Under many cities, buried among the sewer and gas lines, are the remnants of a pneumatic tube system, installed to distribute mail in the 1860s. The system relied on sheet-steel cylindrical containers and compressed air. Letters were secured in the containers and dropped into a network of tubes; compressed air propelled the container to its destination. Hopes for this cutting-edge technology were high in the late nineteenth century. Pneumatic transportation once seemed to be on its way to reality, with pneumatic subways trialed in New York. At one point there was even a plan to create a pneumatic freight line between New York and New Orleans.
In 1897, Scientific American described the opening of the new pneumatic postal system in New York. Promoted as something that would “effect a revolution in the business methods of the retail tradesmen, placing them in hourly contact with the wholesale houses,” the system was held to be faster than sending a telegram (by more than fifty minutes), and the aspiration was that, with an expansion of the network, people would be able to send a letter from New York to Philadelphia and receive a reply the same day. Within New York, the system would be able to carry 250,000 letters per hour, in each direction.
If the pneumatic tube network was still operable, the speed of postal delivery within a city served by it would still be unbeatable today (even with the keenest bicycle courier). Our postal services don’t offer such speed or the multiple daily deliveries that many cities once boasted.
Retailers installed the systems to send cash in tubes from sales counters up to the accounting office; offices used them to send memos. As Scientific American noted in 1880, the tubes improved the efficiency, “not only sav[ing] time and noise, but the wages of an army of boys or girls, besides discharging a large amount of fresh air into the building, greatly improving ventilation.”