Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
Speaker 1: job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio.
Speaker 1: And how the tech are you? It is time for
Speaker 1: us to listen to a classic episode of tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: This one published April. It is part one of a
Speaker 1: two part series. So that's a spoiler for next week,
Speaker 1: right anyway, this one is titled A Series of Tubes
Speaker 1: Part one. Enjoy. So one of the cool things that
Speaker 1: you brought to light is that, uh, you know that
Speaker 1: these are not just little systems that are used within
Speaker 1: like that bank single building to take your bank receipt
Speaker 1: to the teller when you don't feel like getting out
Speaker 1: of your car, right, That these actually used to be
Speaker 1: and in some cases maybe still are much more senses. Yeah. See,
Speaker 1: there used to be these huge networks of tubes buried
Speaker 1: beneath the cities that let people send messages to each
Speaker 1: other faster than ever before. Yeah, I've heard of this
Speaker 1: the Internet. It's a it's a series of tubes. Uh no, no,
Speaker 1: before before the Internet, our ponet but that was only
Speaker 1: like three computers and it was it was in Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pneumatic tubes date back quite a ways. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: when when Lauren said we're going to talk about a
Speaker 1: series of tubes, I thought we were going to talk
Speaker 1: about the whole you know, good old Senator Ted from
Speaker 1: Alaska talking about how the Internet is a series of tubes, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, just for the record, I think is
Speaker 1: a decent analogy. Yeah, yeah, I mean it was. I mean,
Speaker 1: it is funny, but it was. And also, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, some telecom cables are currently being housed in
Speaker 1: old pneumatic tubes. So it is a series of tubes.
Speaker 1: Yeah awesome. So what exactly is a pneumatic tube. Well,
Speaker 1: it is eight hipeline that uses air pressure to move
Speaker 1: a canister from one point to another. Okay, that seems
Speaker 1: pretty simple. So like it seems pretty simple, but wait,
Speaker 1: there's more, uh there? Yeah, I mean, these things have
Speaker 1: come a very long way as technology has advanced up,
Speaker 1: motors have advanced. Motors started existing, like like, electricity wasn't
Speaker 1: really a thing when tube started up. Computers happened, right,
Speaker 1: And actually you might think, well, computers would end up,
Speaker 1: you know, making the whole purpose of these things obsolete,
Speaker 1: but that's not the case. In fact, there's still very
Speaker 1: high tech pneumatic tube systems that are at play in
Speaker 1: various locations for good reasons. And it turns out that
Speaker 1: the computers aren't necessary elements in that in order to
Speaker 1: be kind of like traffic control. So it's kind of
Speaker 1: cool that this thing that we would normally think was
Speaker 1: replaced by computers is actually complementing them in specific use cases. Obviously,
Speaker 1: if you want to send a message to your friend
Speaker 1: across town, you're more likely to either drop a letter
Speaker 1: in the mail or much more likely to send the
Speaker 1: message Kingdom on face. But there are many important uses
Speaker 1: for pneumatic tubes. Um. We will get into many of
Speaker 1: those later. First, let us talk specifically about how pneumatic
Speaker 1: tubes work. Yeah, let's talk about the physics what is
Speaker 1: going on with a pneumatic tube? And so walk me
Speaker 1: through the you wrote. You've you've described an excellent way
Speaker 1: of thinking through this so that we have a logical
Speaker 1: progression to get to the actual mechanics of pneumatic tubes. Okay,
Speaker 1: So pneumatic, in case you don't know, means works via
Speaker 1: pressurized gas. Basically. Um, So the air around us seems
Speaker 1: pretty thin, right, but it's actually a soup. It's actually
Speaker 1: a liquid made up of lightweight atoms and particles like
Speaker 1: nitrogen and oxygen and argon and carp dioxide and ozone
Speaker 1: and dust bunnies and et cetera. Yeah, yeah, uh, And
Speaker 1: that soup is at pretty much a constant density and
Speaker 1: pressure around us while we're walking around on Earth's surface,
Speaker 1: though it's a little bit thinner. The further away from
Speaker 1: sea level you get, right, Right, the higher you climb
Speaker 1: on a mountain, for example, the less dense the air.
Speaker 1: Thus you have let lower air pressure at those altitudes. Right,
Speaker 1: And it's useful to think about that because one great
Speaker 1: way of thinking about air pressure and how it helps
Speaker 1: stuff work is by thinking of how your ears pop
Speaker 1: when you go up in a really tall elevator or
Speaker 1: or up a mountain, or up in an airplane. Um,
Speaker 1: And that's because your your ears pop because of the
Speaker 1: density of the air outside of your body being lower
Speaker 1: than the density of the air in your ears. Okay,
Speaker 1: You've got this little tube of air in your in
Speaker 1: your head called the station tube, and it lets your
Speaker 1: it lets your ear drum vibrate, which is important for
Speaker 1: your ear dry to function. Right, That's what allows you
Speaker 1: to interpret sound right, because sound is a physical uh phenomenon.
Speaker 1: It vibrates the ear drum, which makes some celia go, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that signals the brain that exactly. Yeah, we're just gonna
Speaker 1: re enact once more with feeling line by line. But no,
Speaker 1: it it does. You know. The ear drum is what
Speaker 1: ends up causing these other bones in your in your
Speaker 1: ear to move in such a way that celia inside
Speaker 1: of this one container, uh start to vibrate fluctuate, and
Speaker 1: that sends electrical signals to your brain, which then is
Speaker 1: interpreted as sound. So without that vibration, you don't hear. Uh.
