99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-61- A Series of Tubes

Episode Date: September 20, 2012

Pneumatic (adj.):  of, or pertaining to, air, gases, or wind. In the world before telephone, radio, and email, the tasks of transmitting information and moving material objects were essentially the same challenge.  The way you sent someone a message was … Continue reading →

This is the record-breaking Kickstarter-funded season 3 of 99% Invisible. Give yourself a round of applause. I'm Roman Mars. Newmatic. New? M-D-Q. Newmatic. Newmatic tubes of or pertaining to air guesses or when. Oh, good!

You're here! Donnie, we found some tubes in the wall and now we're trying to see where the tubes go. You see, things go away and they never come back. How the heck does it work? I guess we'll never know. Back you. Yeah, right, vacuum. Let it rip.

MUSIC In the world before telephone and email, the task of transmitting information and moving material objects was essentially the same challenge. The way you sent someone a message was pretty much the same process as sending someone a package you had to send a piece of physical media through the post or on a ship. It was the telegraph that divided telling someone something, from giving someone something. But remember, everyday people didn't speak Morse code, so the message had to be deciphered written on a slip of paper, and then it was delivered to the recipient.

To learn... ...ma... ...dip... ...trip... Even though you can probably guess already that electronic communication eventually killed most of the need for pneumatic tubes, you may not know that it was the telegraph itself that also put pneumatic tubes into widespread use. As telegrams blew up and the cost dropped in the volume rows, it became very difficult

to quickly deliver them to their destinations. And so what they needed to do was come up with another way to get messages across the city quickly. So if you can't send something with that new thing or electricity stuff, you have to figure out a way to do it old school, sending a message as a physical object. It's a last mile problem. Getting to an end customer or an end recipient can be the more difficult problem. And they came up with the post-Numatic or the pneumatic post as a means of doing that. That is Molly Wright-Steanson, researcher,

PhD student, and aficionata of all things pneumatic tube. Numatic tubes are systems of subterranean urban postal services that delivered messages underneath cities all across the world in major financial centers. Those were the large scale implementations, but later on there are a number of smaller pneumatic tube systems more familiar to people today. Our producer Sam Greenspan spoke with Molly through a different series of tubes. So, it turns out Molly and I had similar experiences with pneumatic tubes growing up.

When I was a kid, we used to go to the bank down the street. And I remember going to the bank with my dad, we'd go to the drive-through and he'd put his deposit slip or whatever inside this plastic canister. My mom would unroll her window and she'd get the canister from this big air-making device. And she put in whatever checks she wanted to deposit. And then I would see it shoot up. Sucked up through this clear tube. Through this clear tube.

And it would shoot across to the bank. And then the ladies in the bank. The teller is night put in some candy or a max box card. Lollipops for me and my brothers and dog biscuits for the dog. And send it over with my dad's receipt. Back by Enumatic 2. And it just seemed...

Just seemed really cool, it seemed kind of magic. And they also harkened back to another era. You may only know about pneumatic tubes in the context of a bank drive-through. But when they were invented, they really set the stage for what communication would look like over the next century. The pneumatic post first started in London in 1853,

but the technology transferred very quickly to other cities. Vienna, Marseille, Munich, Milan, Berlin, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Buenos Aires, Australia. In fact, there were pneumatic post systems in every major financial city on every continent with the exception of Antarctica.

