pneumatic tube

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Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

British Empire, Charles Babbage, disinformation, financial independence, global village, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, paper trading, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, technoutopianism, undersea cable

ALTHOUGH THEY WERE ORIGINALLY intended to move messages from one telegraph office to another, pneumatic tube systems were soon being used to move messages around within major telegraph offices. Each of these offices was a vast information processing center—a hive of activity surrounded by a cat's cradle of telegraph wires, filled with pneumatic tubes, and staffed by hundreds of people whose sole purpose was to receive messages, figure out where to send them, and dispatch them accordingly. The layout of a major telegraph office was carefully organized to make the flow of information as efficient as possible. Typically, pneumatic tube and telegraph links to offices within the same city would be grouped on one floor of the building, and telegraph wires carrying messages to and from distant towns and cities would be located on another floor.

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International connections, if any, were also grouped. Incoming messages arriving by wire or by tube were taken to sorting tables on each floor and forwarded as appropriate over the building's internal pneumatic tube system for retransmission. In 1875, the Central Telegraph Office in London, for example, housed 450 telegraph instruments on three floors, linked by sixty-eight internal pneumatic tubes. The main office in New York, at 195 Broadway, had pneumatic tubes linking its floors but also employed "check-girls" to deliver messages within its vast operating rooms. Major telegraph offices also had a pressroom, a doctor's office, a maintenance workshop, separate male and female dining rooms, a vast collection of batteries in the basement to provide electrical power for the telegraphic instruments, and steam engines to power the pneumatic tubes.

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Major telegraph offices also had a pressroom, a doctor's office, a maintenance workshop, separate male and female dining rooms, a vast collection of batteries in the basement to provide electrical power for the telegraphic instruments, and steam engines to power the pneumatic tubes. Operators working in shifts ensured that the whole system operated around the clock. Consider, for example, the path of a message from Clerkenwell in London to Birmingham. After being handed in at the Clerkenwell Office, the telegraph form would be forwarded to the Central Telegraph Office by pneumatic tube, where it would arrive on the "Metropoli­tan" floor handling messages to and from addresses within London. On the sorting table it would be identified as a message requiring retransmission to another city and would be passed by internal pneumatic tube to the "Pro­vincial" floor for transmission to Birmingham by intercity telegraph.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

The practice of medicine is all about information, from making a diagnosis to picking the best medication to offering an accurate prognosis. Unsurprisingly, Mayo has been home to many of the critical innovations in information management. The idea of a centralized medical record and patient registration system was developed there, as was a remarkable network of pneumatic tubes for moving paper charts and x-rays around. At its height, Mayo had some 10,000 tubes traversing more than 10 miles, including one tube that was nine blocks long, connecting the two main campuses. The year 2003—when Burton had his call night from hell—was iconic in the world of medical training.

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President Obama highlighted the Clinic time and time again during the run-up to healthcare reform. The patient safety movement has cast a bright light on the need for effective healthcare delivery systems, and nobody has a better one than the folks in Rochester. Today, instead of charts whooshing their way through pneumatic tubes, there is a computer in every hospital room, in every operating room, and in every clinic, placing information at the fingertips of doctors and nurses. Telemedicine is coming of age—Mayo physicians now deliver care to patients who are hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. And we can now test new ways of improving care through the magic of sensors and big data analytics.

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In the days before computers, Mayo’s tradition was that the patient’s chart and x-rays accompanied him on every visit so that each specialist had all the information he needed. The films were placed in a big folder (along with a hastily-produced, typed interpretation of the film by the radiologist), and an elaborate system of runners, along with those famous pneumatic tubes, moved both papers and films to their proper destinations. After PACS was launched, ditching the expensive, labor-intensive process of carting around the huge x-ray folders seemed like a no-brainer. After all, the clinicians could now see the images and read the radiologists’ reports on their computers.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

Chapter 3: Email Has a Mind of Its Own 1. The story of the CIA’s pneumatic tubes and the general push for practical asynchrony is adapted from my 2019 New Yorker article on the history of email: Cal Newport, “Was E-mail a Mistake?,” Annals of Technology, New Yorker, August 6, 2019, www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-mail-a-mistake. 2. According to the CIA historians I consulted during my research, office networking technology was a big part of the reason the tube system was not expanded during the headquarters renovation. It was clear by the 1980s that pneumatic tubes were quite old-fashioned compared with the newly arrived ability to communicate with electrons through wires. 3.

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Why would the CIA invest the significant amount of resources required to build and maintain such an unwieldy system? By the mid-twentieth century, much more common and inexpensive methods for office communication had already become standard. When this headquarters was built, for example, internal telephone exchanges had been around for decades. Isn’t it unnecessary to send you a note through a pneumatic tube network when I could just as easily call you directly using the telephone on my desk? But the telephone was no panacea. It represents an example of what communication specialists call synchronous messaging, which requires all parties in the interaction to participate at the same time. If you’re not at your desk when I dial your extension, or if your line is busy, then the attempted interaction is a bust.

