A Series of Tubes Part Two

literally do. Yeah, a fan, Yeah, because it's it's pneumatic tubes are a air pressurization system that moved the thing from one point to Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, last time, we just left off with a Mr. Beach, the inventor and engineer who sunk a lot of his personal fortune into the attempt to create a new men the subway system in New York, which ultimately did not happen failed completely. But we're still in the eighteen hundreds, yeah, and lots

more stuff was going on. In e one, D. Brown would patent the cash Carrier, which was in in the United States, which was an in building system for sending money throughout department stores. Um. These suckers operated for decades. UM One Philadelphia retailer, Wannamakers, installed a really huge system in eighteen eighty. That was just a year after they got electric lighting. I've actually seen these in department stores.

Have you ever seen one of these? I don't think I have now, So there were some old department stores in UM in Georgia where they still use these. And I'll talk more about, you know, the purpose of these in department stores, because I'm sure there's still quite a few that still have them, um behind the scenes, yeah, or or it's one of those things that maybe it's just one of those that's only in older buildings. And you know whether or not they're still in use a

question that you know, that's a different question. But I've actually seen them operated, and I remember wondering how they worked. And I'm pretty sure my dad made up a completely fictional like. I'm sure they were like hobbits. Yeah. I don't ask science fiction writers to explain science kind my dad, but if he doesn't know the answer, he will be

more than happy to make it up. And here's the thing, you probably knew the answer too, So at any rate, yes, and um and by six the postal tube system in London stretched for thirty four miles that's about fifty four kilometers underneath the city, and it was transmitting thirty two thousand messages per day. It speeds up to fifty one miles per hour. That's about eighty two kilometers per hour.

That's pretty fast. Uh. Yeah, the mail was carried by what they referred to at the time of street tubes, which were these like two point five inch diameter tubes that were made lad and encased in iron ducks a couple of feet beneath the street. Um. Today, some of these, like I said at the top of our previous episode, are still intact and are used to house telecom cables. Really is a series of tubes before it really is? Uh. Then in two the US Congress would authorize an investigation

into this crazy pneumatic mail system thing. Um. This was headed up by Postmaster General John when Amaker, who is totally the same dude who owns those lines of department stores. Uh. And yeah, he would would take charge of the project. Yeah, pretty cool. He's a pretty rad dude, by the way. If if I'm not sure if history mist in history has ever talked about him, but he basically created the idea of the department store and is you know, went

on to be Postmaster General, did a bunch of stuff. So, due to his influence, in seven, New York City would open their own pneumatic mail system that would send letter and parcels on a loop under Manhattan at about about thirty miles per hour forty kilometers per hour, not not too shabby, respectable speed. All of this was operated by the Tubular Dispatch Company. Fully it were the totally tubularular that would probably be the California right right, maybe maybe

in l a um. According to the USPS, at peak productivity, six million pieces of mail went through the system daily. That's a rate of five carriers per minute each with a maximum load of some five hundred letters. Now keep in mind this is and remember then eight six, that's when Mr Beach died. That's the guy who was going to build the pneumatic tube system. Uh So, so around around that time, lots of cities started to uh to to have these crazy pneumatic tube things, um Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia,

Satan Louis, across the pond Aris, Berlin, Vienna. Italy even issued specialized stamps for sending mail through tubes. They're really pretty I'll have to take a look at those, yes. Uh. Then in nineteen eleven, pneumatic tubes started being used to assist telephone systems. All right, how do you mean? Um? This was over in in Britain and they were called ticket tubes. They were used in telephone stations to help

operators account for calls. So so when a call was completed, the operator would write up a docket on a on a stiff piece of paper that recorded the time of the call and then the duration and total charge the incurred by the customers. That then fold that stiff piece of paper into a sort of sale and just send it straight up to the accounting office. On the same system, error messages could also be sent from the switchboards to

