Interfacing With the Subterranean
9th May 2021
First implemented in London in 1853, the technology quickly spread. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865, Vienna in 1867, and Marseilles in 1894, followed by most other major European cities. Brazil, Argentina, and Australia introduced tubes not long after. Philadelphia and New York implemented pneumatic tube service for first-class letters in 1893 and 1897, respectively, and a pneumatic tube line ran over the Brooklyn Bridge. Urban pneumatic tube installations existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in opera- tion until 1953 in New York and even 2002 in Prague (where the system was taken out of service only after a flood destroyed much of the tube infrastructure). They have also long operated as internal conduits for paper and other material in post offices, department stores, and warehouses, and are still manufactured and used for this purpose today in hospitals, banks, stores, and libraries. (In fact, in a particularly serendipitous moment, some of the research requests for this very article trav- eled by pneumatic tube in the New York Public Library.)
I remember, growing up in the ’50s, visiting a department store in the local Big City in the train of my mother and seeing paper being shuffled around via pneumatic tubes.