The return of pneumatic tubes

In NYC Rsosevelt Island solved their trash problems (which plague the rest of the city) with an underground pneumatic trash network: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/suck-it-roosevelt-isla...

Buildings have a connection into which trash is sucked away to the central yard for processing. It's pretty neat and helps keep the island tidy. You don't get any of the normal huge trash piles that litter Manhattan on trash day.

Conversely, our local hospital is now using robots for deliveries. They trundle around and deliver things like meds to the nurses stations on request, and announce it with "Your delivery has arrived".

Just watching robots trundle around as though it's normal is an interesting slow creep towards what seemed so futuristic in Star Wars in the 70s and 80s. Now our local supermarkets (BJs and Stop and Shop) have robots that trundle around checking inventory as well.

No online discussion of pneumatic tubes is complete without a mention of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

I grew up near Germany's biggest electronics retailers[1] head quarters and they had these tubes ending in their consumer store.

When I was building something and needed a certain component I could just ride my bicycle a few kilometers over the country, say what I needed and a couple of minutes later it would pop out of a tube behind the counter.

I am not very nostalgic, but I miss this immediacy and hope to live long enough to see drone delivery become ubiquitous.

[1] Think RadioShack, but not RadioShack. They claimed to be Europe's biggest, but I have no idea if this was ever true.

One of my earliest jobs as a mechanical engineer was checking the pneumatic tube shop drawings for Perth Children's Hospital. Basically looking for bends with too small a radius and appropriate collars through firewalls.

One of the engineers suggested adding a transparent loop the loop passing through the public atrium for a bit of fun but predictably this was denied.

Stanford Hospital has a pneumatic tube system which earned a listing on Atlas Obscura: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pneumatic-tubes-at-stanf...

You could fit a lot of data in a pneumatic tube capsule full of SSDs, haha. It might give the old hatchback a run for its money.

"Untapped New York" featured an interesting article about the pneumatic tube mail system that was used in NYC:

https://untappedcities.com/2023/10/17/pneumatic-tube-mail-ne...

A lot of the material was also incorporated in their podcast about the same subject:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pneumatic-tube-mail-in...

I'd love to see an advanced citywide or intra-city logistics system using pneumatic tubes or evacuated tubes in general.

There's interesting non-pneumatic work from the Swiss company Cargo Sous Terrain, with self-poweres robot carriers shuttling materials around a city. Haven't heard or seen much in specifics, but their design material looks flashy & cool, and they supposedly are doing a tunnel. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cargo-sous-terrain

Outside of Atlanta GA, there's Pipedream, which launched a modest-sized intra-city auto omous robot delivery system at the end of 2023, which is cool. https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-fir...

It probably isn't worth the trouble nor a real efficiency gain but the idea of evacuated tubes with low air resistance or maybe even using real pneumatic pressure sounds cool. Especially for longer distances, higher capacities, the idea of some kind of hyperloop like system but a bit smaller & not human rated would be neat, could eliminate a colossal amount of CO2 & effort.

I think the last pneumantic tube I saw was decades ago, when banks had drive-throughs.

The lane closest to the bank had a teller, but the other lanes all used pneumantic tubes to send paperwork and money back and forth.

That said, I wonder if pneumatic tubes have been going the way of railroads - extremely useful for their "right-of-ways" to run fiber.

As radiography students we messed around with these. Sending stupid notes or a sub.

It’s a top notch sandwich delivery system.

Not the same but in a similar vein, I was in a big library once and it was having work done. Inside the ceiling were masses of conveyer belts shipping books to various floors and departments.

I've been interested in Laundry Jet, which is a pneumatic laundry chute. The obvious concern is issues with blockages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6xJ4K7WSQw

People in 1920s Berlin nightclubs flirted via pneumatic tubes (2017)

[321 points | 11 months ago | 125 comments]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854061

> The carriers are limited to those speeds to maintain specimen integrity. If blood samples move faster, for example, blood cells can be destroyed.

It’s not the overall speed that destroys the blood cells, it is the acceleration and deceleration at either end which does it. These tube systems just don’t have the ability to include extensive gradual-acceleration and gradual-deceleration systems at either end.

Check out the startup Pipedream.

It sounds to me like building logistics pipelines between hospitals (even partnering with the healthcare pneumatic logistics companies to do this) would be an ideal way to get started. Then expand the network from there with QoS packet prioritization schemes. Similar to how large Fiber Optic networks are done in some regions, or how arpanet started.

Growing up in Moore, Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s, my mother frequented the C.R. Anthony's store in the City of Moore Shopping Center. They used pneumatic tubes; the person at the check-out counter would put a receipt and money tendered into a tube and off it would go to somewhere, I figured some office in back, where they made change and sent the tube back. You could hear it rattle around a bit as it went on its way, and the way it would come back, zip out onto a open curved "landing strip" and slam into the stop was impressive.

I sooooo want this in my house. As well as a solari board.

Belgian yearly car MOT: they're still using pneumatic tubes in several places around the country for papers. Saw those being used there in 2023.

The Niketown stores in NYC and Chicago delivered shoes via pneumatic tube. You’d tell the sales associate the style/size/color, they’d type it into their handheld device, and a few minutes later the shoebox would appear at the nearest (whatever you call it). It was a pretty clever system, but those stores are now closed, from what I understand.

Does it have to be pneumatic? Electric propulsion would be simpler and not need a tight fit in the tube.

At my bank you have to talk to tellers only over a video screen, which annoys me. But the pneumatic tubes you use to exchange checks, slips, cash, and other materiel makes up for it, they are so fun to use. (The system is presumably for teller safety)

I found some videos on youtube of hospital pneumatic systems. Not sure they are the ones this article is talking about. Also haven't found any detailed video about these modern systems.

One would think the advent of modern, semi-autonomous robots could fulfill much of the function of pneumatic tubes for transporting small packages across a facility.

The return? more like "The only modern use case for pneumatic tubes is Hospitals."

Costco uses these to transport cash to the main security safe, Costco doesn’t get robbed

Were pneumatic tubes used outside US?

I haven't seen them anywhere except in old US movies.

I believe they still use them in Costcos to move money around.