Pneumatic tubes transit (PTT): a system that propels cylindrical containers through networks of tubes towards a chosen destination using compressed air or by partial vacuum [‘Pneumatic tubes’, Wikipedia, http://www.wikipedia.org]
PTT, “Whoosh✱ and Go!” technology, the 19th century’s version of “Tap and Go!” Jason Farman has described the application of pneumatic tubes to postal services in the 19th century as “the instant messaging systems of their day”. According to Farman, being able to use pneumatic post to communicate, gave people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an “instant connexion”…pneumatic post meant that they were able to “keep in touch all day long”⊡. Moreover people saw the pneumatic tubes’ facility to deliver articles rapidly as “a symbol of modernity” [‘Pneumatic tubes: the instant messaging technology that transformed the world’, James Farman, interview with ABC Australia, 13-Jun-2018].
Sketch of AE Beach’s pneumatic transit tunnel
America’s first pneumatic-powered subway
American entrepreneurs were following developments in pneumatic tube transport in Europe in the second half of the 19th century and were keen to move into the field. It fell to inventor and publisher of the magazine Scientific American Alfred Ely Beach to lead the way. Beach was less interested in the postal service than in moving people. In 1867 he trialled the first subway passenger service, later named the Beach Pneumatic Transit, in New York City. Initially the service was popular with the public, but Beach experienced opposition from Tammany Hall♉ and its notorious head ‘Boss’ Tweed, and from other vested business interests. Beach got round opposition by flagging that he would also construct a pneumatic tube to cart mail underground around NYC. Unfortunately Beach ran into both technical difficulties and funding issues (exacerbated by the financial crisis of 1873) and the project to extend the subway was stillborn.
PPT system despatch point (Washington DC, early 1940s)
Manhattan mail transfer – the eastern seaboard subway
It wasn’t until 1893 that an urban mail service in the US introduced the PTT system, and this was in Philadelphia (beating New York by four years). The New York City system linked the General Post Office with 22 other post offices covering an area of 27 miles. At its optimal level of output, five capsules each containing around 500 letters could be despatched in a minute (one every 12 seconds travelling at 30-35 mph). A government estimate in the day put the total transmitted by tube at 20,000 letters per day![‘The Pneumatic Mail Tubes: New York’s Hidden Highway And Its Development’ (Robert A Cohen, Aug 1999), www.about.usps.com]. Several other American cities followed Philadelphia and New York in establishing underground mail networks – Boston, Brooklyn (a separate entity to New York before the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge), Chicago and St. Louis.
Manhattan pneumatic mail route
Despite the clear advantage PPT had in speed of delivery over conventional mail despatch, it did not make the hand-delivered mail system redundant. At its zenith in New York PPT never accounted for more than about one-third of the Post Office’s total mail delivery. Other cities in the US were similar although Boston reached about 50 per cent at its maximum output!) [Cohen].
PPT systems, limitations and drawbacks
By the early 20th century the cost for US service providers using the pneumatic tube system had become prohibitive. By 1918 the Post Office was forking out $US17,000 per mile per year [‘Underground Mail Road: Modern Plan for All-but-forgotten Delivery System’, (Robin Pogrebin), New York Times, 07-May-2001]. In addition to cost there were other flaws in tubal delivery that made it impractical. Many mail items were too large and bulky to fit into the tube carriers, and when they did fit, the system was far from seamless. It took critical time to unload heavy items at the receiving end and sometimes the system would clog up during periods of high traffic (requiring delays in the delivery process while workers located the obstructing parcel and dug up the street to get to it) [‘Pneumatic Tubes’, Dead Media Archive, (NYU – Dept of Media, Culture and Communication), www.cultureandcommunication.org].
A maze of tubing
In addition to cost, other early 20th century factors that prompted the decline of the pneumatic post in America include the growing volume of mail, limited system capacities, and the belief that the advent of the automobile made the tubes “practically obsolete” [Annual Report of the Postmaster General, (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. pp. 19–22. Retrieved 8 June 2015, cited in ‘Pneumatic tube mail in New York City’, Wikipedia, http://www.en.m.wikipedia.org].
Pneumatic tube systems tend to work better on a smaller, more localised, scale – as evident in the type of enterprises and institutions that productively employ the pneumatic tube technology today (as outlined in the PostScript following)…they are also more effective (and more economical) over shorter distances, such as encompassing a single city only.