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What the rise of the large office really needed—a productivity silver bullet of sorts—was some way to combine the speed of synchronous communication with the low overhead of asynchronous communication. Which brings us back to the CIA. This is exactly what they were trying to achieve with their pneumatic tube system. Their electromechanically routed, vacuum-driven capsules were the equivalent of a turbocharged mail cart: I can now asynchronously deliver you a message within minutes instead of hours. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the CIA employees were saddened to see the tube system shut down when the headquarters was expanded in the 1980s.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

But the existence of ems with much smaller physical dimensions likely also creates a demand for transport routes with smaller cross-sections. Pneumatic tubes seem one attractive candidate for smaller cross-section transport. Paris once had a large postal system of 6.5-centimeter diameter tubes that moved bottles containing letters at a speed of about 10 meters per second. This tube system started in 1866, and eventually had about 500 kilometers of tubes. Pneumatic tube systems work similarly today, although they are better automated and typically have diameters of 10 centimeters. Em cities might have much larger networks of pneumatic tubes to move small goods. Train tunnels today have a standard diameter of about 6 meters, while automobile tunnels are usually a bit larger.

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Train tunnels today have a standard diameter of about 6 meters, while automobile tunnels are usually a bit larger. Pneumatic tubes are roughly a factor of 100 smaller than train and road tunnels. Tubes 100 times smaller than pneumatic tubes are a bit less than a millimeter in diameter. It turns out that this is a standard diameter for equipment tubes today. Similar to computing and manufacturing, future transport may also be thermodynamically adiabatic, to reduce the use of free energy. That is, there may be substantial subsystems of the transportation system wherein the free energy required to move cargo is proportional to the speed at which that cargo moves.

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

Partly for this reason, the sparkling efficiency of the system became a point of national pride. And indeed, the German post of the late nineteenth century was nothing if not impressive, boasting up to five or even nine delivery times a day in major cities, and, in the capital, a vast network of miles of pneumatic tubes designed to shoot letters and small parcels almost instantly across long distances using a system of pressurized air: Map of Berlin pneumatic tube postal system, 1873 Mark Twain, who lived briefly in Berlin between 1891 and 1892, was so taken with it that he composed one of his only known non-satirical essays, entitled “Postal Service,” just to celebrate its wondrous efficiency.121 Nor was he the only foreigner to be so impressed.

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Indeed, growing up in New York City, I was always struck by the fascinating disparity between the magnificence of public amenities created around the turn of the century, when that very grandeur was seen as reflecting the strength and power of the Republic, and the apparently intentional tawdriness of anything created by the city, for its citizens, since the 1970s. For me, at least, the two greatest exemplars of that earlier age were New York’s monumental Central Post Office, with its sweeping, block-long marble steps and Corinthian columns, and the central branch of New York Public Library (which, incidentally, maintained its own system of pneumatic tubes for sending book requests into the stacks well into the 1980s). I remember once, as a tourist, visiting the summer palace of the Kings of Sweden—the first actual palace I’d ever been inside. My first reaction was: this looks exactly like the New York Public Library! 126. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005. 127.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

Back on earth, the solution for hoist-less elevators may lie in pneumatic vacuum elevators, first used in 2000. Turbines at the top draw air from the tube and suck the cab upward. Other than a vacuum tube, such an elevator requires no pit, hoist way, machine room, or cable. It’s a bit like an old-time pneumatic tube mail system used to propel people instead of letters. Thus far, these elevators only travel up a few stories at best. With the development of the ultra-fast Hyperloop train, which travels through a low-pressure sealed tube, perhaps one day we will see a Hyperloop elevator. Maybe there is an end to this elevator madness after all.

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These exchanges of “waste” increase the environmental efficiency of the whole. Through resource sharing, so-called circular cities are increasingly eliminating waste in urban areas as well. For instance, Hammarby Sjöstad outside of Stockholm has an incinerator to convert combustible waste from households into electricity. In Barcelona, a system of pneumatic tubes runs below the streets to bring trash to an anaerobic digestion facility. These subways for trash more easily bring it to the facility. Then microorganisms break down the material into biogas, a renewable-energy source. As cities are getting more circular, more sophisticated systems will need to manage and share resources.

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This Big Brother may also be watching you, though, with computer vision monitoring your every garbage and sewage output. With skyscrapers producing and sharing energy, food, species, and more, our world may look quite different. Imagine a day in Singapore a few years from now. You throw your recyclable trash into a chute, where a system of pneumatic tubes sucks it to the recycling plant, avoiding the need for a polluting garbage truck. As your trash arrives, robots scan and sort the material, separating paper from aluminum from plastics. Your waste is then turned into a resource, recycled as a new can or toothbrush. Your food waste is piped to an anaerobic digestion facility, where microorganisms break down the organic material, creating fertilizer and biogas that power the nearby vertical farm.

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, private spaceflight, Skype

Maybe it is a faint remnant of the electronics that once hummed and buzzed here. The odor is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is just—distinct. The four rows of consoles facing the front of the room are almost quaint in their simplicity—workstations feature a rotary dial phone. And canisters, too, to send messages to back rooms via pneumatic tubes, the very same kind of transport system featured at your local bank’s drive-through window. No email or instant messaging here. Yet if there’s a temptation to dismiss the room out of hand, images of events past begin to sink in and the sheer enormity of everything that took place here hits like a ton of bricks.

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Llewellyn, widely known as John Star, was a Korean War veteran who excelled at NASA despite struggling with severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. At the end of the row are Jerry Bostick (sitting) and Bill Boone (standing). Jerry Elliott is seated behind Llewellyn. Courtesy NASA. Most credit Llewellyn for the Trench’s nickname, either in whole or in part. It was during the flight of Gemini 6 that pneumatic tubes from the messaging system began piling up around him on the first row, and he thought they looked a lot like empty 105-millimeter howitzer shells he encountered in the trenches back in Korea. If that did not seal it, Llewellyn once issued a challenge to the simulation team during a particularly testy debriefing.

