Live data from Hacker News

The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

untappedcities.com

81–90 of 115 posts

Re: The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

#82

Was probably the inspiration for the movie “Brazil”, released in 1985 where the pneumatic tube system is part of the complicated and extensive "Central Services" administration. Incidentally Brazil is for today's digital dystopia what Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is for environmental instability.

>Brazil is for today's digital dystopia

Can you elaborate there?

Re: The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

#84
Very cool and it's a nice site too (I've only been to NYC once so it's good fodder for longing back). However this sentence made my alarm bells go off:

The first pneumatic tube mail system was installed in Philadelphia (sorry New York) in 1893. New York City’s came in 1897.

A quick check on Wikipedia [1] lists a bunch of earlier systems in Europe, but perhaps there's a silent "in the US" in the original article. That always seems odd to me though, when you're a website focusing on one of the world's top tourist attractions and writing in an international language. Oh well.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_postal_servi...

Re: The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some New York-style Chinese food. Bay food might be authentic but sometimes you just need some properly deep-fried sweet-and-sour pork.

Hey man you might be shadow banned. I vouched for this comment, you might want to email the mods and see what’s up. They are v.reasonable on the whole.

[dead]

Re: The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

#87
post #76

Reminds me of the 1994 movie the shadow with Alec Baldwin. There is a scene where a cylinder is followed through the city. Unrealistically of course but I loved it. I always loved tube mail systems. Berlin, the city I grew up had one too. The only places I now where theses systems are still in use is hospitals.

Me too saw this first in The Shadow, thought that it was made up, until few years later came across the fact that they actually existed.

Re: The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

#88
post #82

Was probably the inspiration for the movie “Brazil”, released in 1985 where the pneumatic tube system is part of the complicated and extensive "Central Services" administration. Incidentally Brazil is for today's digital dystopia what Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is for environmental instability.

>Brazil is for today's digital dystopia Can you elaborate there?

Spoiler alert: the "algorithm" malfunctions due to a real bug.

Re: The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

#89

I don’t understand how such a thing didn’t have constant blockages and what kind of nightmare it would be to dig up and unblock one of these in the middle of the city.

Exactly! But I keep waiting for someone here to mention that, and not seeing it. But my parents' Midwestern bank used to have these too in the 70s, always thought it was so cool.

Is it that regular to need to do this for regular pipes?

I imagine they used a drain snake to push through any blockages, and a redundant route until it was unblocked.

Re: The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City

#90
> In its full glory, the pneumatic tubes covered a 27-mile route, connecting 23 post offices.

Berlin once had a 400 km tube mail system [0], which was in service from 1865 until 1976 (West Berlin) or 1986 (East Berlin). Before WWII, there were nearly 8 million items send via tube mail per year. Several hotels, large department stores or newspapers had their own private connection [1, 2, 3]

[0] https://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/fileadmin/_processed_/2/...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohrpost_in_Berlin

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohrpost_in_Berlin

[3] https://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/verein/forschungsthema-u...

Post reply on HN