I was reading A Coffin for Dimitrios (great book), and found a character saying “send me a pneumatique when you get to Paris.” And in fact, there was a series of pneumatic tubes to speed the mail in Paris for over 100 years. Thought it was cool. Here’s the wiki as well.
Some of those systems are still around. For example, Roosevelt Island in NYC has a pneumatic trash collection system. Apparently it’s the only part of NYC that doesn’t have trash piling up on the streets/sidewalks all the time.
New York almost had a pneumatic subway system, but the inventor tried to go around Boss Tweed. Big mistake.
A letter from The Central Bureaucracy.
“Attention, Hermes Conrad”
“You are about to receive a letter from The Central Bureaucracy.”
My God!
It’s from The Central Bureaucracy!
The technology is still in use today and new systems are built, e.g. for moving around kab samples in large hospitals or industrial sites. Pretty hard to email those.