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“To a great extent, we were technical dinosaurs. Young folks like John Aaron, Phil Shaffer, and Don Puddy, that generation came in with a background with that type technology.” Gone also were the days when von Ehrenfried was forced to trot here and there with messages. Now in place was yard after yard of pneumatic tubes that could zip canisters to and from the MOCR. The dispatches were always of the utmost importance—or not. “People would start putting all kinds of crap in there, not just messages,” von Ehrenfried said. “They would put a hot dog in there or a sandwich. We started getting things clogged up, so they said to knock that shit off.”

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Stale, day old quotes worked for many people, and Wall Street was happy to have people “think” these were real prices. Most of the use of technology by Wall Street was to handle its internal workings. With fixed commissions, technology wasn’t needed as much to drive revenue as to keep costs down. Pneumatic tubes were installed at the exchange in 1918, mainly to send completed trade tickets from the traders to the back office clearing humps. In April 1920, the Stock Clearing Corp. was created to handle the increased paperwork. This was mainly a large room with piles of certificates passed between workers. *** So now, on the brink of the booming 1920s, Wall Street had what it needed to fund America’s post-WWI growth.

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As volume and profits grew, more and more Wall Street partnerships were created to get in on the game. Brokers and traders grew in number, and they all feasted on fat commissions. It was a people business. When institutions or individuals wanted to buy a stock, they called their brokers who relayed the order down to the floor of the exchange. Electronic message switchboards replaced the pneumatic tubes of 1918 so order entry and execution confirmation could happen in almost real time. Of course, this was to the advantage of the traders; they could get the most current feel for the market and customers were still out of that loop. But the back office was neglected and stock certificates still had to be collected and distributed.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Henderson believed that a new delivery method could reduce gasoline prices and lure customers. Between 1946 and 1948, he worked with electronics engineers to design a system that could transmit data about the price of gas and the number of gallons dispensed from a pump to an employee sitting in a tower above. A pneumatic tube running overhead to the tower could whisk cash up from the customer and return change. Self-service gasoline pumps were born. Henderson Thriftway charged 3 cents per gallon less than the petroleum giants and immediately began taking business away from them. At prevailing 1949 prices, 3 cents was almost 20 percent less.

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First, new technologies can create new forms of shadow work. Electronic circuits that carried information from the gas pump to a cash register enabled Bill Henderson to offer the self-serve option at Henderson Thriftway. At first, the technologies are rudimentary and cumbersome, like Henderson’s pneumatic tube sucking cash up to the register above. But as better devices appear to help consumers handle the task, they smooth the adoption of shadow work. Second, shadow work that requires no training can spread readily. The mechanism needs to be essentially idiot-proof. Recall the spillage and fire concerns in Henderson’s early years, before the advent of automatic cutoffs on pump nozzles.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

The novel reflects the sheer excitement and modernity of this new kind of shopping. Watching the crush of the crowds in Le Bon Marché, he was constantly aware of ‘the vastness of Paris – a city so vast that it would always be able to supply customers’. Department stores revolutionised the process of buying and selling. They pioneered new technology, such as pneumatic tubes to send orders around the store, cash registers for instant transactions (Le Bon Marché had no fewer than seventy-three in Zola’s day), as well as lifts and escalators (the first department store to have an elevator was in New York City at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway in 1857). People were encouraged to regard the shop as an exhibition hall.

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The system was pressurised by compressors in eleven power stations. Travelling at between 30 to 40 mph, the canisters were blasted around the city at the rate of five a minute. Each held some five hundred letters and every day about 100,000 letters were moved in this way. A journey that could last forty minutes by road took a cylinder sent through the pneumatic tube network just seven minutes. But it was a costly way of shifting mail and Philadelphia mothballed its network in 1918, switching instead to a new transport technology – automobiles. New York, too, suspended its subterranean mail service for a while, only to reinstate it by popular demand in 1922.

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Berlin’s Rohrpost network (1865–1963) was one of the largest pneumatic mail systems, extending for some 400 kilometres. In Paris, pneumatic mail systems (or ‘tubes pneumatiques’) continued to be used until 1983, when telexes and fax machines made the service redundant. Prague’s system was still in use in 2002 and is currently being restored.7 Placing a mail canister into a pneumatic tube, 1930. Eco-Cities We are living through a unique period in the history of our planet. No other species has ever disrupted the delicate balance of the earth’s climate before. As the Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has said, we have entered a geological epoch of our own making – the Anthropocene.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Tubes also recall a century-old manner of delivering mail, when canisters literally shot through pneumatic tubes. Post-office worker Howard Connelly described New York’s first pneumatic mail delivery on October 7, 1897, in Fifty-Six Years in the New York Post Office: A Human Interest Story of Real Happenings in the Postal Service. He reported that the first canister contained an artificial peach and the second a live cat. Megan Garber, writing for the Atlantic, commented: “The cat was the first animal to be pulled, dazed and probably not terribly enthused about human technological innovation, from a pneumatic tube. It would not, however, be the last.”18 In Connelly’s 1931 autobiography, and at the heart of the things that fascinated his generation, we see an exuberant imagination associated with material objects and the physical constraints of transporting them.