PostScript: Pneumatic tubes in the contemporary world
In the age of fiberoptics and the internet, it might be thought that there is no place for old technologies like PTT. But pneumatic tube systems today still play a vital function in the everyday workings of organisations and institutions including banks, hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, libraries and other public utilities♮.
Technology watchers have hinted at the possibility of a Renaissance of pneumatic technology. Jacob Aron has made the perceptive point that even in an age where online communication is paramount, there is still the physical necessity of transporting goods by road. This is where pneumatic tube networks have a competitive edge…Aron poses the question: “can tubes be (a) more efficient and greener” way of delivery❂ [‘Newmatics: antique tubular messaging returns’, (J Aron) New Scientist, 13-Aug-2013, www.newscientist.com]
Roosevelt Is: narrow stretch of land 3.2km long in NY’s East River
Many areas of society unrelated to postal systems currently use PTT…on Roosevelt Island (NYC) the locals have used pneumatic tubes to dispose of its garbage since 1975 (something similar has been proposed for Manhattan to tackle its mountains of trash) [‘Proposal maps out pneumatic tubes system to take out New York’s trash’, (Dante D’Orazio), The Verge, 24-Sep-2013, www.theverge.com].
Many hospitals rely on networks of tubes for their internal communications – the prestigious Stanford Hospital in California uses the technology to move blood, lab samples and medicine around the facility. Pneumatic tubes systems today are of course computer-driven and much more complex, Stanford Hospital’s network contains 124 stations. Future applications for PTT continue to be visualised…entrepreneur/inventor Elon Musk has proposed that his pneumatic-powered ‘Hyperloop’ will be capable of transporting passengers in a pod between cities at 800 mph [‘Underground Mail’, (2017), www.computerimages.com/musings].
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✱ the sound the pneumatically propelled mail capsules made when they went down the shute
⊡ a characterisation very familiar to today’s social media dominated world
♉ the Democratic Party political machine which had a stranglehold on NYC politics at the time
♮ such as the Library of Congress (US) and the Russian State Library in Moscow. The ongoing utility of pneumatic networks contrasts with the bad wrap pneumatic tube systems have received from writers of fiction over the years, eg, works such as 1984 and the movie Brazil have tended to equate them with “creaking, bureaucratic dystopias” [Jacob Aron]
❂ although the other x-factor player here is 3D-printing – if it realises its full commercial potential it would tick those same boxes with perhaps greater utility
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
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✱ 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
⌂ Ball court at C-Itzá (southern end-zone & temple)
Our group tour of Yucatán’s archaeological Maravilla, Chichén-Itzá, ended with an informative stroll through the long-abandoned ball court. As we slowly walked from one end of the former playing field to the other, we got a feel for the atmosphere of the place as our guide Henrique told us about the religious symbolism and the savage practices associated with the court. Chichén-Itzá’s Gran cancha de pelotá (the Great Ball Court), the venue in pre-modern times for Mesoamerica’s Jugeo de Pelotá (literally: “Game of ball”), is the best surviving example of the court used by the Maya and other indigenous Mesoamerican peoples for their ancient versions of the ball game✱.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-20.jpg”> Olmec heartland – arcing from San Lorenzo to the Gulf[/Roots of competitive sport?
Much about the game, thought to be the world’s first organised team sport, is uncertain. The Mesoamerican ball game (MBG) seems to have had its origins with the Olmecs, the earliest known major civilisation in Mexíco, around 1,600 BCE✺. The Olmecs, whose empire centred around the Gulf of Mexíco’s southern coast area, were renowned producers of rubber (the raw material that the latex balls used in the game were made of). Most of the evidence for what the sport was about, comes from the discovery of items such as the bog-preserved balls themselves, and from ceramic pieces interred in tombs – figurines portraying ball players, sculpted miniatures of the game and its paraphernalia, or from architectural decorations, carvings and the like on the ball court walls (around 1,300 erstwhile ball courts have been discovered in or around Central America – the northernmost in the US state of Arizona).
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-22.jpg”> The basic ‘⌶’ shape of the Ancient Mexícan ball court[/capThe non-standardised Mesoamerican ball court
The dimensions of the ball court at Chichén-Itzá are quite large, at least 545’L x 225’W, a long, roughly rectangular space with an ⌶-shaped playing surface…whilst this ⌶-shape is the norm for Mesoamerican ball courts, other ball courts discovered elsewhere in the region show that there was no standardised size for courts, some are tiny by comparison to Chichén-Itzá, effectively alleys rather than fields. Tikal’s ball court (in present-day Guatemala) for instance is only ⅙th the size of the Chichén-Itzá field [‘Mesoamerican ballcourt’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The courts themselves were masonry structures, composed of stone, rubble, abode, etc materials.