Speaker 1: And without this tube you wouldn't get that vibration. That
Speaker 1: would have nothing to vibrate against. It would just be
Speaker 1: all solid meat and that doesn't vibrate as well. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean sound can travel through solids, but it's not
Speaker 1: as effective going from air to solid then from solid
Speaker 1: to solid, so you know it's important. So the C
Speaker 1: station tube is shut off with muscles that are tied
Speaker 1: into your mouth throat swallowing muscles. This is one of
Speaker 1: those things I always thought was weird that that our
Speaker 1: ears are connected to I mean, the human bodies. Gross y'all,
Speaker 1: especially the sinus type system. Yeah, and that's that's why
Speaker 1: if you swallow, you hear like a tiny little pop,
Speaker 1: and that is the muscles of that tube opening up
Speaker 1: and and letting a fresh supply of air in, which
Speaker 1: is important because the air that gets into the tube
Speaker 1: gets absorbed by the walls of the tube, and so
Speaker 1: it needs to be replenished periodically. That's also why your
Speaker 1: head hurts so much when when you have a cold,
Speaker 1: because those muscles get stuffed up by gunk and you
Speaker 1: can't replenish that air supply and everything hurt. When you're like,
Speaker 1: I can't hear because I have a cold, it seems
Speaker 1: because yeah, yeah, that's because the because your ear drum
Speaker 1: literally cannot vibrate because there's not a replenishment of air
Speaker 1: in the tube. That's kind of cool. I mean, I
Speaker 1: had never thought of it that way. So interesting. Okay,
Speaker 1: so all of this is a sidebar promise. We're getting
Speaker 1: back to pneumatics. UM. So, so as you gain altitude,
Speaker 1: the air inside of your ears starts exerting pressure on
Speaker 1: those membranes. Um, it starts pushing because it's at that
Speaker 1: higher density than the air outside. Um. You know, it
Speaker 1: wants to be chill like that lower pressure air, you
Speaker 1: never let it hang loose. Yeah, when you create this
Speaker 1: pressure differential than there, that's where you're starting to get
Speaker 1: that feeling of something's just kind of like you get
Speaker 1: that ache. You can get pretty painful too, if you
Speaker 1: especially like you know, you hear about babies and kids
Speaker 1: having real problems because they haven't figured out how to
Speaker 1: voluntarily open up their irustration tube. Yeah. And so when
Speaker 1: the difference in pressure is great enough that you either
Speaker 1: voluntarily or involuntarily open up that illustration tube, that the
Speaker 1: sudden release of that pressurized air is pretty forceful and
Speaker 1: creates that pop. That's when your ears go pop um.
Speaker 1: But is just one example of pressure at work around us. Uh.
Speaker 1: This next one that I've got for you is a
Speaker 1: little bit more technical. Okay are you ready? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: straws like what the pig built his house out of,
Speaker 1: drinking straws. Okay, okay, so crazy straws in my case,
Speaker 1: but yeah, sure, sure, crazy straws totally. So you're not
Speaker 1: technically pulling liquid up through a straw. You're you're creating
Speaker 1: an opportunity for the liquid to push itself up. So
Speaker 1: I'm motivating the liquid. You're motivating the liquid. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This section that you apply with your mouth creates an
Speaker 1: area of low pressure at the top of the straw,
Speaker 1: which means that the relatively high pressure liquid at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the straw pushes a sip of your drink
Speaker 1: up into your mouth. Now, this is really interesting to
Speaker 1: me because I talked about a similar thing with Josh
Speaker 1: Clark when we covered how toilets work, because we had
Speaker 1: to talk about siphoning and the siphoning and uses a
Speaker 1: similar principle and it does quire this difference in pressure
Speaker 1: as well. So very interesting. So how does this compared
Speaker 1: to say, pneumatic tubes. Well, it's it's basically the same thing. Um,
Speaker 1: the the tube part is air tight like a straw,
Speaker 1: except it has sealable hatches at either end instead of
Speaker 1: you know straw. Bit's yeah. Um, so so you you
Speaker 1: put a canister in one hatch. Yeah, it helps a
Speaker 1: whole lot off. The canister has some kind of like
Speaker 1: flexible skirts on either end, the concealed the interior edges
Speaker 1: of the tube that air is not passing around around
Speaker 1: the canister right to make it the most effective. So
Speaker 1: you so you put your canister in there, you close
Speaker 1: the hatch, and you press your go button. Um. Now
Speaker 1: on the other end of the tube, pressing that button
Speaker 1: will open up a vent and start a motor. Now,
Speaker 1: one of two things will happen at this point, right,
Speaker 1: So this all depends upon where the canister is in
Speaker 1: relation to where the blower is. Right. So here's the
Speaker 1: boring one, because because you get to take the really
Speaker 1: cool one. Here's the boring one if the canister is
Speaker 1: the blower side. So in other words, this is like
Speaker 1: the blower being a fan essentially that can either blow
Speaker 1: air into the tube or pull air out of the
Speaker 1: tube if it's on the blower side, and the only
Speaker 1: way to move the canster to the other end of
Speaker 1: the tube is to blow air against the canister pushing it.
Speaker 1: So you're increasing the air pressure on the side of
Speaker 1: the blower and it just blows the canister across. So
Speaker 1: this is essentially the same as when you shoot blow
Speaker 1: darts at your coworkers, or when I say you when
Speaker 1: I shoot blow darts at Ben bowling. Um, he has
Speaker 1: wondered what that tingling sensation has been, and no one
Speaker 1: tell him. But that's essentially it yeah, but if the
Speaker 1: canisters on the opposite side, See the blower on a
Speaker 1: pneumatic tube system typically is at just one end. You
Speaker 1: don't have two blowers right right, And it's not um.