the machinery rooms. So this is different from what I thought when you said that amanic tubes were being were helping out with telephone systems. I just imagine that she just started screaming into a tube, and I hope that someone somewhere down the line could hear you. They did. Actually, I believe that they did actually have some tubes like that in some buildings, like just shout into this tube. Like some of the old old ships had those two right right, Yeah, they were mostly used in in in

naval naval capacities. But I also just love the idea of the like original four or four message being like sent on a stiff piece of paper that was just sailed along. I imagine Google will have to bring that back for the full's day sometime in the future. Uh. Then in nineteen thirteen, one Waldemeir Comfort. Yeah, I think Valdemar comfort excellent. I'm so bad at German you think

that over the years I would have gotten better anyway. Uh. He was then the managing editor of Scientific American, and he proposed that, like, really soon we should be delivering prepared me two homes via pneumatic tubes. He was like, this is a direct quote. He was like, if a letter can be shot through a pneumatic tube from New York to Brooklyn, why not a five course dinner? Now, obviously you would want to enclose said meal and some sort of container and just having like a turkey shoot

through the tube at top speed. I don't know, I kind of like that idea. You just imagine like, like I didn't get a full five course meal. I guess maybe I did. All I can tell is it's mush now, you know. I'd be kind of like having the Willy Wonka gum, except that all the flavors of all the courses are delivered simultaneously speeds of like thirty Yeah, I

that never took off, not surprisingly. Also, I mean obviously, in order to have that even work, first of all, the tubes would have to be of a considerable size, and also you would have to make sure you had the appropriate breaking system to make certain that the food was not just converted into sludge by the time it arrived. Yes, and I and I don't believe that those those air braking systems were really developed until like maybe the nineteen thirties,

somewhere in there. Um so so. At any rate, in nineteen fourteen, or by nineteen fourteen, rather some third of New York City's mail was being sent by pneumatic tube um. But oops, hey, that was the year the World War broke broke out, um, and so the US Post Office suspended the pneumatic mail system on the basis of fuel preservation. UM. After the war, the service would be restored, but only in New York City and Boston. The other cities of

the U S there pneumatic mail systems would remain dormant. Ye, Now this does make sense. I mean obviously, during the World War, you know they're they're using motors that are running on fuel, and that fuel was very necessary to the war effort. Yeah, or some of them, we're probably still running on steam engines. That's true. That's true. And I mean even just from a labor or perspective, you want to make certain that you are dedicating that labor to the efforts that are going to give you the

most positive outcome from this advantage. Right. Um. Although in London those were the pneumatic male tube systems were considered important enough to keep going. Um. They they kept their tubes running through the war. Um especially I think because they were tied to um uh telegraphy. So they were really useful for keeping secret messages secret during the war, especially because you know, other quick communication methods could be tapped right, right, So it's obviously tapping into a pneumatic

tube would be pretty difficult. You just break the tube, right, You have to dig under a city street and break the tube and the people notice, yeah you do that be hard, It would be hard. For you to be able to actually intercept a message at all. Yeah, I can understand why it would remain to a way of sending messages in secret. However, the fact that it's a way to send messages in secret also creates a vulnerability. Yeah.

Absolutely so. In nineteen forty, the Luftwaffa specifically targeted London's pneumatic tube system. Uh. They successfully bombed out a bunch of it, and it would take about a year to recover the tube system at all, and it would not be fully restored until after the war was over. Meanwhile, over in Germany, the Berlin system was also targeted, but had didn't didn't suffer enough damage for a lot of

it to be taken offline. I mean, there were parts that had to be repaired, but it largely remained operational throughout the war. Yeah. Uh. In ninety three, the New York City Post Office would shut down their male tubes, those famale tubes that had been proposed by Beach back in the day. Uh, poor Beach, you just you just