Antarctica's always lag lacking, but nowhere were pneumatic tubes more extensive than in Paris. At the end of the 19th century, Baron Houseman had totally redone Paris's urban layout, putting in those big, iconic boulevards and circular plazas. And he also put in sewers. So not only did the sewer carry potable water, and eventually electrical cables, but it carried

pneumatic tubes. And these tubes inside of tubes were a hit. My 1919 Paris was processing 12 million pieces of pneumatic post a year. In my 1945, there were 450 kilometers of pneumatic tubing lining Paris's underground, making it possible to get a handwritten note across Paris in less than two hours without even breaking us what. Here's how it works. You write something on some special stationery and close it in a special envelope, pay special postage, and you get it to your local to beast. That's what you call one of the people who sends pneumatic posts. To beast puts the envelope in a canister, and let me tell you about these canisters. At first, they just looked like soup cans, but over time they became more aerodynamic and began to resemble

little rockets. Anyway, the two beast rings an electric bell to alert the two beast on the receiving end that there's an incoming canister, and then, though, it's hurtling through Paris's underbelly so fast that the sending two beast could actually hear the canister arriving at its destination. The descriptions that I've read from the 19th century talk about the shock, the noise of the shock of the pneumatic post arriving. The only mechanism that could provide enough force would be steam. And so there were gigantic steam engines underneath the hotel they post, which was the central post office in Paris, and they would produce the compressed and verified air that would serve to push or pull the pneumatic tubes

through all of the kilometers and miles and miles of tubes that were underneath the streets. There were also even buildings that just simply existed to produce air for the tube services. The biggest pneumatic tube systems had problems that required some creative troubleshooting. Harris had an interesting mechanism in case there was a blockage.

Someone would fire a gun into the tube and then measure the sound waves and be able to figure out two within, I guess, two meters or so where the blockage was. And then they would be able to figure out two within, I guess, two meters or so, where the blockage was. And then they would be able to go underground and undo the flange and bring out the offending canister. I guess it's better than what happened in Berlin where they just poured copious amounts of wine into the tubes in order to unfreeze the stock canisters. As exciting as all this sounds, electric communication evolved.

Europe, other technologies like telephone and telefacts improved and got way cheaper. And so of the last mile problem. But it was another form of physical transport that put the nail in the coffin. The thing that put them out of business in the United States was the invention of the truck. The truck was invented in 1912 and that's kind of what did it. Trucks are fine at all, but they just don't capture the imagination like a massive pneumatic tube network as silly as such a thing might seem today. Molly and I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what exactly it is about the

tubes that leads us to be fascinated with them. I have a couple of theories about why pneumatic tubes are magic. I think they inspire wonder because they're alive, or it feels like they're alive. They're reaching out through the city. They have tendrils and tentacles, and they breathe, and they throw things up, and they feel much, much bigger than we are. I also think they inspire wonder because

they manifest communication. You know, for us today, when we think of communication, all the ones and zeros and digital things that we move don't feel real tangible to us anymore. But I also think that they felt pretty magical to people back then too, that they were kind of electrical and breathing connections of communication. You could send a hankerchief and send it to your lover by a pneumatic tube, and it would still smell like you. So I mean, I think they were romantic as well, and I think that that's part of the winter today too. So in a sense they're both live and mechanical, both high and low tech and there's also something to be said about the journey of a tube canister that you can imagine it's snaking its way

through these underground passageways carrying your message. And so this idea of being able to go somewhere where you wouldn't otherwise be able to go is amazing. That tube message has made that entire underworld journey in order to surface in the hands of its recipient. More than their widespread use, what might be the most surprising thing about pneumatic tube systems is how long they stayed in use. The post-Numatique operated in Paris until as late as 1964, tubes even ran over the Brooklyn

Bridge until 1953. And it took a force of nature to knock them out of Prague, that city was using them until a flood in 2002. But get this, lots of places still use pneumatic tubes. Hospitals use pneumatic tube systems, and that's because you really can't digitize tissue or medication. And so the next time you find yourself in a hospital, take a look because you'll find them by the nurse's stations and in the emergency room. They're also used at places at grocery stores or big electronics stores, usually that kind

of delivery of all of the money through pneumatic tubes so that it's not anywhere where the store could get robbed. When Molly was doing research on tubes at the New York City Public Library, she found that her requests were being dispatched via pneumatic tube. But there's one other tube system in New York that moves a lot more material.