Speaker 1: Especially classically, these things weren't always powerful enough to necessarily
Speaker 1: push right. So if the canisters on the opposite end,
Speaker 1: like I, I've sent something out now, I'm expecting it
Speaker 1: to come back, but my blower is at the the
Speaker 1: end where I am at, I have to I have
Speaker 1: to find a different way to move the canster. I
Speaker 1: can't push it by by turning the fan to blow
Speaker 1: air into the tube. So what do I do? Then, Well,
Speaker 1: the motor will still drive a fan down at the
Speaker 1: other end of the tube, but but this time it
Speaker 1: will start to pull air out of the tube, venting
Speaker 1: it out of the tube entirely. Gotcha. Okay, this section,
Speaker 1: just like a straw, creates a partial vacuum at that
Speaker 1: end of the tube with the fan an area of
Speaker 1: low pressure. So uh, you know, down down at the
Speaker 1: canister end of the tube, the higher pressure air behind
Speaker 1: the canister wants to expand to settle the difference, right, um,
Speaker 1: so it will push the canister through the tube. So
Speaker 1: the canstor is still being pushed. It's just that it's
Speaker 1: being pushed because the air behind it is at a
Speaker 1: higher pressure than the air in front of it, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's so cool. So in most of these systems, when
Speaker 1: the canister reaches its destination um like the end of
Speaker 1: the tube, it will trigger a trapdoor to close behind it,
Speaker 1: which will also cue the motor to turn off end
Speaker 1: the vnced close, meaning that the partial vacuum that's been
Speaker 1: created in the tube will be broken, and your buddy
Speaker 1: at the other end can open up the hatch and
Speaker 1: take out the canister. And that makes perfect sense because
Speaker 1: obviously if you had continue to have that vacuum they're
Speaker 1: opening up the hatch would have been difficult, it real hard, yeah,
Speaker 1: because that that air pressure on the outside of the
Speaker 1: tube is pushing against it. You know. It's this same
Speaker 1: sort of deal. That's just one of those things that
Speaker 1: you have to have all the lower parts in place
Speaker 1: for the system to work properly. And the big advantage
Speaker 1: of this sort of system is that you don't have
Speaker 1: to connect little motors to all those canisters, right. The
Speaker 1: individual units don't need anything, they don't need any moving parts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the whole. The system is a whole can have a
Speaker 1: single well, it can have a single motor. A lot
Speaker 1: of the time these days, they've got really complex multiple
Speaker 1: motor things that's going on, especially if you have like
Speaker 1: lots of potential destination systems. But but if you had
Speaker 1: a very simple system where it was just an out
Speaker 1: and back, you would just need one one motor turning
Speaker 1: one fan or or you know, some people just refer
Speaker 1: to him as air compressors, but technically you're using a
Speaker 1: fan anything fan. Yeah. So yeah, that's really interesting. And
Speaker 1: they are also some interesting advantages or rather design elements
Speaker 1: that have been made to make sure that the canisters
Speaker 1: arrived safely, because in the original systems, canisters would arrive
Speaker 1: by basically just crashing into the opposite end of the two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they and they could be going pretty darn fast, depending
Speaker 1: on how powerful that fan was. Yeah, tens of miles
Speaker 1: an hour, which which I mean usually I say is
Speaker 1: kind of a joke, but actually that's pretty quick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially for something like if you haven't designed it just right,
Speaker 1: it's gonna you know, just just smash it up, yeah,
Speaker 1: or it's gonna end up causing damage to the tubes,
Speaker 1: and obviously that's a problem. So there are a couple
Speaker 1: of different ways of slowing them down properly. One of
Speaker 1: those uses air brakes, which is essentially just again pressurized air,
Speaker 1: but now on the low pressure side, so that can
Speaker 1: slow down the canister from you know, it's it's inevitable
Speaker 1: crash towards oblivion, or bumpers like little rubber bumpers that
Speaker 1: can come out from the sides to slow like the
Speaker 1: way a lot of roller coaster brakes work. Huh. And
Speaker 1: also they often have some form of switch that once
Speaker 1: a canister passes that switch, it activates it, which then
Speaker 1: turns off power to the blower. Uh. Now, momentum still
Speaker 1: a thing, so you have to plan for that as well.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, it's sort of like the trapdoor idea,
Speaker 1: but with a little bit of a longer glide after
Speaker 1: the trapdoor. Right. So now I'm going to try and
Speaker 1: explain without the use of visual aids, how how a
Speaker 1: simple pneumatic tube system using a couple of valves and
Speaker 1: a switch would help a canister come to a stop.
Speaker 1: All right, So you've got with the two valves, these
Speaker 1: create a pathway for air in front of the caster
Speaker 1: to vent out for most of the trip, while leaving
Speaker 1: enough for the very end to act as a cushion. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, you need a way for air to
Speaker 1: vent outward or else you'll never create that area of
Speaker 1: low pressure. But you need a way to keep a
Speaker 1: little bit of air in there so that it can
Speaker 1: act as a breaking system. So you've got to figure
Speaker 1: out how to do that. And when I saw there
Speaker 1: was a a series of illustrations I saw online that
Speaker 1: explained this really well. And uh so I'm going to
Speaker 1: try and walk you through it the best way I
Speaker 1: know how. So we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, y'all. And
Speaker 1: here's here's what's happening. So your adventurer is in a
Speaker 1: tunnel and behind you as a giant spinning fan of death.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think I've been on this module before. Okay,
Speaker 1: So in this case, the giant spinning fan of death
Speaker 1: is currently slow. It's it's actually not even moving at all.
Speaker 1: It's it's no one's trip that trap. Yet you start
Speaker 1: walking down the tunnel. So the van is behind you
Speaker 1: and you just have a big expansive tunnel in front
Speaker 1: of you. Now, as you walk down the tunnel, you
Speaker 1: see that there is a split from the tunnel off
Speaker 1: let's say to your left, and it's just a second,
Speaker 1: smaller tunnel that you see down the door. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: there's no door. It's just just an open it's just
Speaker 1: an opening. But but I like your initiative. You didn't
Speaker 1: even have to roll for it, all right. But you
Speaker 1: continue on down and you come to your first actual
Speaker 1: door in that main tunnel. Now you can do your kicking,
Speaker 1: and it works because that door will only open outward
Speaker 1: into the main hall. This is a valve, and it's
Speaker 1: a one way valve, right, so air can go from
Speaker 1: the fan through the main pipe, but it can't be
Speaker 1: sucked back this way, got it? So if airs, if
Speaker 1: airs being pulled, that door slam shut and nothing, not
Speaker 1: even your mighty kick will open it. So since there
Speaker 1: are no differentials in air pressure, your kick opens the door.
Speaker 1: You continue down the hall. I gonna skip the cobalt encounter.
Speaker 1: As you continue down the tunnel, you see a door
Speaker 1: on your left. Now, this door is the other valve.
Speaker 1: This is the valve that is the bypass valve. And
Speaker 1: in fact, if you were to kick down that door,
Speaker 1: but you can do oh ah, yeah, I kicked down
Speaker 1: the door. Excellent, So the door opens inward into that
Speaker 1: secondary tunnel. There's no bug bears. There is an al bear,
Speaker 1: but he's currently on break. So you kick down the door. UH.
Speaker 1: That opens the pathway to the bypass UH top tube
Speaker 1: or bypass pipe. So the first tunnel that you passed
Speaker 1: way back when on the left, it's the same, it's
Speaker 1: that same pathway. So this door will only open when
Speaker 1: air is being pulled through back toward the fan, so
Speaker 1: sucked back toward the fan. So that way, you always
Speaker 1: have one valve that's open and one valve that's closed,
Speaker 1: and it all depends upon air flows, so there's no
Speaker 1: mechanical or electrical need to to change these valves. It's
Speaker 1: just the airflow that does it automatically. So if the
Speaker 1: air flow is being pulled back, the bypass valve is open,
Speaker 1: the main valve is shut, and because the bypass pipe
Speaker 1: completely bypasses that main valve, air can still flow through.