didn't quite live long enough. I mean, granted, again, the electrical system ended up create being the future of the subway, but still that I of using it for for freight and for mail was something that he could have actually if he if he had lived just another year, he would have seen it in operations. Although by this point the competitor for pneumatic tubes was really motor vehicles. Um, the Post Office began in investing in trucks, which kind of made all of these magic tubes a little bit

inefficient by comparison. You know, you put you can put heavier things, more things in a truck, and you can drive it further distances to more than one place. So yeah, um, you could actually make multiple stops. Crazy. But meanwhile, around the same time, the CIA was busy building a really huge tumatic tube system on their campus in Langley, Virginia that would wind up transmitting some seven thousand, five hundred messages every day. Yea, even the n s A wasn't

able to read all those. Oh. By nineteen sixty two London would also down its street tube system h and in nineteen seventy six Berlin which shut THEIRS down as well. There was pretty big that if you lined up all the tubes in to end, you would have about two miles of them, and that's about four d KOs And like we said, you know, this one was one that was built in eighteen sixty five, made it all the way through nineteen seventy six and even survived those World

Wars mostly intact. So that's pretty pretty impressive. The Paris system would last until seven, the Paris the Paris System, by the way, it was named the carts a new Oh your French, I love you so so dearly. By night nine. Even the CIA would give up the pneumatic ghost as email began hitting the scene. And now with the n s A, I'm sure they're regretting that decision. Well, yeah, that's the thing. In the UK, the government may will

be using pneumatic tubes. It's latest two thousand three. There's a written record of messages being sent between ten Downing Street and the and the Foreign Office by pneumatic tube, like like right alongside fancy encrypted computer system. And I know it's still in use in the Norwegian parliamentary buildings because I watched a really cool video. So there's a video on YouTube and it's it is Norwegian. They're speaking Norwegian. I cannot understand Norwegians, so I do not know what

the description is. I assume it's an explanation of what is about to happen, but probably not saying like this entire video is lies. I'm guessing that's probably not the case. But in this in this video, they have a canister that's outfitted on one end with a go pro and a light. So the light obviously is necessary because they want to capture what it looks like if you were to go through one of these pneumatic tubes. But you need the light because it's gonna be dark in there.

So they have someone from Parliament I assume, set the canister into one of the devices. They look like a T M S. I'll talk more about that in just a second. But they program where it needs to go, you know, they select the destination, they hit the button and it gets pulled up into the pneumatic system and starts rocketing through all those pipes. So you can actually watch the journey, and it takes a you know, a minute or so for it to get from where they

sent it to its destination. Uh. And I think they even said it so that it hit a place and then had to backtrack some because at least that's what it looked like. They definitely went through some sort of sorting system at least once, which is kind of cool, Like it's not just a straight shot, which would have been you know, I've been like it looks tonnel. Yeah,

this was a little more exciting. It also looks pretty rough, like there's a lot of clattering around, which makes you think like, yeah, but based on this principle, might not have been the most gener toll of rides um, but still pretty awesome. And uh, and keep an eye out on Facebook and Twitter probably and and tumbler. I'll send out a link to the video because it is pretty

interesting to watch, even if you don't understand Norwegian. But that also leads us to a discussion about how pneumatic tubes are being used today, you know in the UK, may be used for government purposes in Norway as well, maybe in the US government, particularly in more secretive circles. Kind of hard to say. They don't really advertise that they do not. Yeah, no, that part they advertised that

they are being secretive, just not how they're doing it. Um. So in order to really talk about this, one of the things I saw and I thought I had to bring it up because you know, Lauren was on the show to talk about coffee. Oh yeah. The last time I was here, we were talking about how coffee machines were. Yeah, and as it turns out, there was a pneumatic system that's very closely tied to coffee, and I thought i'd

bring that up. There's actually a video about this too, although it's not quite as harrowing as they journey through the pneumatic tube. Bought the go pro. So there's a company. It's called the Roasting Plant, and it's a coffee company that has stores in New York City. When I was the video dated to a time when they only had a store in Manhattan. But I've seen the plural used to describe their stores now, so I assume they're more than one. Uh. And they have something called the java Bot. Yeah,

