Ben Frantz Dale. The McDonald's in Edina, Minnesota, had a very unusual drive-thru. It used pneumatic tubes to send people extremely salty food. But its closure in showed that no tube was safe. It's possible to look at the pneumatic tube's story as one of long decline: Its ambitions began as a revolutionary people mover, were reduced to mail, got stuck in the office, and ended up, at best, a way to avoid talking to a bank teller.
But there's still hope for the compressed air fan, from the far-out concept of Foodtubes capsules of food, shot underground to the far-out concept of the Hyperloop which proposes speedy transit underneath California in a reduced-pressure tube. People can also hope for even more unusual uses like pneumatic beer delivery.
The pneumatic tube was always meant to hold more than bank teller slips — at its best, it's contained a world of possibilities. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Pneumatic tubes at a typewriter factory, circa Getty Images. Even then, the streets were full of carriages and cars, leading to heavy traffic and congestion, a big problem for postal carriers. Thanks to tube systems letters were delivered much faster. Especially for the stock market, the tube system was a lifesaver in the midth century: important messages were often late due to traffic problems, making e.
The first tube system in Germany went into operation in Berlin in Even the secret service relied on this mode of transportation because the tube system was tap-proof. To ensure no unauthorised access to highly confidential government documents was possible, a special runtime control was integrated in these tube systems.
If the carrier was not delivered within a certain time, an alarm would be triggered. At the beginning of World War II, tube systems slowly became less popular; many tubes were destroyed in bombings. It seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket that had been provided for that purpose. A suit of clothes was the third arrival and then came letters, papers, and other ordinary mail matter. Chicago-based inventor Joseph Stoetzel proposed a system of pneumatic tubes that were larger than the nine miles of existing pneumatic tubes that the city had underground for mail.
To prove how effective and safe it was, he put his own son, Robert, inside one of the canisters. In his sci-fi novel "Double Star," Richard Heinlein describes the idea of "vacutubes. A two passenger capsule was just emptying; Dak shoved me in so quickly that I did not see him set the door combination… The few minutes we had been crammed in the vacutube had been long enough for me to devise a plan…".
Sixty-two years before Elon Musk officially unveiled plans for the Hyperloop, a Honeywell engineer predicted that by , cars would move through pneumatic tubes that kept them from crashing.
The cartoon depicts George Jetson traveling through a pneumatic tube. In , the song reached its personal height at No. The latest in rodent-control technology was the prairie dog vacuum.
It was ironically named Dog-Gone and the inventor, Gay Balfour, said the idea for it came to him in a dream. The idea was to create a global system of car-sized and passenger capsules that could use frictionless maglev technology. In , Daryl Oster, the founder of ET3, was issued the first patent in evacuated tube transport. Although it channels some inner Jetsons vibes, it once again ponders the possibility of pneumatic travel.
In fact, as our own Alexis Madrigal detailed in his book, many European cities had similar setups. The Viennese inventor Victor Popp created a system for Paris that was so successful that investors in the Niagara Falls power project seriously considered using pneumatic tubes -- not the nascent technology of long-distance AC transmission -- to deliver the power of the falls.
His idea? Float the train on magnets inside a specially-built tunnel with all the air pumped out ; that would eliminate the friction that normally slows a train down. Goddard's vacuum railway was, of course, never built.
The design features car-sized passenger capsules traveling in tubes of 5 feet in diameter on a frictionless maglev. Airlocks at passenger stations, the company says, allow for the transfer of capsules without admitting air.
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