Speaker 1: So now we're going to have to use a an
Speaker 1: example to talk about what happens when the canister comes by.
Speaker 1: So the canister starts rocketing down the path toward the
Speaker 1: fan side, so air is being pulled through, it ends
Speaker 1: up passing a switch. That switch tells the fan to
Speaker 1: stop blowing by. Of course that's going to take a
Speaker 1: little time, So the cancer continues down towards the pathway.
Speaker 1: The canister ends up passing that bypass valve, which is open.
Speaker 1: So once the canister is cleared the bypass valve, because
Speaker 1: you have an air tight seal between the main valve
Speaker 1: and the canister, that air between the two starts to
Speaker 1: get compressed, and that compressed air begins to push back
Speaker 1: against the canister, slowing it down, and thus you have
Speaker 1: air brakes. That was a long way to go over
Speaker 1: that explanation, but honestly, without the use of visual aids,
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure how it is going to explain how
Speaker 1: this actually works in a way that would remotely make sense. Uh,
Speaker 1: you now get two d and thirty gold pieces a
Speaker 1: piece and the princess is in another castle. Okay, okay, well,
Speaker 1: good adventure than You're welcome. I'm a level three game
Speaker 1: mess thro um. Yeah. So obviously, if the if the
Speaker 1: fan were switched the other way, where the canstor is
Speaker 1: blowing down the the pipe, the main valve would be opened.
Speaker 1: The bypass valve would be shut, and that would be
Speaker 1: it there would it would be no different otherwise. Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's the basic way that this works. And that's
Speaker 1: you know, that's a very very very simple versions, as
Speaker 1: complicated as that just sounded out loud, that that is
Speaker 1: as basic as it gets. Really. Yeah, Jonathan from two
Speaker 1: coming in here. We're going to have more from this
Speaker 1: classic episode after this quick break. You know, I said
Speaker 1: a while ago that these things have been around since
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties at least. So let us go to
Speaker 1: the way back machine. It's been out of use for
Speaker 1: so long. Kind of dusty in here, this little Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what, as as as cramped as this thing is,
Speaker 1: it's still cooler than Josh and Chuck Studio. I mean,
Speaker 1: not not like in a style sense, I mean physically
Speaker 1: the temperature is lower. Physically Yeah, cooler, Yeah, yeah that No,
Speaker 1: they they're they're pretty hot, yeah they are. They're there
Speaker 1: a couple of hot guys. All right, Well, anyway, let's
Speaker 1: just where are we setting this to, uh too, to Greece? Sure, well, okay,
Speaker 1: like ancient Greece, modern Greece. Okay, I was really hoping
Speaker 1: you were going to say Greece too, but okay, to
Speaker 1: Greece it is here we go. Well, we do have
Speaker 1: chills and they are multiplying. But that was Greece one.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I don't want to it's it says a
Speaker 1: lot for you and little for me. So there was
Speaker 1: a mathematician who started writing about the concept of using
Speaker 1: pressurized guests to produce mechanical motion. I know this guy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Haro of Alexandria, also known as Heron. He's a pretty
Speaker 1: smart dude. Was he was? Did you you know? We
Speaker 1: talked about it. He is. Since we are here in
Speaker 1: the way back missions and he's across the street over there,
Speaker 1: he's kind of working on something else right now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we're weirding him out by looking at him. Maybe. Okay,
Speaker 1: well let's just act casual, all right. So something else
Speaker 1: that he was really known for, by the way, he
Speaker 1: was known for working with steam engines, in fact, pressurized gas.
Speaker 1: It makes sense, right, it's related. He noticed that air
Speaker 1: had the ability to physically push against things, and that
Speaker 1: if you had a way of generating air movement, you know.
Speaker 1: He even thought, oh, air must be made of something
Speaker 1: because it can have a force. So very forward thinking.
Speaker 1: He didn't have the words to describe this in the
Speaker 1: way that we do today, but he understood that this
Speaker 1: had a way of doing work, and that if you
Speaker 1: could find a way to channel that, you can make
Speaker 1: air do work for you. And that gave him a
Speaker 1: lot of thought about steam, including one of my favorite
Speaker 1: proposed inventions. There's no record of it actually existing, and
Speaker 1: I think we I think we talked about this one
Speaker 1: in our episode about steam engines. Yeah, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: we did. This is the magical way to open temple doors.
Speaker 1: And so you start with a flaming brazure, which is
Speaker 1: a container that contains hot coals, essentially, and you have
Speaker 1: that connected to a boiler. The boiler boils water, water
Speaker 1: is converted into steam. That steam goes through a long
Speaker 1: tube that's essentially a condenser tube. It condenses back into
Speaker 1: water and starts dripping into a bucket. When enough of
Speaker 1: water has dripped into that bucket, that bucket, which is
Speaker 1: suspended by a rope from a pulley, starts to get
Speaker 1: heavier and heavier, pulling downward, and that pulley system ends
Speaker 1: up turning a couple of columns that open up the
Speaker 1: temple doors. So by lighting a fire and and sacrificing
Speaker 1: something to the gods, eventually the doors open and it's magic. Uh,
Speaker 1: it was pretty brilliant. He's he actually came up with
Speaker 1: a lot of different really cool ideas. Um and so
Speaker 1: you know, we definitely wanted to call him out. But
Speaker 1: then we have to skip ahead a couple of you know,
Speaker 1: like a millennia or two. You know. Oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you know how it goes with science stirring some of
Speaker 1: those intervening years between. Yeah, tell him increase and say
Speaker 1: that the Renaissance, you know, back when everyone suddenly said, hey,
Speaker 1: remember when we used to be smart. He liked that.
Speaker 1: It was great. You know, we were a lot a
Speaker 1: lot fewer of us were dying of the plague back then.
Speaker 1: We liked that time. That was good. Yeah. So a
Speaker 1: fellow by the name of Dennis Poppin, I think that's
Speaker 1: how you said, that, would present a paper on an
Speaker 1: invention that he or an idea that he was calling
Speaker 1: the double pneumatic pump to the Royal Society of London.
