Air Pressure Transport
By Atom Bergstrom
Atom’s Blog
PTT (pneumatic tube transport) was invented by William Murdoch in the 1790s.
The London Pneumatic Dispatch Company used a pneumatic underground railway system for carrying mail, packages, and freight from 1863 to 1874.
The most comprehensive system of pneumatic tubes for mail delivery was in Berlin. Berlin began using pneumatic tubes in 1865, Paris in 1866, and Vienna in 1875.
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Chicago had 9 miles of underground pneumatic tubes shooting canisters filled with letters back and forth between several post offices.
An 84 ½ mile express mail delivery was planned to be installed connecting Chicago and Milwaukee.
Pneumatic railroad transportation was being installed in Chicago — in New York too — but the Rockefeller Octopus put an end to it.
As permaculture guru Bill Mollison (1928-2016) pointed out, all books or manuals having anything to do with pneumatic transportation were stolen from libraries around the world.
Conspiracies DO exist despite the nasty pieces of work who concocted the “Communist Conspiracy” saying that conspiracies DON’T exist.
Pneumatic architecture has been erased from public memory just as thoroughly.
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Molly Wright Steenson (“A Series of Tubes,” The Missouri Review, Mar. 7, 2023) wrote …
“Starting in the mid to late nineteenth century, pneumatic tube postal services linked post-telegraph offices with each other in every major financial hub in the world, on every continent but Antarctica. As improbable as it seems, propelling messages through hundreds of kilometers of subterranean tubes and pipes was a good solution for delivering messages across a busy city jammed with carriages and motorcars. The first pneumatic post system opened in London in 1853; New York’s pneumatic post shuttled first-class mail across the Brooklyn Bridge till 1953, its postal workers called ‘rocketeers;’ the Prague system was in operation till 2002. Paris’s Poste pneumatique was the most extensive, encompassing some 450 kilometers of tubes in 1945, and it wasn’t until 1984 that telephone service became reliable enough to merit shutting down the Poste pneumatique. There were pneumatic postal systems in more than sixty cities around the globe.”
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'Air Pressure Transport' have 4 comments
September 20, 2023 @ 5:12 pm John
Hello Atom! I do see this pneumatic tube transport show up in films on Turner Classic Movies, often in department stores and businesses where inter-office mail is being distributed…watching it work on film is always fascinating and so futuristic! Why was such an efficient delivery system removed and purposefully “erased” from our history? Is there anything preventing it from making a comeback?
October 9, 2023 @ 9:58 pm Ellen
Yes! Let’s go back to the horse and buggy (and/or pneumatic tube) days – and I am being serious. We would be much better off. Also, wondering — Atom, Did pneumatic tube systems require electricity?
October 14, 2023 @ 9:08 pm Atom
No electricity needed.
October 14, 2023 @ 9:08 pm Atom
It’s all about the money! The oil industry didn’t want any competition.