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Howard Wallace Connelly, Fifty-Six Years in the New York Post Office: A Human Interest Story of Real Happenings in the Postal Service (1931), cited in Megan Garber, “That Time People Sent a Cat Through the Mail,” Atlantic (August 2013), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/that-time-people-sent-a-cat-through-the-mail-using-pneumatic-tubes/278629/. 19. Data from TeleGeography, https://www2.telegeography.com/our-research. TeleGeography’s assessment of 99% of all international communications being carried on undersea fiber optic cables was also reported by the “Builtvisible” Team in “Messages in the Deep” (2014), https://builtvisible.com/messages-in-the-deep/.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Whatever field he touched, no matter how briefly, he seemed to invent new devices for it, and he even sat on the board of inquiry of the first Atlantic cable. To solve the problem of overloaded short-distance lines, Clark came up with a system of pneumatic tubes. Just as the telegraph was being scaled down to power doorbells, Clark scaled down a failed concept for a pneumatic tube rail line that dated back to 1810 and had originally been intended as a type of high-speed people mover. In 1853, he installed the first line of tubes measuring an inch and a half and spanning some 200 yards from the central telegraph office to the stock exchange.

The Complete Novels Of George Orwell by George Orwell

British Empire, fixed income, gentleman farmer, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, pneumatic tube, the market place, traveling salesman, union organizing, white flight

That’s better, comrade, that’s much better,’ she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years. 4 With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk. In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one of newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor.

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As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

…

It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures. Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The message he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa.

Kiln People by David Brin

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Easter island, index card, jitney, life extension, machine readable, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, price anchoring, prisoner's dilemma, Schrödinger's Cat, telepresence, Vernor Vinge, your tax dollars at work

The Universal Kilns security staff had taken charge of that mystery, sifting the estate for any sign of both missing dittos. So far to no avail. I didn't expect them to achieve much. It's easy to smuggle a rox in a box. Millions, cushioned mummylike in CeramWrap, get shunted all over the city each day by truck, courier, or pneumatic tube. And it's even easier getting rid of a dead one -- just flush the remains into a recycler. Without a pellet, one batch of golem slurry is no different than any other. Anyway, I had investigations to take care of, including one for a client who was willing to pay top rates. Ritu Maharal wanted me to look into the mysterious death of her father.

…

Pal shouts in my ear to turn left. So I do. I can feel the wall cameras, their passive eyes recording. No time to stop and shout my innocence -- I didn't know! Only actions can speak for Albert Morris now. To keep him out of jail, I kick in my reserves. Ahead, the loading docks. Gel-wrapped ditto blanks slide into pneumatic tubes, departing for distant customers with a sucking whoosh. Giant forklifts -- huffing and puffing -- haul larger models onto trucks. "Over here!" The yell echoes, both in my ear and across the loading bay. I spy a version of myself, dyed UK Orange, bearing a weasel-like creature on his shoulder.

…

The busy worker ants who keep civilization going -- every hue and candy-striped combination -- bustled in/out of nearby factories and workshops, bearing heavy loads, hurrying to confidential meetings or carrying rush orders on spindly legs. Traffic snarled for a while, forcing us to wend around an open pit construction site, marked by a broad holo sign: CITYWIDE ROXTRANSIT PNEUMATIC-TUBE PROJECT: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK A glimmering animated display showed steady progress toward the day when clayfolk and other cargo would zip to every part of town via an extended network of airless tubes, shuttling to any address like so many self-targeted Internet packets, automatically and at hardly any cost.

Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, white flight

This period in the mission, with the infrequent contacts, the spacecraft in drifting flight, and the crew asleep, provided an opportunity for detailed analysis of the spacecraft systems and orbital trajectory. Mission Control borrowed technology from many eras. Most of the systems the controllers used were cutting-edge, only months removed from the laboratories. One notable exception was borrowed from turn-of-the-century technology. A pneumatic tube system provided the means to transmit messages of all types between the three floors and the work areas used by controllers and computer operators. The P-tube carriers were aluminum cylinders, twelve inches in length and three and one half inches in diameter. A spring-loaded hinged door allowed messages to be placed in the tube.

…

The team structure was successful and the shakedown cruise of the new control center was a roaring success. We would need every millimeter of technology as each successive mission increased in complexity, duration, and risk. The computers and television displays gave the controllers instant access to hundreds of Gemini measurements. The trajectory data was instantly available to users, and the pneumatic tube eliminated the need for runners—and the distraction caused as they raced around the control room. But most of all, we liked the new Mission Control Center because we no longer had to travel to the Cape and live in motel rooms for day after day. Summer 1965 The Gemini 5 mission was scheduled to last eight days, twice as long as the previous one.