Speaker 1: That's pretty, that's pretty. That's a pretty impressive name, the
Speaker 1: double new double pneumatic. It's twice as good as it
Speaker 1: is clearly obviously um, but nothing more would come of
Speaker 1: this until the early nineteenth century. Yeah, that's when there
Speaker 1: was a Scottish engineer by the name of William Murdoch.
Speaker 1: I have to mention William Murdock because while while he
Speaker 1: had essentially invented the pneumatic tube, he didn't do a
Speaker 1: whole lot with it. It was some of his I
Speaker 1: hesitated to use the word like students because they weren't
Speaker 1: even apprentice to him. But people who worked within the
Speaker 1: same field, who were exposed to his ideas were able
Speaker 1: to actually implement them. But he was the one who
Speaker 1: came up with the concept of using a pneumatic tube
Speaker 1: in the early nineteenth century, and others would take that
Speaker 1: idea and run with it. Uh Yeah, namely one British
Speaker 1: engineered by the name of George Medhurst. He would publish
Speaker 1: a plan in eighteen ten for a pneumatic transport system. Now,
Speaker 1: let me ask you, is this the one where you like,
Speaker 1: you get in the tube and you press a button
Speaker 1: and then you just fly across. So it's not like
Speaker 1: in futurama. I know now that would hurt a lot.
Speaker 1: I don't recommend it. Yeah, Well, Okay, so they're downsides.
Speaker 1: I mean, clearly you really need that air brake system
Speaker 1: to work really well, and your ears would pop like
Speaker 1: a mother. True. Yeah, being being being subjected to extremely
Speaker 1: low pressure on one half of your body might not
Speaker 1: have the best effect overall. All right, fair enough, Okay,
Speaker 1: So so he was so he was working with a
Speaker 1: compressed air. Yeah, he actually created as something called the
Speaker 1: Aeolien engine in eight hundred, which was a kind of
Speaker 1: like a car running on a compressed air in a way,
Speaker 1: it was a vehicle that used compressed air on the
Speaker 1: vehicle itself to create a system of propulsion to make
Speaker 1: the vehicle move. So in this case, the the you know,
Speaker 1: like we said with the pneumatic tube is one of
Speaker 1: the big advantages is that you have the centralized source
Speaker 1: of power. This was the other way around. This is
Speaker 1: more like more akin to a motor vehicle. So but
Speaker 1: he that was an early experiment of his that didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily work out, you know, as like this is going
Speaker 1: to be the new means of transportation. But he was
Speaker 1: recognizing the power of compressed air. So then he moved
Speaker 1: on to create a design for this pneumatic transport system
Speaker 1: and it consisted of an iron tube that was six
Speaker 1: ft high by six ft wide, which is about one
Speaker 1: point eight meters each. And I had rails along the
Speaker 1: bottom of this tube, so cars would be set on
Speaker 1: the rails and then blown through the tubes using compressed air.
Speaker 1: So essentially the style that we were talking about the
Speaker 1: the the easy, more worring method of getting canisters from
Speaker 1: point A to point B. But he did he did
Speaker 1: note that he did the math and suessed it out,
Speaker 1: and and thought that if air could be subjected to
Speaker 1: just forty pounds per square inch of pressure, just um,
Speaker 1: it's it's about two and a half times the amount
Speaker 1: that the atmosphere exerts upon us right now hanging out
Speaker 1: at sea level. Um. If we could increase that two
Speaker 1: and a half times, that air molecules could be propelled
Speaker 1: at like a thousand miles an hour or a thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred and nine kilometers, You're welcome, Canada and else.
Speaker 1: Uh when actually pushing stuff that is an air, that
Speaker 1: speed would only be about a hundred miles or a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty kilometers per hour, which it's still pretty fast.
Speaker 1: Certainly in eighteen ten was not too shabby. It's now No,
Speaker 1: Unfortunately he would pass away before he really had a
Speaker 1: chance to implement any of these ideas, but his ideas
Speaker 1: would become instrumental for people who were working on actual implementations, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So uh, one of the one of the interesting stories
Speaker 1: I came across, and I was telling Lauren before we
Speaker 1: went into the podcast studio that this, the stories of
Speaker 1: these people probably couldn't merit a couple of episodes. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll mention it to Stuffy miss in history because because
Speaker 1: it really fits more in their line than ours. But
Speaker 1: I want to talk about Simuda and Clegg. So you
Speaker 1: had the Simuda Brothers. That was a company that was
Speaker 1: run by Jacob and Joseph Simuda who were primarily shipbuilders,
Speaker 1: so they were engineers, but they built ships. Then they
Speaker 1: partnered with another inventor and engineer named Samuel Clegg, who
Speaker 1: at one time and worked in a company that used
Speaker 1: a lot of William Murdock's inventions. So Clegg had been
Speaker 1: exposed to Murdock's ideas. Some people refer to him as
Speaker 1: as as Murdoch's student, although from all the research I did,
Speaker 1: it didn't seem like they had a very like each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like saying Tesla worked for Edison in
Speaker 1: the sense that, yes, Tesla worked for one of Edison's companies,
Speaker 1: but was not like directly associated with most of his
Speaker 1: life for coffee with the dude. No, especially by the
Speaker 1: time they ended up being kind of rivals. But but
Speaker 1: even in the early days they didn't. It's not like
Speaker 1: Edison knew everybody to work for him anyway. So their
Speaker 1: their idea was to lease some already constructed but unopened
Speaker 1: rail lines. So the idea was they took some rail
Speaker 1: lines that had not yet been open to the public.
Speaker 1: They had been built but not used, and they were
Speaker 1: at a place called Wormholt Scrubs, at least that's what
Speaker 1: was known by at the time. It is now known
Speaker 1: as Wormwood Scrubs. Two bees instead of one, yeah uh.
Speaker 1: And they used a pipe set between the two rails
Speaker 1: as their pneumatic system. So instead of an entire huge
Speaker 1: pneumatic tube encompassing the rails, there was a smaller matic
Speaker 1: tube set right in the middle of the rails, and
Speaker 1: the tube had a slot running all the way the
Speaker 1: length of the tube at the top of it. All right,
Speaker 1: So you're they had a train car that had a
Speaker 1: pole that essentially extended down into that slot and was
Speaker 1: attached at the other end inside the tube to a piston. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this is like a pneumatic monorail. Yeah exactly. The
Speaker 1: piston acted like a canister would in a normal pneumatic tube.
