With a whoosh it would disappear.

As a young boy after the war, I would stand transfixed as an officious Eaton’s floor walker would stuff a paper document or money into a 10 inch tube. The tube would then be inserted into a pipe. With a whoosh it would disappear. Moments later with a clunk it would magically reappear with a receipt or change. Years later on the trading floor at Richardson’s, we employed the same system. All trades would be sent via the pressurized air system to be recorded at our central communications office.

I never thought much more about this ingenious way of communication until recently, when a pneumatic mail envelope got my attention. The letter was sent June 6, 1885, from Wien (Vienna) Taborstrasse Post Office between 1:00 and 2:00 in the afternoon. It arrived the same day at Zieggasse Post Office some several kilometres away between 2:00 and 3:00 that same afternoon. How could that be? Intrigued by the envelope, I researched further and found that the pneumatic capsule transportation system was invented by William Murdoch in 1836. The Victorians were the first to use capsule pipelines to transmit telegrams to nearby buildings from telegraph offices. This was how the letter traveled several kilometres in an hour - in 1885 - via a pneumatic tube connecting the two locations.

The idea of pneumatic capsule transportation so excited the world, that thought was given to uses beyond transporting parcels and letters. It was even proposed people could be transported using this system Popular Science magazine regularly featured drawings of people being whisked from destination to destination, and both Lockheed and MIT conducted feasibility studies. These were later abandoned as too expensive.

For those who remember Flash Gordon comics, people were regularly moved through inter-galactic space by this method. Even James Bond got into the act in the 1987 movie “The Living Daylights” where Bond smuggles a defecting KGB agent to Austria via a capsule in the Trans-Siberian Pipeline.

Rome, Berlin, London, New York, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and many other major cities around the globe used this system. Money, mail documents and parcels were sent swiftly to banks, post offices, telegraph offices and hospitals as well as government offices and businesses. The system was so efficient that it lasted in Paris until 1984, and it is still used in limited applications around the world. The universal use of the computer to transmit information has led to the unfortunate demise of this interesting and innovative method of communication.

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2013