so here's what the java bot does. You get? They actually have green coffee beans, so they right, So these are unrested trees exactly, and so you know, once you've dried them in everything and then the whole thing. You can learn more about that in our episode about how coffee machines were. Yeah, we go into the tail because there's a subject we're passionate about. It's coffee. Uh. So you take the these beans that have not yet been roasted, and you put them into canisters that then are attached

by tubes to a roaster. Now, whenever you need to roast a specific type of coffee, it can automatically pull the beans from those canisters through the tubes to the roaster. Once it's done roasting, it sends them through other tubes to other storage canisters so that you have your different you know, different types of coffee being roasted side by side, and they're all sorted properly. And this way, when you

want a particular type of coffee. Let's say that you go in and you're like, I want a mix of Sumatran and Ethiopian coffee, you could totally do that and the system will end up pulling exactly the right number of beans from each It measures it automatically, and and yeah, the whole thing is automatic. So it's pretty pretty cool

to look at. And from what I understand, the way they describe their stores is that it's like walking into a giant coffee machine, except it's a coffee mach that's also a roaster, so it goes beyond what a normal coffee machine does. So I'm pretty sure that they have to roast the beans ahead of time, because there's no way you could roast them fast enough for someone waiting

for a cup of coffee to get their coffee. I think I would think that roasting them that fast would have to be at temperatures that you don't really want. You just burn the beans. So my guess is that they roast them and then what happens is when you order a cup of coffee for the first ones that had gone through, that's that process. Are the ones served

up to you. And from what I've heard about the company, they don't keep any roasted beans longer than forty eight hours because after that they as well they should not because now it's no longer as fresh. But they're also other uses. A lot of hospital systems are using pneumatic tubes. Oh yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's really convenient, as it turns out, for transporting um thing things like like specimens and documents that have important time stamp pically across campuses.

And this one really again, after watching that video of the pneumatic tube, like the journey through it, it surprised me to think of, you know, things like specimens and drugs being delivered this way, because typically you consider those to be really you know, delicate, delicate, you know, are usually in like glass containers and stuff. So I looked at a company that does this called swiss Log. It's just one company that does pneumatic systems for hospitals. That's

one of the things they offer. And the pictures explained a lot. So the canisters, uh, were not just big plastic containers that you would put stuff in. They were actually they had a foam in them with openings that were just large enough to put in things like a vial of blood. So it holds it steady and it's padded all around, and then you can close it up. And obviously, if you're talking about things like healthcare, talking about patient privacy, you're talking about delivery drugs, there's a

high need for security with these systems. Oh sure, yeah. You don't want just anyone walking off the street and opening up a canister, right yeah. Whether that's because that has you know, drugs that would be illegal for you to obtain without a prescription, or it contains some sensitive information about a particular person, whatever the reason, you would

not want that to happen. So a lot of these systems also have security measures in place so that you cannot retrieve the canister unless you do something else first, like insert a pen, So you would have to know what the pen was. To retrieve that particular canister, you would have a little notification. Again, it looks like an a t M. You would walk up to it. It would say like a secure carrier. Um, uh, you know is in the system, and to retrieve it you would have to put in the pen or you might have

to scan like a badge. So let's say that Lauren and I work in the same hospital, and I want to send Lauren some some information. I could make sure to pick her from a list specifically to to me yea of that exactly, you would swipe your badge and you'd be the only person capable of retrieving that particular uh whatever canisterer and in in hospital. Obviously, cutting down on the amount of time it takes to deal with this sort of stuff is a huge benefit both to

the patient and to the hospital itself. So you can understand why this sort of system would be put in place. Um, they're they're usually these days so complex that they have to be controlled by computers because uh, you know, human button pushing is not as ideal, especially once you get into the really complex systems. I was reading about Stanford Hospitals,

