How do pneumatic tubes work

The first models of these delicate systems started appearing in the s when the prototypes were introduced. The early versions were used to transport mail most of the time, especially in huge cities that were still on the rise both in population and economically. These included London, New York, Boston, Paris, and Berlin, all major world metropolises and capitals still leading the way today. Soon after, towards the end of the s, pneumatic tubes became an integral part of the infrastructure, and buildings that were built from scratch had them incorporated and ready to use from the moment they were open.

They reached its peak at the turn of the century when most if not all major post offices and services, as well as banks and similar bureaucracy-heavy establishments and institutions, had their own pneumatic tube network.

After the two world wars, however, they saw a decline in popularity due to new technologies, industries, and practices. Despite this, they are still a very important thing today as many different markets make regular use of them. The system consists of different parts, all equally important. Here we will dissect them and talk about each in particular. The capsules that contain the cargo are called carriers, and they are the ones that travel through the plastic tubes.

Whoever needs to send something from point A to point B within the building, or a block of buildings even, packs the documentation or items inside, seals it, and places it in the dedicated tube opening.

There are different sizes of carriers and they accommodate different systems and industries. There are those leak-proof and leak-resistant, perfect for hospitals, labs, and the food industry. The durable transparent material is used to make them, and they can last a long time. Also, they are quite easy to use and operate, as all you have to do is open and close the flap.

There are cushioned skirts on both ends that allow smooth transition through the pipeline, and some have additional cushioning to prevent bumping and scratching. At the stations is where the employees send and receive the tubes. These ports exist on multiple locations throughout the establishment in question and are either operated by dedicated workers, or they sit and wait for anyone with a package to approach and do it themselves. There is special software installed in the stations with a user-friendly interface.

This is how the employees choose which station to send their carrier to. William Murdoch invented pneumatic carrier transportation in the early s.

The Victorians were the first to use capsule pipelines to transmit telegrams to close buildings from telegraph stations. There was an idea that these large tubes were eventually going to transport people.

This checkout has a large metal box referred to as a sending station with a door that opens onto a tube. Some of these systems may have doors that can be locked with keys or be opened with a numeric PIN, other tube systems can be unsecured with just a hatch that opens and closes.

This can also be called the powered station since it provides the air that moves the tubes back and forth. More often than not, both stations have some alert system to notify when a package has been received. A lot of the time the receiving stations will collect the money bundles from the checkouts so it will be set to receiving mode, or vacuum mode.

For someone who was born after, say , it's probably difficult to imagine, but there was a time when people didn't have e-mail , cell phones or digital books on Kindle. Back in the late s, people mainly communicated long distance by letter or telegram. Even telephones were still a novelty. Our ancestors' lack of instantaneous communication may make the world of a century or more ago sound hopelessly slow-moving. But it didn't seem that way to them. One reason was that they did have a means of transmitting written and printed information — and other objects as well — in what seemed like a flash.

In a sense, it was their version of the Internet , but it wasn't electronic. Instead, they had something called pneumatic tube transport — a bunch of pipelines in which air pressure is used to propel a canister through a system of tubes to its intended destination [source: Library — UC Berkeley ]. Starting in the mid-to-late 19thcentury, numerous major cities in the U.

Pneumatic tube systems worked so well, in fact, New York City's post office used one to move mail around the city until , and Berlin had a similar system up and running until [source: Web Urbanist ]. And while pneumatic tube transport has largely been supplanted by quicker and more convenient electronic methods of transmitting information, the technology still has valuable uses.

In this article, we'll talk about how pneumatic tubes work, what they were once used for, and what they are used for today. The metal-and-glass intricacy of pneumatic tube systems seems like a perfect example of Victorian-era technology, the sort of elaborate period gadgetry that you might see Robert Downey Jr.

But actually, the idea of pneumatics — that is, using pressurized gas to produce mechanical motion — goes back to Hero of Alexandria, a Ptolemaic Greek mathematician, inventor and author who lived in the first century A.

Hero apparently was a pretty observant guy. He noticed that the wind, even though it didn't have a visible substance, could push pretty hard on things. That led him to deduce that air was actually composed of tiny, invisible, moving "particles," what today we call molecules.

He went on to figure out that if you compressed those moving molecules by jamming them into a tight space or passageway, they'd try to escape, and in the process, push a solid object that was in front of them. He also deduced that if you could create a vacuum — basically, an empty space — that air molecules would try to rush into it. By means of these principles, he wrote, "many curious and astonishing kinds of motion may be discovered" [source: Woodcroft ].

Hero used his understanding of how pressurized gases behave to create gadgets like a primitive steam engine and a singing toy bird, but it wasn't until the that a British engineer, George Medhurst, published a plan for a pneumatic tube transport system[source: Woodcroft ]. Medhurst noted that if air was subjected to 40 pounds per square inch of pressure — only about two-and-a-half times the amount that the atmosphere exerts on us at sea level — air molecules would be propelled at 1, feet meters per second, or about 1, miles 1, kilometers an hour.

When pushing a canister, the speed would only be about miles kilometers an hour, but that was blazingly fast for [source: Medhurst ]. Unfortunately, Medhurst wasn't as good at actually building machinery as he was at designing it, and he died in , before he actually could construct his vision [source: Stephen and Lee ].

In the s, Great Britain's General Post Office commissioned a study of Medhurst's concept, and in the s, awarded a contract to engineer T. Rammel to build a pneumatic tube system to carry mail throughout London [sources: Library — UC Berkeley , Grace's Guide ] By , London's tube system stretched for 34 miles