In Roosevelt Island, pneumatic tubes are used for garbage. Roosevelt Island, if you don't know, is a small island in the east river between Manhattan and Queens in New York. And as it happens, my good friend Hannah Jamal grew up there. Hey. Hey, Hannah, how's it going? Good, nice to hear from you.

So I called up Hannah and asked her about the pneumatic tubes in her hometown. I get frustrated when people ask me about the garbage tubes because to me, how you take out your trash on those both island is not the most fascinating thing about it. Yes I'm sure that there are thousands of fascinating facts about Roosevelt Island but let's hear about those garbage tubes. Yeah so Roosevelt Island is only about three miles long and about 800 feet wide and when the island was being developed for residential living in the 1960s planners determined that the quality of life would be better without big garbage trucks on the roads. I know, right?

So instead, they dispatched with their trash with a pneumatic tube network. And I have one friend in particular, and he's my friend, David, and he can tell you more about how it works. So I asked Brooklyn-based producer, Mouge Zadi, to go meet Hannah's friend. Oh, hey, how's it going Moog?

Nice to meet you. The guy named David Kimble Stanley, and I live in Roseville, D'Iland. Well, tell me when you want to start talking about the trash, because there isn't that much to say about it. That's what's sort of fine about all this. But here, okay. The beginning of the process is I guess the same as what most people deal with. It's just like taking out the trash.

You take your trash bags and then... The process is I guess the same as what most people deal with. It's just like taking out the trash. You take your trash bags and then... Just take out a plastic bag and we tie it up. And then we go outside here, come with me. You walk out into the hallway? We go out into the hallway. And just on each floor there's a room which is called the A-Vac room. And I've lived in Roosevelt Island my whole life.

It's the same thing and at least all the original buildings. And I imagine it's the same in the newer buildings. But basically every floor has a trash room. ours is right next to the stairwell. You open it up and there's not a lot in it. It's just a tiny little closet like space and there's a place for recyclables but recyclables, that stuff that that is recyclables, is put in this big shoe. With a little candle that you pull and you pull up in the door and show your garbage down the street and that's it. And that's it.

To be honest, like it wasn't until after I left Roseville, Thailand that I realized that other people don't have a vacuum, so that's not the system that's used. I try to remember precisely when I learned about it, and I think it might have been a Wikipedia. I like double-check that I knew at pneumatic men. It's like, oh, so it just sucks the trash, that's amazing. And then I, yeah, went on with my day. In fairness, the tubes might have made a bigger impression if Hannah and David had to put

their trash bag in a rocket ship ship canister and fire it across the island, but there's still something about a visit to Roosevelt Island that makes you feel like you're on the cusp of the future, even though you're clearly not. Hey, Monley, can I try a theory? Sure. Okay, if you think about all the technology we were promised the future would hold. From something like Star Trek. A lot of it has come true, right?

Like we have little touchscreen computers, we have hand communicators. But one of the things that we don't have, and we'll probably never have, is the transporter, you know, the thing that can disassemble something somewhere, and reassemble it somewhere else. And I wonder if that has to do with why the tubes feel both so ancient and so futuristic at the same time. Like it's the closest we ever got to transmitting a physical object instantaneously. I think that's possible. I think that's definitely possible that you could get something instantly or that it's

again that you could communicate instantly, that you could not only get it, but you could have that feeling and that sensation or that information right away. It's the nexus of those two things. But it's more than just information. The scented handkerchief that arrives after traveling through miles of Paris underground or even the dog biscuit from the bank to where these are romantic because they have physical intimacy. I mean maybe that's why we keep coming back to it and maybe that's why

steampunk seems important in a digital age that actually we do need physical things and you know we we never did get our jet packs, but we do care all the more about things that are real and tangible that come to us. And I think with the pneumatic post represents ties, what pneumatic tubes represent to us, is the possibility that that could happen. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars with help from Moog Zating. It's a project of KALW 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco.

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