“http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-23.jpg”> The court with the Bearded Man Temple (L) & the Jaguar Temple (R)[/captioThe C-I court’s side walls
The side walls at Chichén-Itzá are high (a full 8m) and completely perpendicular except for a small sloping bench which extends a metre-and-a-half up from the ground. The walls are decorated with bas-relief carvings which mirror Mayan society. Many other court walls elsewhere in Meso-America are considerably lower and some have angled walls which are much more acutely diagonal, sloping sharply inward. Forming part of one of the side walls at Chichén-Itzá is a famous, two-tiered temple, Templo del jaguar (Temple of the Jaguar). At both ends of the field there are small temples, the best known being the Templo de hombre barbado (Temple of the Bearded Man).
⌂ Clay model of ball court from Nayarit: more spectators than players! [LA County Museum of Art]
Rules of the game?
No lists of codified rules for the sport have survived…leaving the notion of how games were conducted open to speculation. Many theories abound…the most common view is that the players used their right hip to strike the ball…the traditional game of ulama still played in Central America today with the hip is believed to have descended from the archaic indigenous game. Other views postulate that players could use their chests, shoulders, elbows, knees and forearms to propel the ball, or a hand-stone called a manopla or even some kind of racket or (hockey-like) stick. Possibly all of these are correct…the rudimentary ball game seems to have had differences from region to region, and between the different civilisations. An echo of this can be seen in the varying names used for the sport – pok-ta-pok and pitz, Pelotá Maya and ōllamaliztli (the Aztec ball game). Each team had a capitan (team captain) but again there is variance as to how many players constituted a team, some sources say between two to four athletes, although others say six or seven✥. Players (and officials) often donned flamboyant, feathered head-dresses for the games [‘Mesoamerican ball game’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⌂ Feathered serpent stone ring
Scoring and winning?
On the high walls at the Chichén-Itzá court, seven metres up, are stone-rings which the Maya introduced to the ball court. Because they resemble hoops, many observers have speculated that these rings decorated by intertwining feathered serpents are goals. While they may well be, it is problematic as to how significant the circular goals may have been in the context of a match…players at Chichén-Itzá, unable to use their hands and feet, would need a Herculean effort to propel a heavy ball through the relatively small hoops seven metres high, it would be extremely difficult to manoeuvre the (basketball-sized) ball through the hole!✾ The more likely avenue of scoring was to propel the ball over a centre line into your opponents’ territory, if it bounced more than twice before they played it or if they failed to return it to your side, you were awarded points. Victory therefore, unless a player was lucky enough to land a ringer, tended to be determined by the number of points each side scored [‘The Ball Game of Mesoamerica’ (Mark Cartwright), 16-Sept-2013, Ancient History Encyclopedia, www.ancient.eu (‘Pre-Hispanic City of Teothihuacan (UNESCO/NHK) video)].
Another version of how MBG was played, favoured by the Maya warriors, involved putting the ball in motion by using only the right hip, right knee and right elbow and players were penalised for letting the ball hit the ground…sometimes this involved bouncing it off the side wall, and eventually getting it through the stone ring to win the contest. Surviving artwork from different Mesoamerican communities suggest that hip-players also exclusively used the right hip [‘Mayan ball game’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⌂ M/Amer ballplayer (with ball approx the size of a 10-pin bowling ball) [Source: MMA]
MBG equipment:
The way ball-players dressed to take part in games was a product of the ball used in Meso-America – balls were made of solid rubber and weighed up to nine pounds (about four kilos). Some were as large as a basketball, others more the size of a softball. Propelled through the air at a good rate of knots the heavy orb could inflict a lot of harm on the human body, so from (an attempt at) self-preservation, players wore protective gear…including a sort of yoke or a loincloth reinforced with leather (occasionally they also wore a sort of girdle); sometimes helmuts; gloves and guards on their arms, legs and torsos⌖. Even so, serious injuries from the hurtling ball were known to be common, even on occasions death resulted.