which started installing this huge numatic system. Before then, a team of like twenty people had the job of running important samples and results around the expanding Stanford Hospital campus um some eight million samples and results per year. And and even with that team of twenty people, they were frequently short staffed, which is, you know, really bad news when the freshness of the samples um or the immediacy of the results are are important to a patient's health

and welfare. According to Stanford, the system as of now ish hosts a hundred and twenty four stations. Every nursing unit has its own. There are one forty one transfer units, nine interzone connectors, and twenty nine blowers um to alert employees to the arrival of the containers. The system has more than three dozen different combinations of chimes. I can only imagine what it's like learning what each chime is signifying. You're like, oh, no, no, no, honey, that was beat

beat boop bee boop boop. Yeah, that's not for you. If you are hearing two boops, don't even bother. Yeah, that that was highway to Hell you're looking for stay were close, totally unrelated. One one is much faster to a very undesirable location, the other one takes a lot more effort, but you love being there. Just think of

it in those sense. Now you'll be fine. But these these canistries that they use can can go up to eighteen miles per hour, which means that even at peak use of the system, which can which can get very busy, it only takes about three minutes for a package to transfer the longest route in the system, which is pretty cool.

I mean, if you've ever been in one of these huge hospitals, you have to realize that if you were to physically give this to someone and have them running across a campus, yeah, and and take elevators or stairs. I mean, these these buildings can be gargantuous, like if you ever go to um Like here's an example in Atlanta, Great Memorial Hospital is an enormous beast of a building. So clearly, if you have a system of getting this through much faster, again, it could be a huge benefit

both to the hospital and to the patient. So I love this next one you have because it terrifies me. Uh yeah, Pneumatic systems are also being used in industrial plants and factories, and have been since about the nineteen seventies, really powerful tube systems began to to see use as transporters of like heavy machine parts and gravel and stuff like that with within factories. I mean, I can't even fathom how terrifying. Yeah, I didn't read any numbers on

like exactly the horsepower required for this kind of thing. Uh. You know again we're talking air pressure as the thing that moves this stuff. That's a lot of air pressure. That's scary business. Yeah. I can only imagine the size of the canisters too. I mean, you have to have something that's going to be creating that seal like this start just loose machine parts rattling through tubes. I would

hope not that would be even more terrifying. Um, But I mean I'm sure it's not like a like a civic worth of gravel that you're sending at the station, you know, all at once, and and it's probably on wheeld system similar to what the dispatch this stem in London was. That wasn't you know, Those weren't just giant canisters either. Those were the wheeled carts that were still pushed pneumatically, but um, we're running along on rails. Uh So.

Also we talked earlier and in the first episode, we talked about the department stores using these two um to transport money, and so I was going to talk a little bit more about that and the way I saw it. So there were two things I saw them used for. I saw them used when someone would write a check

at a department store. Instead of storing the check at the cashier's desk, they would go ahead and put it into one of these canisters put through the numatic tube system to be put to the processing center inside inside the same store, but on a level that customers never went to because it was the office level. And then there were also times whenever you were using really um large bills that you know, the cashier would not want

to have that at his or her station the right. Yeah, you don't want to have a lot of high bills at a point where you're going to be interacting with customers a lot, especially a point where you might have to leave the desk, you know. The responsible thing, the thing that department stores wanted was to get that that big, big money away from the point of contact with customers and into the central processing area, which you can do

by shooting it through neumatic too. And then occasionally you would have the people over at the central unit create change. So if it was something like you're using a hundred dollar bill to buy a three dollar item, then they might they might not have the change at the cashier, but they would end up being able to do that over in the central area and then put it back in another caster, send it back down and there you go. So,

like I said, I used to see this department stores. Um, there are a couple of big ones that we would go to when I was a kid. Uh some some in actual Atlanta and some of them over closer to Gainesville, which is where I grew up, Gainesville, Georgia, not Florida. And yep there was you know, people are like, oh, Gainesville, Florida's no smaller than that little city in in uh in Georgia are we were the poultry capital of the world and had a statue of a chicken in town square.