…

Odyssey O’Neill, Gerard O’Neill, John Operating procedures Operations and procedures officer Orange Team Orbit trajection propagation Orbital mechanics Orbital missions Osan Air Base Osgood, Cathy Pacific Airmotive Page, George Paine, Thomas Parks, Oliver Parks Air College Passive thermal control (PTC) maneuver Patnesky, Andrew Patrick AFB Paules, Gran Pavelka, Ed Perssons, Al Peters, Bill Petrone, Rocco Philco (Co.) Phillips, Sam Pioneering Mission for the Twenty-first- Century America Pioneering the Space Frontier Plan X Pneumatic tube (P-tube) system Popovich, Pavel Potassium intake Powers, Shorty Prescott, Warren Presley, Will Press Press conferences regarding Apollo Apollo 11 mission Press corps Preston, G. Merritt Public Affairs Office/officer Puddy, Don Quail flight test Range safety officer (RSO) Ransdell, Lois Real time Recovery teams Red Team Redstone missions Redstone rocket launches MR-1 MR-3 Reed, Dave Remote site teams astronauts and doctors drilling and EVA Remote sites CapComs computer systems Gemini missions Rendezvous Apollo missions backup Gemini missions practicing priority in space program by Russians Renick, Gary Retropack Retro controller (RETRO) Retrofire Rickover, Hyman Risk Risk judgment Roberts, Tecwyn (Tec) Rockets failures high-altitude research Roll-and-pitch program Roosa, Stu Rose, Rodney Rose Knot Victor tracking ship Sabre jet Saturn rockets Saturn rockets guidance and computer system problems with testing Saturn V rocket Saultz, Jim Saxe, Ira Saylor, Ralph Schirra, Wally Apollo 7 first manned CSM mission Gemini 6 Mercury mission Schmitt, Jack Apollo 17 Schneider, William Schweickart, Rusty Science and Applications Directorate Scientists Scott, Dave Apollo 9 Apollo 15 field geology trip Gemini 8 Scott, Gary Sealab See, Elliott Service module Apollo 13 redesign of Service propulsion system (SPS) Shaffer, Phil Shea, Joe Shepard, Alan Apollo 14 Cape CapCom first manned mission MCC MR-3 walk on Moon Sigma 7 Silver, Lee Silver Team Simpkinson, Scott SimSup (simulation supervisor) Apollo 11 MA-3 Simulation technology Simulations Apollo 9 Apollo 11 Gemini 7 Gemini 76 launch Singing Wheel Sjoberg, Sigurd Skylab Slayton, Donald K.

Celebration of Fools: An Inside Look at the Rise and Fall of JCPenney by Bill Hare

business climate, fake news, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, McMansion, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, vertical integration, walking around money, warehouse automation, women in the workforce

But let me explain what I tell every one of our associates." "Of course, sir," said Batten. "If you have any complaint, even if you don't like my tie or the shine on my shoes—anything—just write it down on a slip of paper. You don't have to sign your name. Just send it to the office in the tube." Maynard gestured at one of the old pneumatic tubes for sending sales slips and cash to and from the office. "The cashier puts the notes in a shoe box and we read them at the store meeting every Thursday morning." "Is that difficult?" Batten asked. Maynard smiled again and said, "No. I don't run the meeting, the first man does. But whatever the complaint, if it's reasonable, he corrects the situation."

…

The problem was that they couldn't get along with each other. Worse, both of them were totally flummoxed with Maynard's management style. "What do you mean?" one or the other would plead to the manager. "Please explain what you want." They were gone in a little less than a year. Batten received a note via the pneumatic tube: Please see me in first men's office. —Maynard He quickly went up to the balcony. The first men's office was between Maynard's and the room where the secretary and the cashier worked. Just outside, he had to step aside as two young men from the stockroom removed one of the twin desks. The manager was waiting inside with a big smile.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Yet technology is at once a principal cause of and solution to the major problems Bellamy addresses, including inefficiency (overproduction and underproduction, excessive competition, mismanagement); inequality of opportunity and of income; immorality (greed, monopoly, exploitation); and urban blight. Technology’s purposeful, positive use—from improved factories and offices to new highways and electric lighting systems to innovative pneumatic tubes for delivering goods, electronic broadcasts, and credit cards—is critical to America’s predicted transformation from living hell to heaven on earth. The Variety of Utopias 31 Without question, Bellamy’s envisioned twenty-first-century United States is an avowed technological utopia, an allegedly ideal society not simply dependent upon machines but outright modeled after them, its citizens quite willing cogs in a “great industrial machine.”

…

Crime would barely exist because poverty would no longer exist. In these ways, Looking Backward is a more complex and more humane work than William Morris in his News From Nowhere (1890)—discussed in the next chapter—would ever acknowledge. Interestingly, Bellamy predicted only a few specific technological advances: those pneumatic tubes to deliver goods, electronic broadcasts, and credit cards instead of money. Other predictions such as department stores were primarily logical extensions of existing American society. Nevertheless, Looking Backward remains timely in its concern for using cutting-edge technologies efficiently, for distributing the opportunities and wealth derived from technological advances fairly, for offering varieties of work and living arrangements, and, not least, for constructing a vision of the future out of moral conviction.

The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House by Nada Bakos

Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, fear of failure, feminist movement, meta-analysis, operational security, performance metric, place-making, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, WikiLeaks, work culture

But those were the jobs being given to equally qualified male applicants. Instead the bank offered me a position as a teller. I worked behind the drive-through window listening to the whoosh of the pneumatic tube, spending my days cashing checks and telling people how to fill out a deposit slip. I became resentful. I didn’t want to live in Montana at this point in my life, and I certainly didn’t want to work the pneumatic tube. I still had dreams of a life overseas, and every day at the bank I began to feel like the walls were closing in on me. In my restlessness, I took a job in organizational development in human resources at a nearby metals-mining company.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

New technologies enabled the construction of larger, taller buildings to house the increasingly complicated strata of the workplace. The “office building” took shape under the hand of architects such as Louis Sullivan, who envisioned structures composed of independent, standardized cells, which he likened to the hexagonal building blocks of beehives: discrete, MECE units, not to be merged.* Dictaphones and pneumatic tubes enabled discrete, directed communications at a distance without the messy inefficiencies of the countinghouse. Executives moved to separate rooms, then to plush suites, and finally to different floors to separate them from the “pools” of stenographers toiling away at desks arranged in grids, silent but for the clacking of typewriter keys.