MBG, real life and death ball games
George Orwell said that football was “war by other means” – a description that might be as apt for MBG as it is for modern football. Ball games for indigenous Mesoamericans served several purposes. The Maya used ball games as a proxy for war, to settle territorial disputes, and to foretell the future. Games were appended to religious ceremonies involving human sacrifice…some but not all culminated in the ritualistic execution of the captain or players on the losing side. Our guide at Chichén-Itzá pointed out the ball court’s carved stone friezes which depicted the winners making human sacrifices by decapitating the losing captain…conveyed both graphically and imaginatively with spurts of blood from the victim’s severed head turning into wriggling serpents! MBG had many martial associations, warriors took part in the games, war captives were forced to play in rigged games which inevitably resulted in their being sacrificed to the gods [‘The Bloody and Brutal History of the Mesoamerican Ball Game, Where Sometimes Loss was Death’ (Monica Petrus), Atlasobscura, 09-Jan-2014, www.altasobscura.com].
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PostScript: An inclusive, multi-purpose sport – religious, political, conflict resolution, cathartic, social, astronomical
The games could be social and recreational⊟ (allowing women and children to play) but normally they were formal and ceremonial events. The Maya elite for example would use them to act out their creation myths, MBG featured in their sacred legends – such as the Hunahpu Hero Twins Myth in which twin boys get lured into Xibalba (the Maya underworld) while playing the game… within the framework of the Maya religious beliefs, ball courts like at Chichén-Itzá were thought to provide (symbolically at least) a portal into the Underworld. MBG was tied into cosmological events, the orbits of the sun and the moon, and games were performed with symbolic resonance, as allegorical battles between “good and evil” [‘The Maya Ball Game’, History on the Net, www.historyontheney.com]
▲ Ball court at Xochicalco (Morelos, Mex.): note the vast difference to Gran cancha de pelotá…Xochicalco is on an infinitely smaller scale, characterised by low, staggered side walls comprising earth mounds
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✱ one of the panels on the side wall depicts the leader of one team with the decapitated head of his opposing captain
✺ the earliest unearthed ball court ruins is at Paso de la Amada in the Soconusco region of Chiapas (circa 1,400 BCE)
✥ seven – the Maya lucky number. More plausibly there may have been six-a-side plus a referee
✾ although pictorial evidence indicates that the stone rings in the Aztec ball game were at ground level and much more accessible
⌖ a player’s equipment could weight up to 20lbs
⊟ gambling on the outcome of games was prevalent
An exploration of the archaeological sites of Mexíco’s Yucatán Peninsula cannot be said to be complete unless it includes a trip to Chichén-Itzá (see footnote for etymology) – essential even for those with only the barest of interest in the archaeological significance embodied in its stepped pyramids and celestial-viewing platforms…according to UNESCO Chichén-Itzá represents “one of the most important examples of (the blend of) Mayan-Toltec civilizations”. An outcome of the Toltec invasion of Yucatán (and of Chichén-Itzá) in the late 10th century is that visitors to the ruins of the city can see in the city’s ancient structures a fusion of icons and styles from the two Pre-Hispanic cultures✱.
Zona arqueología
In relation to Mérida (where we were based), Chichén-Itzá is in San Felipe Nuevo, a drive of 115km along Highway 180. Predictably for somewhere lionised as a “modern wonder of the world”, the place was brimming with tourists when we arrived. Our guide for the day, Enrique, took us through the complex’s turnstiles and we made our way from the entrance through a phalanx of clamouring vendors hawking their memorabilia merchandise. After an obligatory baños stop, we headed for the large temple in the centre of the site, the Temple of Kukulcán. “El Castillo” as it is known, is 25 metres high and decorated with carvings of plumed serpents and Toltec warriors. The pyramid was roped off to prevent visitors climbing it (the consequence of a female tourist falling to her death from it in 2006).