Speaker 1: And then you sit there and think like, well, how
Speaker 1: do you create the difference in pressure if you've got
Speaker 1: to if you've got a slot all the way across
Speaker 1: the open top of this two, Yeah, there's no there's
Speaker 1: no way to seal it. So what they did was
Speaker 1: they created a leather flap that would essentially be opened
Speaker 1: immediately before and close immediately after the the rod would
Speaker 1: pass through. And uh, the the track they were using
Speaker 1: was on a very gentle slope, and so what they
Speaker 1: did was they used air to push the train car
Speaker 1: up the slope to its destination, and then on the
Speaker 1: return trip they just allowed gravity to bring the car back,
Speaker 1: so you didn't have to have any sort of power
Speaker 1: to bring back the car um and it was used
Speaker 1: pretty extensively as kind of a demonstration. Uh, this sort
Speaker 1: of this kind of track was started to get a name,
Speaker 1: is called atmospheric railways. That's beautiful. Yeah, the reason they
Speaker 1: wanted to call it atmospheric, was that, yes, they're using
Speaker 1: they're using pressurized air, but the cars themselves can be
Speaker 1: open to the air, so you're not forced inside a
Speaker 1: tunnel because a lot of people were worried about getting
Speaker 1: you know, claustrophobic. Yeah, you know, not all of us
Speaker 1: do well in tunnels. Um, they can be certainly. So
Speaker 1: other atmospheric railways would follow, including some built by Isambard
Speaker 1: Kingdom Brunel, who we talked about on tech stuff in
Speaker 1: How Subways Work. That was the seven episode. So he
Speaker 1: was famous for a lot of reasons, one of them
Speaker 1: being that he dug the Thames Tunnel, so he really
Speaker 1: um kind of pioneered the methodology for digging tunnels safely,
Speaker 1: especially under you know, ground that you would technically think
Speaker 1: would be really unstable like the bottom of a river.
Speaker 1: Um and one of his trains, at least from a
Speaker 1: report I read during a demonstration, hit a top speed
Speaker 1: of seventy miles per hour, which is about a hundred
Speaker 1: thirteen kilometers per hour. But keeping that seal effective even
Speaker 1: with those leather flaps was problematic, and so eventually because
Speaker 1: of these issues, the fact that you had to replace
Speaker 1: that seal often uh ended up meaning that when steam
Speaker 1: engines really started to become popular, the pneumatic train systems
Speaker 1: like these couldn't compete, and so people just started to
Speaker 1: go with steam engines that were seen as more reliable
Speaker 1: than something that you had to constantly maintain. So ultimately, um,
Speaker 1: they I was gonna say these didn't go anywhere, but
Speaker 1: that's not true. They'd go from one place to another place.
Speaker 1: Sure they went places, yeah, but they just didn't take off. No. No,
Speaker 1: they literally did not take that literally and figuratively both. Yes. Two,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Again, we're gonna take another quick break and be
Speaker 1: back with more. In the fifties, telegraph systems began to
Speaker 1: really boom um, which I mentioned A for reference and
Speaker 1: B because if it's important to note that in these
Speaker 1: early days of telegraphs, you know, they it was really
Speaker 1: cool technology, um, but they were really understaffed uh telegraph
Speaker 1: telegraph offices, you know, because there was so much demand
Speaker 1: and most people in businesses couldn't afford to have their
Speaker 1: own telegraph machine. So central offices would send these message
Speaker 1: boys on foot through busy city blocks carrying all of
Speaker 1: these telegrams, which would kind of negate depending on you know,
Speaker 1: like like peak capacity, the speed of of a telegraph
Speaker 1: versus a mail system. The idea of being, hey, I
Speaker 1: can send this message instantly, except I'm sending it instantly
Speaker 1: to a centralized point and then from there where someone
Speaker 1: else could has to run it out to you anyway.
Speaker 1: So in eighteen fifty three Latimer Clark would build a
Speaker 1: non electric pneumatic tube that would carry messages between the
Speaker 1: electric and international telegraph companies headquarters and their offices at
Speaker 1: the British Stock Exchange. Uh. And yes, a lot of
Speaker 1: telegraphs were stock related. As we have talked about on
Speaker 1: the show before. H Stock exchanges kind of drive message technology.
Speaker 1: It's crazy, the idea that you want to pounce on
Speaker 1: something as soon as possible, whether that's buying or selling.
Speaker 1: So it makes sense that they were really working to
Speaker 1: try and decrease the amount of time between a decision
Speaker 1: and when it can be acted upon. Um So his tubes,
Speaker 1: Latimer Lattimer Clark's tubes were only one way. Most most
Speaker 1: tubes up to this point were so. In other words,
Speaker 1: once it got to its destination, it had to be
Speaker 1: carried back physically to wherever the first office and around
Speaker 1: the same time, the Great Britain General Post Office would
Speaker 1: commission a study of Medhurst's ideas to try to to
Speaker 1: get some kind of larger postal tube system, right, something
Speaker 1: that could make the delivery of letters more efficient. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean this is again we've talked about this,
Speaker 1: uh in the Subways episode in particular, we talked about it.
Speaker 1: How this same period where London was experiencing explosive population growth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the Industrial Revolution when suddenly there are fewer there's
Speaker 1: fewer need of farmers, and there's a greater need of
Speaker 1: of labor in various ways in the cities and the
Speaker 1: urban areas. So you had this migration of people into cities,
Speaker 1: plus the you know, the fact that people still make people.
Speaker 1: So there was that too going on and uh, and
Speaker 1: so we have this this world where everything's getting more
Speaker 1: complicated because suddenly there's just so many more people living
Speaker 1: in the same physical space as before. Yeah. So, so
Speaker 1: in the eighteen sixties, the GPO would award a contract
Speaker 1: to one T. W. Rammell to constructing anumatic tube system
Speaker 1: that could carry mail throughout London. And Ramball's done some
Speaker 1: really interesting stuff. In eighteen sixty three, Rama would build
Speaker 1: a two foot gauge pneumatic dispatch railway in central London.