…

“exporter, wholesaler, importer” . . . Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 15. In Saval, Cubed, 20. 750,000 . . . Saval, Cubed, 36–40. New technologies enabled . . . Saval, Cubed, 36. building blocks of beehives . . . Saval, Cubed, 109. Dictaphones and pneumatic tubes . . . Saval, Cubed, 40. Executives moved . . . Saval, Cubed, 144. the term “ladder” . . . Saval, Cubed, 39. efficient flow of paperwork . . . Saval, Cubed, 5, 67. “The girl at the end” . . . Saval, Cubed, 151. turning their desks away . . . Saval, Cubed, 61. Bell Labs . . .

My Misspent Youth: Essays by Meghan Daum

haute couture, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, pneumatic tube, rent control, rent stabilization, Yogi Berra

Where are those heady nights on Beekman Place, those working days on lower Fifth, those underpaid trust-fund girls with the clacking Smith Coronas and the clicking low-heeled pumps from I. Miller? Where are Bennet Cerf’s entrepreneurial seeds, Maxwell Perkins’ worshipful authors, Mary McCarthy’s well-read bedfellows? Where are the editorial assistants lunching frenetically at the Oyster Bar counter? Where are the pneumatic tubes running directly from Vassar and Smith to Viking and Scribners, sucking young English majors down their chambers and depositing them at chewed, wooden desks with tins of lemon drops in the top drawers and manuscripts towering over the “In” boxes? Alas, lament entry-levelers everywhere, the thirties are gone.

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway by Doug Most

Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, independent contractor, Menlo Park, place-making, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, safety bicycle, streetcar suburb, transcontinental railway

In an article in Scientific American published just before the fair opened, Beach wrote that he had developed a transportation system that was as “swift as Aeolus (god of breezes) and silent as Somnus (god of sleep and dreams).” Halfway through the fair, on October 19, another article on Beach’s pneumatic tube appeared in Scientific American. At the time that his article appeared, more than twenty-five thousand people had already ridden the tube and a new line was forming every day. Beach wanted to make sure the crowds kept coming. “The most novel and attractive feature of the exhibition is by general consent conceded to be the pneumatic railway, erected by Mr.

…

The article focused on the railway’s details, but in one line, it planted the notion that perhaps the pneumatic railway was the future of transportation. “It is probable that a pneumatic railway of considerable length for regular traffic will soon be laid down near New York.” Of the hundreds of inventions that filled the floor of the armory for six weeks, Beach’s pneumatic tube was the sensation that could not be ignored. Everybody wanted to ride on it, and by the time the fair closed in November, more than seventy-five thousand people had. Beach wanted everyone to remember what they had witnessed, so that he could begin to push the idea with New York’s lawmakers. He published a pamphlet in which he described in the simplest terms how his pneumatic railway worked.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

card file, Charles Babbage, clockwatching, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, spinning jenny, the scientific method

When they attempt to return, the risen masses will meet them with fire and steel! We will fight them from the roof-tops, from doorways, alleyways, sewers, and rookeries!" He paused to dab his nose with a snotty kerchief from his sleeve. "We will sequester every sinew of organized oppression. The newspapers, the telegraph lines and pneumatic tube-ways, the palaces and barracks and bureaux! We will put them all to the great cause of liberation!" Mallory waited, but it seemed that the young fanatic had at last run out of steam. "And you want us to help you, eh? Join this people's army of yours?" "Of course!" "What's in it for us, then?"

…

McNeile's patent Swiss bath-tub. Putting his brandy aside unfinished, he nodded then, and napped. And dreamed, perhaps, of the Eye. The Bessemer docked at Calais at half past one. Monsieur Lucien Arslau's apartments were in Passy. At noon, Oliphant presented his card to the concierge, who conveyed it via pneumatic tube to Monsieur Arslau's establishment. Almost immediately, the whistle attached to a nickeled speaking-tube peeped twice; the concierge bent his ear to the funnel; Oliphant made out faint tones of shouted French. The concierge showed Oliphant to the lift. He was admitted, on the fifth floor, by a liveried manservant wearing an ornate Corsican stiletto through a pleated sash of gros de Naples.

Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed by Henry S. F. Cooper

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, pneumatic tube

About the only event requiring the controllers’ close attention since Apollo 13 left earth orbit had been a small rocket burn the day before, called a “hybrid transfer maneuver,” which had aimed the spacecraft for its target on the moon, the Fra Mauro hills—and, incidentally, had taken it off a free-return trajectory, the safe path most previous Apollos had followed so that in the event of trouble the spacecraft could, without navigational adjustment, swing around the moon and head back to earth. Now, a couple of minutes before nine, one of the flight controllers, the Retrofire Officer, whose responsibility it was always to have a plan ready, in case of trouble, for bringing the astronauts home, sent word to the Flight Director that another bridge was about to be burned: via a pneumatic-tube system connecting the consoles, he dispatched a routine memorandum to the effect that the spacecraft was nearing the spot where it could no longer reverse its direction and return directly to earth if anything went wrong. There were a couple of dozen controllers on duty, of whom only about half were directly involved with the running of the spacecraft at any given time.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

To deal with the growing problem of fulfilling orders, Rosenwald developed a mechanical scheduling system, a sort of assembly line for customer orders. “Miles of railroad tracks run lengthwise through and around this building for the receiving, moving and forwarding of merchandise,” boasted the Sears catalogue. “Elevators, mechanical conveyors, endless chains, moving sidewalks, gravity chutes, apparatus and conveyors, pneumatic tubes and every known mechanical appliance for reducing labor, for the working out of economy and dispatch is to be utilized here in our great Works.”1 One of the first people to visit this industrial marvel was reputedly Henry Ford. In 1916, Rosenwald added another innovation—a pension fund for employees in which the firm’s contributions were tied to its profits and much of the fund was invested in Sears’s stock.

Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

These solutions allow us to minimize the amount of human labor in a number of tedious tasks, but also allow us to do things at a greater scale with greater intelligence. Consider traffic counts: most cities need to manually count traffic to understand the flow of traffic in central corridors. This is a tedious and resource-intensive task, since you need a human to manually count each vehicle. IoT offers alternatives such as counting vehicles by pneumatic tubes on the ground, infrared light, and radar or using computer vision built in to cameras. This can be done at a much bigger scale, since humans need to go and sleep every once in a while, whereas devices never sleep and will keep counting when they are set up, and they will be doing it at a lower cost.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Similarly, the same underlying trends portend a decline in work travel, as workers take some of the gains of automation and information technology with less time in the office or the factory (or hospital, or school, or any of the thousands of other worksites). Eventually there may be replicators, or pneumatic tubes, or good 3-D printers, and delivery as most people think of it now will also decline. Or, there may be less overall consumption. But we can fairly safely extrapolate that, for a while, 20th century retail infrastructure and supporting transport system of roads and parking is overbuilt for the 21st century last-mile delivery problems in an era with growing internet shopping. 12.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

Then another piece of paper gets passed to the inbox of someone who calculates the product costs and taxes and shipping costs and any applicable discounts and mails out an invoice, which then flags the collections department, which sends out the PO and charges the credit card. Finally, an accountant in the fulfillment department books the ten grand. Maybe the piece of paper moves through a pneumatic tube, I’m not sure. Now the reality, of course, is things are much more complicated. Any organization of any decent size will not have one of each of these systems; they’ll have dozens. Whether they’re the result of acquisitions or new business units, these fulfillment chains tend to multiply.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

The narrator himself seems to be a bewildered civilian navigating a paranoid military bureaucracy. We readers, knowing what we know about the sad fate in store for the written word, may smile grimly as clerks stamp index cards “classified,” documents tumble from mail chutes, envelopes shoot through pneumatic tubes, dog-eared folders vanish into metal safes, and paper tape snakes from computers. Of course, we recognize our own world, too. Rambling deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, the narrator stumbles upon a room full of books: “gray, crumbling” books on dusty, sagging shelves. It is the Library. A balding, shuffling, bespectacled, cross-eyed old man seems to be in charge.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

Pearson’s scheme to link the mainline rail stations must have seemed equally outlandish, as it involved digging up entire city streets and inventing a way for steam trains to store smoke while underground. Henry Mayhew – editor and co-founder of the satirical magazine Punch and an advocate of reforms for the working class – fretted that humans would be treated like cargo. He wrote that Pearson’s ‘drain-like’ tunnel would be ‘sending the people like so many parcels in a pneumatic tube, from one end of the metropolis to the other’. Punch joked that the population of London would have to make their coal cellars available for the trains to pass through.4 Speed has not always been essential. It took twenty years to build the Underground’s first route – the Metropolitan Line – and although it was a triumph of Victorian engineering, the vision was, from conception, human.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

He predicted that Burbank’s citizens of the future would live in apartment buildings made of plastic with electricity supplied by underground atomic power transmitted by waves through the ground. The city’s thoroughfares would be transformed: street parking and parking lots would be replaced by an automated, hub-based system. To reduce traffic congestion, freight would be delivered by an underground belt system similar to the pneumatic tubes that once delivered the mail.1 It was an articulate and inventive vision. But none of it came to pass. Norwood was not the only one with an unreliable crystal ball. World’s Fairs are international forums of innovation, but they are invariably poor predictors of coming breakthroughs. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair attracted millions of people to a vast fairground to see the latest in windmills, steamships, telegraphs, electric lighting and the telephone.

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth

full employment, gentrification, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube

In 1912, workers digging the BMT (or the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit, known by graffiti artists as “the ding-dong line” because the doors used to make a ding-dong sound when they opened) tunnels found the city’s first subway line twenty-one feet under Broadway between Warren and Murray Streets. It consisted of a single pneumatic tube 312 feet long and 9 feet wide, in which the cars were pulled or pushed along by huge fans at the ends of the tunnel. Noted inventor Alfred Ely Beach, the founder and one-time editor of Scientific American magazine, built the subway in 1870 and it ran for only a few weeks before New York’s infamous Mayor Boss Tweed shut it down.

The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, Works Progress Administration

Broad ramps of polished black terrazzo led out from the concourse; one carried pedestrians farther into the second floor, another led up a 10 percent slope to the third floor, a third with two switchbacks rose to the fourth floor. The corridors had the feel of a circus, as messengers rolled by on bicycles, roller skates, and oversize tricycle carts tinkling their bells to avoid running over pedestrians. Message centers on each floor served as hubs, linked by fifteen miles of pneumatic tubes that whisked files and correspondence throughout the building inside plastic containers. The quickest way to any far-off point in the building—even if it was on the same ring where one started—generally was to go toward the center of the building to the inner A Ring and follow signs leading to the proper radial corridor.

