London Pneumatic Despatch Company | Hacker News Reader

London Pneumatic Despatch Company

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45 pointsbenbreen20 comments

University College London operates a newer pneumatic tube route in the Bloomsbury area, yet at a much smaller scale. The route crosses the pneumatic line described in TFA.

https://www.quirepace.co.uk/products/pneumatic-tube-systems/...

Prague had a system that ran from 1889 to 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_pneumatic_post

It seems to me they just got the scale of this completely wrong. The tubes should be a lot smaller, say a foot in diameter, and go through the air at streetlight-top level. The network would need an automated switching system to direct each "packet" from its source to any of thousands of destinations. People could pay to have endpoints in their houses or receive packages at the corner shop.

Letters, cans of beer and indeed cylindrical foods such as hot dogs, burritos or fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, could be inserted into a cylindrical capsule and delivered anywhere in the network area in a matter of minutes.

Previously (or perhaps in an alternate timeline): https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

The original article is more like a pneumatic cargo wagon. Pneumatic posts of much smaller diameter existed all over Europe before and after the larger one described in the OP:

https://www.warwickandwarwick.com/resources/articles-library...

I have once had the unrealized ambition to buy an old drive-through teller bank location and open a burrito place where your food goes through that pneumatic money tube. Would have been perfect for pandemics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXCtY5bBqDY

I like the idea of pneumatic food & drink delivery, though it would result in rather fizzy cans of beer.

Automated switching wouldn't even be needed, router could have been a job title.

I guess it depends how centralised your tube network is, but I can't see how it would be economical at scale. For a intra-building sized deployment, sure, but metropolitan tube-to-the-premises network with hundreds or thousands of endpoints per node you'd surely need automation.

Plus, it would be pretty simple to adapt internet routing architecture to the tube sorting machines. As long as you can embed a destination (node and endpoint) address in a barcode or NFC tag on tube ingress to act as your "packet header" you can leave the routing decisions to the tube sorting machines much like existing interior gateway protocols.

I meant in the 1860s.

I guess this is what inspired the pneumatic tube systems in Bioshock: https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Pneumo_Tube.

Hyperloop but it's 1859 :)

Hyperloop but it's 1824: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_railway

Here is a good page with info about various European and American cities' systems and quite a few technical details about them:

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneumess.h...

I saw a tube delivery system in use at Costco -- probably for cash. Also some Kaiser Hospitals use it now for blood samples and such -- a complaint from a floor nurse is that, the system is fast but there is no delivery notification. So if a delivery is not scheduled clearly, someone must use valuable time to check repeatedly ...

That seems like the kind of thing that would be trivially solved with something like an IR sensor connected to the/a network...

A lot of companies use them to get cash to and from the vault. Home Depot has one for each set of registers. Less chance of an incident walking to a from the back, but they're only really used at the beginning and end of the day with a few exceptions.

Am I the only one amazed that they could build all of that for £12M?

Its successor operated as part of the Royal Mail into this century, now open as a museum and occasionally for 'rides' I believe.

Mail Rail - it’s a really popular museum and in normal times you can indeed ride the little train most days, and occasionally they do walkers deeper into the tunnels. You might also recognise it as the Vatican postal train in Hudson Hawk

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