In this modern world of 24/7 online global communications and instant messaging systems, it is interesting to take a look at an earlier age’s emerging technology which had the objective of fast-tracking communications between people in different parts of rapidly modernising cities. This novel way of moving mail around drew on the subterranean reaches of urban centres to create channels for transporting them.

Wm Murdoch

It started with the London Stock Exchange in the 1850s…traders trying to buy and sell at the most propitious times of the trading day relied on telegraphs to communicate quickly with their people. The problem at the time was that telegraphs were regularly subjected to delays and hold-ups. A swifter way to communicate was needed for business success, and the technology to do so already existed in Scottish engineer William Murdoch‘s invention of the pneumatic tube in the 1830s.

Enter J Latimer Clark, an electrical engineer, with a patent “for conveying letters or parcels between places by the pressure of air and vacuum”. Clark’s delivery system powered by compressed and depressed air was implemented to connect the London Stock Exchange with the HQs of the Electrical Telegraph Company through a 660-foot long pneumatic tube. By the 1860s the stock exchanges in Berlin and Paris had followed London’s lead. Postal services for both commercial and personal transmittances were a natural fit for the pneumatic tube. Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Dublin got their own networks, whilst on the Continent, Berlin’s Rohrpost was introduced in 1865 and Paris went public with Poste Pneumatique in 1879. Other cities got in on pneumatic post and the practice spread to places as far away as Melbourne and Buenos Aires, and most anywhere in between.

The London pneumatic tube mail train at its formative stage!

London Pneumatic Despatch Company
In 1859 Latimer Clark with Thomas Webster Rammell put forward a proposal for an underground tube network in Central London. The city’s General Post Office was chosen as the nucleus of the network because it was “the routing hub of the whole country’s” transport system [Julian Stray]. The two engineers with cashed-up and influential backers formed the London Pneumatic Despatch Company to build a large-scale, underground pneumatic railway✱ with the purpose of transporting mail bags and small parcels on railcars through tunnels. At first LPDC’s prospects of success looked promising, but several developments and reversals (a financial crisis in 1866, logistics problems, technical drawbacks, and the Post Office getting cold feet over the project) saw the Company fold and its operations close in the 1870s [‘London’s Lost Pneumatic Railway: The World’s 2nd Oldest Underground’, (Long Branch Mike, 12-Apr-2015), Reconnections London Transport and Beyond, www.londonreconnections.com].

(Photo: Science Photo Library)

Despite its failures LPDC’s underground railway did capture the public’s imagination and inspired other imitators. There were experiments elsewhere in the 1860s to try to establish a viable pneumatic train network – at Croydon, Devon and Dublin. Ultimately though, for a variety of reasons, these came to nothing [‘London’s Victorian Hyperloop: the forgotten pneumatic railway beneath the capital’s streets’, New Statesman, 18-Dec-2013, www.newstatesman.com].

Capsule [National Postal Museum (Smithsonian)

The principles of “blow and suck”
The pneumatic post services of the day used pressure and air vacuums to transmit mail through a network of tubes. The process went like this: people wanting to expedite the delivery of an important document would take it to the post office where it would be rolled up and placed inside a metal or aluminium capsule. A postal clerk (in New York these employees were known as ‘rocketeers’) would drop the capsule into a hatch which corresponded to the marked lane for its intended destination…by pressing a button the capsule was transported by compressed air through a network of tubes beneath the pavement. Air from the transmitting end blew the capsule in a forward direction along the tubes. At the receiving end of the line a machine would suck the propelled capsule towards it (in the same way the suction of a vacuum cleaner functions!).

A cutting edge over conventional 19th century delivery modes
Using pneumatic power to transport letters (subterranean mail) and other items had readily apparent advantages in its unfettered immediacy…the reliance on horse-drawn vehicles and messengers on bicycles meant that delivery was impeded by the ever-increasingly congested streets of burgeoning cities, pneumatic post transported underground had no such obstacles and delivery was infinitely faster!

Parisian Poste Pneumatique network (Musée de La Poste)

Paris: Poste Pneumatique
Paris, as much as any modern metropolis, wholeheartedly embraced pneumatic tube transportation from the get-go! By the 1930s, when the service was at its peak, Paris had some 466 kilometres of pneumatic tubes. Cost was and remained an issue though…in 1975 the cost of sending one pneu☯ in Paris was eight-times that of having a posted letter delivered. As the 20th century rolled on patronage of the pneumatic post system dwindled, in 1984 Poste Pneumatique closed down for good! It’s inevitable demise was a combination of the service’s high cost and the superiority of newer communications technology (fax, telex) which made it obsolete [‘Pneumatic tubes and how mail was moved in Paris for more than a century’, Larry Rosenblum, (World Stamps), 02-Oct-2016, www.linns.com]

Prague PTT engine room

Bohemian Express Post: Prague’s pneumatic post system
Prague’s pneumatic post is the only surviving post system of this kind still intact in the world. It entered service in the Czech capital in 1889, the fifth in the world to be connected, after London, Vienna, Berlin and Paris. The Prague system operated from a central point, the main post office in Wenceslas Námêstí, and conveyed letters, documents and information to other post offices in the city, to government offices, to banks and to other important institutions. It started with the despatch of mainly telegrams, later telexes were sent through this medium. The city network of tubes covered a radius of 60km. Around 1970 a test was done of its speed of service vis-vís an on-road messenger delivery service. The pneumatic tubes won, delivering a capsule of 50 telegrams to Prague Castle in eight minutes✾ [‘Pneumatic Post System in Prague’ (Jakob Serÿch, June 2004), http://www.capsu.org/features/pneumatic_tube_system_in_prague.html]. In the 1990s Prague pneumatic post was despatching up to 10,000 documents a day! Unfortunately the European floods of 2002 put paid to the Czech pneumatic postal service, Telefonica decided the repairs needed to the tubes was too costly and in 2012 sold the system to Czech software entrepreneur Zsenêk Dražil, an enthusiast of old technologies. Dražil’s ultimate plans for the service are still unclear, but he has hinted at the tourism possibility of it being opened up to the public as a “national technical monument” [‘Radio Praha ❘ in English’, (Daniela Lazarová, Czech Radio, 11-Oct-2003 and Jan Richer, ‘New Owner Promises Bright Future for World’s Largest Pneumatic Post System’ Czech Radio, 08-Aug-2012)].

PostScript: A sample of anecdotal stories associated with pneumatic tube systems
Stories abound about the unauthorised and unorthodox uses of the pneumatic tube networks in different countries by postal workers. Its a trait of human nature that employees in the familiarity of their work environs are known to “push the envelope” and try to get away with things wherever they possibly can, and this sphere of work was no different. Staff of the Prague pneumatic tube system for instance (according to some of the stories told) were known to use it to send sausages and bread rolls to each other! Similarly in New York it was an open secret that post office workers on Manhattan used the system to receive their daily lunch orders from a well-known Bronx sandwich shop…the shop would dispatch the lunches via the tubes from the Bronx PO to the Manhattan PO! The pneumatic tubes were also sometimes utilised to play jokes on staff at another PO, eg, live mice sent through the tubes to get a predictable reaction from the startled female employees receiving the canisters at the other end; a live tortoise-shell cat returned in the same mail bag in which it had been sent, and so on.

Receiving point with collection trays

⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸
✱ the world’s second underground railway after the limited line from Paddington to Farringdon opened in 1863
☯ an item sent by pneumatic post in France was known as a pneu
✾ a similar test was conducted earlier on the New York PTT system where the underground tube delivery easily eclipsed a motor vehicle delivery which had to contend with heavy Manhattan traffic