That's not a joke. I didn't think you were joking. You can look up images on Google image search if you want to and make fun of me. In my childhood at any rate. But no, it was really neat to see those because the only other time I ever saw them was whenever my parents were going to a bank to deposit money or to and so you know the banks, Like if you were right up there adjacent

to the bank wall, you don't need a pneumatic system that. Yeah, there's there's just a little shelf that you can kind of push stuff through right right, yeah, and then you know they'll they'll use their their grabbing stick or whatever to get it on their side. And then if you were like one over or two over, obviously, then you would need to have some sort of to livery system to get either like deposit slips or retrieve things whatever, and that's where the pneumatic tube system would come in.

So those would be the places where I've seen them in action. Uh, And of course I've heard about them in other places, but like I want them to be here, Like I think we need to have pneumatic tubes. Oh here. It has to work, yeah, absolutely, I mean, honestly, once the construction in this building is done, we're going to have a real absence of irritating, loud, rattling noises. And I think that that that is a niche that can be filled absolutely by pneumatic tubes. I mean, our HVAC

system does a pretty good job. I get so tired of sending emails, you know. Yeah, and I'm really trying to work on my handwriting. I think it could be a lot of fun. I have a feeling we would uninstall it after a day, But I am totally in favor of saying, let's install pneumatic tube system. Maybe whoever sits next to the blower would have a different opinion than I do. I suspect so. But at any rate,

so this has been a really interesting topic. I mean, just again, this technology that is so you know, so it's it's old, but it's also kind of I don't know, there's something about it. I think it has that same kind of appeal as steampunk. Yeah. And I had no idea, no idea that these systems were so widespread. Yeah, yeah, beyond something like you know, the limited use of the bank, like inside of a single building. I had no idea

that they spread throughout cities. Yeah. It's such a such an interesting engineering way to get around the problem of how do you deliver mail in a dense urban environment in a timely manner, um relatively timely at any rate. So I mean we could still make that argument today. So yeah, it was really cool. And Lauren, thank you so much for joining me on this pair of episodes. Great having you here again. Thank you, thank you for having me, Thanks for thanks for agreeing when I said, hey,

let's do this thing. On the end, it was so much fun. And also you should totally watch the video. I mean, obviously we've covered a lot more information than we covered in the video, but the videos are amazing work. I mean, Lauren does a great job with the writing team and our production crew puts it together and looks great. Oh yeah, yeah that that may or may not be out at the time that this podcast episode publishes. But you know what you do is subscribe. Yeah, there you go.

That's the ticket brain stuff, and then you'll be able to catch all the amazing videos you appear in in lots of those two I do. Indeed you can. You can see my appalling visage. It's only sometimes appalling, and only when we completely cover you in fake blood. Yeah that did happen this quote unquote fake fake blood. Yeah, hey, I helped make that blood, all right, I know it was fake. Okay, that's that's much better than the one the other way that could have gone. I helped make

that blood. I was harvesting it from myself because I only trust in my own uh No. But but seriously, those those videos are phenomenal. You have not been checking them out. You have got to go see the brain stuff videos as well as the what the Stuff videos that you work on. Uh these are it's it's a direction that how stuff works has been moving in for a while and I think people are just starting to pick up on it and they are wildly informative and entertaining.

So I recommend you go check those out if you have not seen them. And of course you can hear us on our sister podcast, Forward Thinking with Joe McCormick, where we talk about the future sometimes as if it has already happened. If you catch caught the April Fools Day episode from this year, if you haven't, you need to go and listen to it because we had so much fun on that one. And so yeah, you check

that out. Also, remember, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, you can get in touch with me send me an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The hand to what all three of those is tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really sick for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com