Once it's swallowed up by a series of pneumatic tubes, the canister embarks on a dark, shadowy journey unseen by the human eye. But now we have GoPros, and now we can see exactly what the inside of a pneumatic tube system looks like.
It's not easy being a migratory fish these days. Not only do you have to deal with natural obstacles like friggin bears, there are also man-made obstacles standing in the way—like 500-foot-tall dams. One enterprising company has figured out a safe and effective way to get around these problems: a fish cannon.
It takes work to go upstairs, but it doesn't have to. That's why elevators were invented. If you want an elevator in your home, though, it takes some serious construction. Why not travel through pneumatic tubes like the Jetsons? No, seriously, you can.
It's Friday! Time to sit back, relax, and enjoy a genuinely satisfying session of Suck the Balls. Designer Niklas Roy's interactive installation shows just how much fun can be had with pneumatic tubes, a vacuum, and a pit of yellow plastic spheres. (Spoiler alert: lots of fun.)
Waiter service too slow for you? How about a pneumatic tube that spits out sliders at 87 MILES PER HOUR? C One Espresso, a cafe in Christchurch, New Zealand, has concocted just such a plan to deliver mini-burgers straight to your table via pressurized air.
New Yorkers have a history of experimenting with pneumatic tubes—both for mail delivery (seen above) and public transit—but only one version ever really stuck: An automated vacuum trash collection system beneath the streets of Roosevelt Island. According to two recent studies, this 40-year-old relic might hold the…
The January 18, 1925, Zanesville Times Signal (Zanesville, Ohio) ran an article about a proposed 88 story skyscraper in New York. Titled "How We Will Live Tomorrow," the article imagined how New Yorkers and other city-dwellers might eventually live in skyscrapers of the future. The article talks about the amazing…
A century ago, futurists predicted that pneumatic tubes would be the transportation systems of tomorrow. That idea never came to fruition - until recently. Stanford University's medical center uses a 4-mile-long pneumatic tube delivery system. And it saves lives.
7,000 times a day, the staff at Stanford Hospital launch a sample or some other vital object through their four miles of pneumatic tubing. Because the internet is good at sending emails, but not chunks of stomach lining.
Before the internet, an actual series of tubes really was the best way to transport messages quickly. OObject has complied an amazing list of these systems—some dating as far back as the 19th century. [OObject]
From his first job at Scientific American circa 1900 to his retirement in 1956 as science editor at the New York Times, Waldemar Kaempffert wrote widely about the sciences. As you might imagine from the man who penned yesterday's Popular Mechanics article, Kaempffert was a man with grand plans for a future world made…
A few months ago we looked at the first part of fourteen-year-old Arthur Palm's predictions for the year 2001. Arthur was writing for his school newspaper, the Milwaukee Excelsior, in the year 1901.
On Monday we looked at the German translation of a piece by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. for the December 1900 issue of Ladies Home Journal. Today we have the English version which highlights the coming advances of the twentieth century. Below the full text is provided but we'll be examining it further over the next few…
In 1900 John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., author of many detective and mystery novels, wrote a piece for the December issue of Ladies Home Journal speculating about what the next hundred years held. Everything from weather control to pneumatic tube delivery to the science that will surely bring "strawberries as large as…
I downloaded an episode of the first season of The Jetsons yesterday. It occurred to me that there is nothing more paleo-futuristic than the pneumatic tubes used to transport the characters. I can't wait until the world of transportation catches up to 1960s bank teller technology.