Speaker 1: More and then a bit because it takes a couple
Speaker 1: of years before it opens. But in eighteen sixty four
Speaker 1: Rambles Crystal Palace pneumatic railway opened. What so Crystal Palace
Speaker 1: is sect area in London, a location in London. Um,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't The pneumatic railway itself was not a
Speaker 1: crystal Palace. It would have been phenomenal, right. So it
Speaker 1: ran on a track that was about six hundred yards
Speaker 1: in length, that's around five and the train cars had
Speaker 1: colored bristles to help create a seal in a ten
Speaker 1: ft diameter or a three meter diameter tunnel, So kind
Speaker 1: of similar to those flexible skirts we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: excepting this case was bristly. Yeah. Uh So this massive
Speaker 1: fan would blow the carriage down onto one end of
Speaker 1: the track. Then the fan would reverse to create a
Speaker 1: partial vacuum to bring the carriage back. So it used
Speaker 1: both principles of pneumatic tubes and a trip cost sixpence
Speaker 1: in a song, or or just a sixpence. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: always think of like Oliver, you know, I think of
Speaker 1: like a Dickensie and musical when I think about the stuff.
Speaker 1: In fact, I want to write one now at any rate.
Speaker 1: That's that's a good hobby. Next time on a very musical.
Speaker 1: Oh man, now you guys are gonna request me to
Speaker 1: never saying I know that. So it operated for just
Speaker 1: two years, and depending upon whom you ask, it might
Speaker 1: or might not have been intended to serve as a
Speaker 1: model for an atmospheric railway, but in a different sense,
Speaker 1: because obviously this one was completely encapsulated in the tunnel,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the ones that had the tube that
Speaker 1: ran parallel, well in between the rails, So this is
Speaker 1: one the rails are completely encapsulated in the two. There
Speaker 1: are a couple of cool urban legends about what happened
Speaker 1: to this particular railway. So one says it was just
Speaker 1: sealed off, that that once it stopped being used, they
Speaker 1: sealed off the tunnel, and that in fact there is
Speaker 1: this lone tunnel underneath London where if you were able
Speaker 1: to get access to it, you would see the tracks
Speaker 1: and even the carriage itself. There was a lady who
Speaker 1: even reported that she had found it, and there were
Speaker 1: skeletons sitting in the carriage dressed in Victorian outfit. It
Speaker 1: seems unlikely. Yeah, I don't know, Like we're shutting her down.
Speaker 1: Don't let anybody out. We're just shutting off the lights
Speaker 1: and leaving. Yeah, you got your sixpences long gone. You
Speaker 1: are on the wrong train. That sounds like a Stephen
Speaker 1: King story. Um, there's another urban legend that said the
Speaker 1: tunnel collapsed from a bomb which trapped the carriage and
Speaker 1: some passengers in it forever like there was essentially a
Speaker 1: cave in and they were stuck and died and are
Speaker 1: entombed in the carriage. But those kind of bombs weren't
Speaker 1: really falling on London for another few decades. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the thing. And this this legend was circulating as early
Speaker 1: as nineteen thirty, but there was there were no bombs
Speaker 1: that were going off in the eighteen sixties at in
Speaker 1: London like like that at that time was blitz. No
Speaker 1: and and in fact the Blitz didn't even happen by
Speaker 1: the time this urban legend first started circulating. And so
Speaker 1: it got stronger after World War Two, I mean more
Speaker 1: because partly because people were using underground station and I'm
Speaker 1: two tunnel lines as as a place to seek refuge
Speaker 1: during the Blitz, but that was just an urban legend
Speaker 1: in anyway. In eighteen sixty five the London Pneumatic Dispatch
Speaker 1: Railway opened And this one is not meant to carry passengers,
Speaker 1: although I think someone wrote it the first time it opened.
Speaker 1: But the yeah again, like that would hurt. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think so too. The cars themselves, Uh, I was reading
Speaker 1: one description. It was said they were coffin sized. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you uh, they're not meant to carry people. But
Speaker 1: but freight and mail right that this is part of
Speaker 1: the mail system. Uh. And this comes directly from the
Speaker 1: Pall Mall Gazette on October twelfth, eighteen sixty five. And
Speaker 1: you know it's in England. Okay, do it? Do it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: The driving power is that Holben and consists of two
Speaker 1: twenty four horse power steam engines. They set in most disc,
Speaker 1: the diameter of which is about twenty two ft. The
Speaker 1: immense circular fan revolves with great rapidity in an air chamber,
Speaker 1: creating an almost irresistible atmosphere, power which, by the use
Speaker 1: of valves, can be used either for blowing the trains
Speaker 1: through the tubes or literally sucking them back again. So
Speaker 1: there you go. Good show. Thank you, thank you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was when I read that description. I was just
Speaker 1: so enchanted by the resistible atmosphere power with such great rapidity.
Speaker 1: So I was, oh, how British this this newspaper is,
Speaker 1: but yeah, very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, back on the telegraph,
Speaker 1: and in eighteen sixty eight, the UK government would pass
Speaker 1: the Telegraphs Act, which nationalized the telegraph industry and wrapped
Speaker 1: it into the Post Office, thus meaning that the g
Speaker 1: p O acquired like really quite a lot of pneumatic
Speaker 1: telegraph lines which various companies had been privately building out
Speaker 1: over the past decade. Now this is also interesting because
Speaker 1: again it mirrors what happened with the subway system in London.
Speaker 1: The subways were built by private companies, so you had
Speaker 1: a bunch of different independent systems that were not connected
Speaker 1: together at first, until the government realized that this was
Speaker 1: a serious public good good and that you know, they
Speaker 1: wanted to help it out as much as possible and
Speaker 1: conform everything so that it could be used as widely
Speaker 1: as possible. Exactly the same. Yeah. Meanwhile, across the Pond
Speaker 1: eight seventy an inventor by the name of Alfred ELI
Speaker 1: Beach begins construction on a pneumatic subway in New York
Speaker 1: called the Beach Pneumatic Transit, obviously named after the inventor.
Speaker 1: The subway did not transport commuters to a magical New
Speaker 1: York beach, sadly, but here's some interesting and odd facts
Speaker 1: about that project. So, first, Beach lied about what he
Speaker 1: was doing. I read somewhere that um that he had
Speaker 1: like personal disagreements with one of the powers that were
Speaker 1: at the time, Um, someone by the name of Boss Tweed.
Speaker 1: Oh well, here's the thing. Originally Boss Tweed backed Beach,
Speaker 1: but Boss Tweed fail fell from favor quite famously through corruption.
