Posted 6 months ago
keramikos
(25 items)
OK, I didn't really go through a pneumatic tube with Alice, but a recent MIT piece I read sent me down a rabbit hole about pneumatic transport/delivery systems, which fascinated me as a child when I saw them in operation at department stores.
Image credit is the Crystal Palace pneumatic railway at Wikicommons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crystal_Palace_Athmosperic_Rly.1864.jpeg
This is by no means an exhaustive list of related links (nor necessarily well organized), but rather a selection of some of the ones I found interesting, starting with the one that piqued my interest today:
The return of pneumatic tubes
(Edit 20240622: Changed the link from "https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/19/1093446/pneumatic-tubes-hospitals/" to an archive.is link, because the MIT Technology Review link seems to be one of those annoying stealth paywall ones. That is, you click on the link once, and everything looks beautiful. If you try to go back and look at it another time, you get hit with a paywall).
https://archive.is/BN61m
THE CRYSTAL PALACE PNEUMATIC RAILWAY 1864
https://www.xenophon.org.uk/cppr.html
The Beginnings of The Pneumatic Railway
https://www.postalmuseum.org/blog/the-beginnings-of-the-pneumatic-railway/
Alfred Ely Beach's Pneumatic Railway Underneath Broadway in New York City
http://www.klaatu.org/klaatu11.html
Alfred Ely Beach's 1867 pneumatic railway patent:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US70504A/en
A Brief History of People and Animals Traveling Through Tubes
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/g28686725/tube-transportation-history/
The golden era of the pneumatic tube — when it carried fast food, people, and cats
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/24/8834989/when-the-pneumatic-tube-carried-fast-food-people-and-cats
An Express of the Future (by Michel Verne)
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606611h.html
George Jetson using pneumatic transportation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxsD5uA7vs&t=33s
A little mood music:
Klaatu Sub Rosa Subway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqKsZpzAGQA
WoW great information,,
Can you imagine being in that transport tube and it getting stuck? Bet that kid had his eyes closed for that trip..
dav2no1, Nope, not me. >8-0
I think I'm slightly claustrophobic, and that exceeds my limits. I'm also not too crazy about being in a tunnel that goes underneath water.
I once took a ride on the subway line in the San Francisco Bay Area that goes underneath the bay, and all I could think was, "This would be an especially sucky time for an earthquake."
FYI, I stopped being so lazy, and organized the links a bit, added titles, and added another link for a Michel Verne (Jules' son) fiction short story about a pneumatic subway route -- underneath the Atlantic Ocean. *shudder*
D'oh! I neglected to put the key word "patent" in my previous comment. I couldn't edit it, but as the OP, I could delete it, so I did.
I also edited the text description section to replace the 20th century pneumatic system patent with Alfred Ely Beach's 1867 pneumatic railway patent.
Yeah...I didn't like the few minutes I once had to spend in the MRI machine for a shoulder injury. And my moving around made it last even longer. Every Sci-Fi movie has some sort of tube they fill with water for long space travel..maybe the future has better drugs..lol
I've been in an MRI machine, and aside from the noise, it didn't really bother me, but then it was a fairly short 'tube,' and medical personnel were on hand to assist me.
I once visited a cave that was a "spelunk it yourself" experience. At the park entrance you paid a fee, and they gave you a hard hat and a flashlight. From there on out, you were essentially on your own.
I had to get down on my knees to get through one section. I told myself that if there was another section where I would have to wriggle through on my belly, and it was longer than my body, I was turning back.
Yep, the future had better have some excellent anti-anxiety meds.