The Kuk
The chirping bird phenomenon
Whilst we were taking in the ambience of the eleven hundred-year-old El Castillo temple, guides leading other groups of tourists would demonstrate the acoustics of the pyramid by standing at the base of the stairway and clapping their hands loudly (we were already familiar with this stage show, having first seen the clapping trick performed at Teotihuacán on the outskirts of Mexico City). It seemed a bit gimmicky to me but some pyramid researchers and acoustical engineers apparently believe that the echo effect that this generates from the ancient structure replicates the chirping noise made by the sacred Quetzal bird (the kuk), native to Central America [‘Was Maya Pyramid Designed to Chirp Like a Bird?’ (Bijal P Trivedi) National Geographic Today, 6-Dec-2002, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/]
Templo de Kukulcán
Measuring the scientific achievements of the Maya
Chirping Quetzals aside, the Temple of Kukulcán at the height of the Mayan empire power was salient to how Mayans lived their everyday lives and planned their future endeavours. The 365◘ step pyramid demonstrates how important astronomy was to the Maya and how remarkably accurately they were able to measure mathematically (eg, the 365-day Maya calendar devised centuries before the West!). The alignment of structures like El Castillo affirms the advanced understanding the Maya had of astronomical phenomena such as solstices and equinoxes.
El Caracol
Observing the clear blue sky
Walking around the ruins we discovered from our guide that the Maya put to use different buildings to make serious astronomical observations (without the aid of telescopes) of the sky above…the Plataforma de Venus (near the Temple of Kukulcán) is a platform used by the Maya elite to track the transit of Venus. The planet Venus was important to the Maya both theologically, as a deity (god of war), and practically, to use its movements to decide when to make raids and engage in battles with enemies. On the southern axis of the city is the Observatory or El Caracol (“the snail”), a small building with a circular viewing tower in a crumbling condition, also integral to studying planetary movements [‘ChichenItzaRuins’, www.chichenitzaruins.org].
Spot the iguana!
We spent a very liberal and leisurely amount of time wandering around the various excavated remnants of the site…off to the sides were several smaller and apparently less important temples and a couple of cénotes (unlike the others in the Peninsula we swam in, these were sans hoods, fully exposed). In another minor temple (in a poor state of repair) we were able to observe that some of the native non-human locals had made a home in the crumbling stone structure, in this case a well-camouflaged iguana (above)!
La Iglesia
An elaborate multi-layered “jigsaw puzzle” in Chichén Viejó
Of those we saw, I found La Iglesia (The Church) the most interesting building, architecturally and visually. One of the oldest buildings at Chichén-Itzá (and it looks it!), the building is oddly asymmetrical with an elaborately decorative upper part sitting incongruously atop an untidy foundation “made up of hundreds of smaller stones fit(ted) together like a huge jigsaw puzzle” [Chris Reeves, ‘La Iglesia’, American Egypt (All about Chichen Itzá and Mexico’s Mayan Yucatan), www.americanegypt.com ]. The upper section is dazzlingly and elaborately decorated with bas-relief carvings comprising a composite pattern of animal symbols – armadillos, crabs, snails, tortoises (representing the four bacabs who in Maya mythology are thought to hold up the sky). The other dominant sculptural feature of La Iglesia’s facade are masks of the Rain God Chac [‘Chichén Itzá – The Church’, Mexíco Archeology, www.mexicoarcheology.com].
The Great ball court
The final highlight of the ancient city that we got to see on our visit to Chichén-Itzá was the Great (or Grand) Ball Court. The Gran cancha de pelotá, one of thirteen ball courts unearthed at Chichén-Itzá, is the best preserved and most impressive of all such ancient sports stadia in Mexíco. It is known that, from as early as 1,400 BCE, Mesoamericans played a game involving the propulsion of a rubber ball which may have incorporated features of or partly resembled football and/or handball. I will talk about what the Chichén-Itzá ball court reveals about this indigenous Mexícan game and its significance to native Pre-Columbian society in a follow-up blog.
Footnote: Nomenclature
“Chichen Itza”, a Maya word, means “at the mouth of the well of the Itza.” The Itzá were a dominant ethnic-lineage group in Yucatán’s northern peninsula. The word ‘well’ probably refers to the nearby cénote sagrado – the sacred limestone sinkhole around which the Maya city was constructed.
Chichén-Itzá vendors hard at it! Sombreros for a hot day.
␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣
✱ Yucatán’s “most important archaeological vestige”, ‘Pre-Hispanic City of Chichen-Itza’, www.whc.unesco.org
◘ one for each day of the calendar year
PTT, “Whoosh✱ and Go!” technology, the 19th century’s version of “Tap and Go!”
Sketch of AE Beach’s pneumatic transit tunnel
PPT system despatch point (Washington DC, early 1940s)
Manhattan pneumatic mail route
A maze of tubingRoosevelt Is: narrow stretch of land 3.2km long in NY’s East River
(Photo: Science Photo Library)