Speaker 1: And then after the fact Beach said he was one
Speaker 1: of the men who stood in my way. He changed
Speaker 1: the story, and people said okay and went along with
Speaker 1: the story because they wanted to. They wanted this system
Speaker 1: to be put in place. But it ended up not
Speaker 1: being enough because there were other issues that would follow.
Speaker 1: But yeah, originally Beach and Buss Tweed were buddy buddy,
Speaker 1: and it was only after the fact when when Boss
Speaker 1: Tweeds going down Beaches like, I'm not going down with
Speaker 1: you like that guy was always a pain in the butt.
Speaker 1: So so Beach really wanted to create this subway system.
Speaker 1: Um and you know, in order to do that, he
Speaker 1: would have to dig up part of a New York street.
Speaker 1: He knew that Tweed would not be excited about this thing.
Speaker 1: So he was like, well, what if I were building
Speaker 1: a pneumatic male system. Yeah, well, you know what, we
Speaker 1: need a couple of couple pneumatic tubes. Want to send
Speaker 1: mail one way, one to bring mail back the other way.
Speaker 1: Clearly we can't have both going the same tube because
Speaker 1: if messages need to be sent in both directions at
Speaker 1: the same time, they're or it's not gonna work. Pandemonium, yeah,
Speaker 1: dogs and cats. So what we need to do is
Speaker 1: have two tubes. And so they said, all right, that
Speaker 1: that proposal we can get behind. You can you can
Speaker 1: build your your male pneumatic tubes. And then he says,
Speaker 1: all right, well, what I'm gonna do is I'm going
Speaker 1: to house this pair of tubes within a larger tube
Speaker 1: to protect them. So so I'm gonna need to dig
Speaker 1: really pretty big tunnel. It's gonna be it's gonna be
Speaker 1: pretty big. So Beach also came up with a tunneling
Speaker 1: shield and we talked about those in the Subway Episode two. Tunneling.
Speaker 1: Tunneling shields are essentially a tunneling tool that hold up
Speaker 1: the integrity of the tunnel while you're digging, so that
Speaker 1: people behind you can shore that up with brick or
Speaker 1: or whatever they're using to seal it off. So he
Speaker 1: goes in and he starts digging this tunnel. Everyone thinks
Speaker 1: he's digging tunnels for humatic mail teams. He's like, ha ha,
Speaker 1: I now have this wonderful device that I'm going to
Speaker 1: demonstrate to people to show them how magical this is.
Speaker 1: You can ride in a carriage underground, thus avoiding all
Speaker 1: the dangerous traffic that's happening up on the surface level
Speaker 1: where you've got you know, horse drawn carriages going willy
Speaker 1: nilly all over the place and passing pedestrians everywhere. Exactly
Speaker 1: back to the cats and dogs. So he ended up
Speaker 1: buildings a a track that was only three feet long
Speaker 1: or about yeah, and the tunnel was eight feet in
Speaker 1: diameter or two point four meters, and about twenty people
Speaker 1: could ride on the carriage at a single time. And
Speaker 1: he himself funded the construction almost entirely out of his
Speaker 1: own pocket. So hundreds of thousands of dollars that Beach
Speaker 1: personally put forward to this because he really believed in it. Uh,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to take a ride on it once
Speaker 1: it opened, so he opens it and you actually had
Speaker 1: to go in through a department store. They had a
Speaker 1: an entrance to the station quote unquote station through their basement.
Speaker 1: The station itself was lit by gas lanterns, had a
Speaker 1: fountain with gold fish in it, and two statues of mercury,
Speaker 1: uh flanking the tunnel. Yeah. Very understated, was Mr Beach.
Speaker 1: And so if you wanted to ride, you needed two bits,
Speaker 1: so two bits in order for you to ride, and
Speaker 1: that would give you a trip to the end of
Speaker 1: the line and back again. And all ticket uh, all
Speaker 1: tickets that were bought, all that money was given to charity.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think it was given to charity for
Speaker 1: children whose parents were whose fathers were soldiers, would who
Speaker 1: had died. So it was it was all going to
Speaker 1: a charitable cause and it was yeah. Yeah, So it
Speaker 1: was supposed to be the birth of the subway system
Speaker 1: of New York, but it did not get much traction.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so uh, boss the boss Tweed corruption scandal happened,
Speaker 1: and then Beach had to distance himself from Boss Tweed.
Speaker 1: Then uh he there was a stock market crash which
Speaker 1: ended up pulling a lot of funding away from any
Speaker 1: possibility of extending this outward. Also, there were people saying, like,
Speaker 1: could this actually be efficient? Um, we couldn't necessarily run
Speaker 1: multiple trains on a single track. It would all be
Speaker 1: one train per track because you couldn't You couldn't control
Speaker 1: their movement between stations otherwise, like how would you how
Speaker 1: would you get train a to to you know, unless
Speaker 1: you have like a really complex system of blowers. Um.
Speaker 1: So they started saying, well, this doesn't like it's going
Speaker 1: to be very efficient. There's not there's no money to
Speaker 1: support it. And so also the rise of electricity meant
Speaker 1: that ultimately it became moot. And again you can listen
Speaker 1: to how subways work to learn about the rest of
Speaker 1: that story. So, while it was never really taken seriously
Speaker 1: as a means of transportation for passengers, Beach's original proposal
Speaker 1: to build those pneumatic mail tubes, which he totally wasn't
Speaker 1: serious about, did actually catch on, not as he originally
Speaker 1: imagined them, which were these like ten ft diameter tubes
Speaker 1: above city streets designed for both people in mail, which
Speaker 1: he was calling the US pneumatic dispatch, right, so that
Speaker 1: never happened, as I'm sorry, clearly he was he was
Speaker 1: influenced at least in part by the London pneumatic Dispatch,
Speaker 1: which was being successful as far as the mail goes,
Speaker 1: and um, so he would his his work would live
Speaker 1: on within that system, although I think he died before
Speaker 1: before it was actually built. Uh yeah, so yeah, there's well.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, progress is built upon a lot
Speaker 1: of hard work and sacrifice and not. In some cases
Speaker 1: it comes to us at the expense of ideas that
Speaker 1: seemed awesome, but ultimately we're untenable. However, something is you know,
Speaker 1: salvageable from the idea, and I think that's the case
Speaker 1: with Beach. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. Next week we will have part to the
Speaker 1: exciting conclusion of a series of tubes. If you have
Speaker 1: suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way
Speaker 1: to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the
Speaker 1: show is tech Stuff h s W. I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. H