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Much of this netherworld was built into the low ground on the eastern side of the building, but there were pockets of space all around. The basement extended beneath the Mall and River terraces, well beyond the Pentagon’s confine creating an F and even a G Ring below some of the building. Utility pipes, ducts, and pneumatic tubing snaked through the narrow corridors. The basement had a Byzantine quality that would only grow over the years, as various mysterious offices took up residence in the Pentagon’s lower reaches. Yet its design had more to do with engineering than secrecy. Since the Pentagon had been built on both low ground and high ground—the western two-thirds forty feet above sea level, and the eastern third ten feet above—the low ground had been raised with eight feet of fill.

Artemis by Andy Weir

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Apollo 11, centre right, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme

The smelting facility sat two hundred meters from the reactors. It was a mini bubble thirty meters across, with a hopper on one side. The hopper ground rocks into a coarse grit and put it in sealed cylindrical containers. The containers were sealed into pipes, which forced them into the facility with air pressure. Like an old-school pneumatic tube system from the 1950s. If you’re going to have a bunch of air pumps and vacuum-management systems in your facility anyway, you may as well take advantage of them. The train airlock stood on the other side of the bubble. The train tracks leading to it diverged into two lines. One ran to the airlock, the other to the unmanned silo car that transported rocket fuel to the port.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Instruments were locked to the same tempo because they were being played by human beings who could follow the gestures of the conductor or hear the beat being generated by the rhythm section. But a machine needed mechanical cues to stay in sync with other machines. Antheil had attempted to jerry-rig a system of pneumatic tubes and electric cabling to coordinate the pianolas, but none of his efforts worked in the end. Eventually, he gave up and rewrote the score for a single pianola, accompanied by traditional pianists. Even without the sixteen player pianos, the 1926 premiere managed to provoke a small riot in the theater.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory purposes.8 More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin’s glands is imitated, by means of a “pneumatic tube” filled with oil.9 Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of “Parisian rubber articles.”10 A 1908 conversation with “Dr. P.,” a Parisian doll manufacturer, revealed that each of his creations required three months of painstaking labor, given everything that needed to be done to produce a lifelike product.11 He claimed his clients included both men and women and that each “fornicatory doll” cost three thousand francs—about twice the average annual income at the time.

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

Illy, there can only be one perfect espresso, and his tight control over every variable in the coffee-preparation process allows him to achieve it regularly. On a guided tour of illy caffè’s Trieste facility — with a security guard trailing ten yards behind at all times, ready to pounce if I brandished anything remotely resembling a camera — I saw the rest of Illy’s directives put into action. Pneumatic tubes transported the beans from the roasting plant to the packaging center, where machines dumped the coffee into airtight tins and flushed them with nitrogen to preserve freshness, before finally pressurizing and sealing the containers. At one of illy caffè’s two on-site concept espresso bars, a barista pulled me a shot according to strict percolation instructions; the water must be heated to exactly 194 degrees Fahrenheit, then pushed through the coffee grounds for precisely thirty seconds at a pressure of 130 psi, thereby generating a layer of khaki-colored foam on top called crema.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Electric lines fanned out across the city to government buildings, commercial establishments, and thousands of ordinary Parisian households—helping Paris live up Panoramic view of the Universal Exposition of 1900 (Vue panoramique de l’exposition universelle de 1900). Baylac, Lucien. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. 64 B elle E po q u e to its reputation as the City of Lights. Under Baron Haussman, the city had modernized its formerly medieval street plan, while below ground a network of pneumatic tubes snaked along for more than 120 miles, delivering millions of paper messages throughout the city on any given day.4 Paris was becoming, as historian Rosalind Williams put it, a “unified system.”5 That system radiated outward as well as inward, as Paris cemented its position as a cultural and economic hub.

Cathedrals of Steam: How London’s Great Stations Were Built – and How They Transformed the City by Christian Wolmar

Ascot racecourse, British Empire, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Crossrail, driverless car, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, pneumatic tube, railway mania

When leaving Euston station, which initially had just two platforms, one each for arrivals and departures, a group of strong men called ‘bankriders’ would push the loaded carriages to the ‘Messenger’, the name given to the winding cable, and fasten it to the train. Then, a blast of air was sent along a pneumatic tube which sounded a trumpet inside the engine house (the noise was described as a ‘melancholic mysterious moaning’). It soon became familiar to the residents of Camden near the Regent’s Canal as it was amplified by two tall chimneys that sat above the engine house that straddled the tracks. That was the signal to start hauling the ‘endless’ cable – in reality a tarred rope – which was just over two miles long.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 20.  And before this, the network city was already well understood. The Romans, and the informational city by French pneumatic tube engineers who largely perfected the point-to-point packet, switched distribution analog information units. By the 1960s, continental-scale computational network systems, such as the SAGE early warning system, suggested more comprehensive transformations of urban pathways and partitions according to information processing perspectives, especially in cinema and architecture.

…

The economies of scale that are possible by regularizing and extending itineraries might parallel those of regularizing and monetizing other kinds of social interaction online. Elon Musk's perhaps real and perhaps speculative Hypertube project, which would send humans whooshing up and down California inside what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube, is exemplary, as is the tendency for cities to strategize economic growth through the enhancement of their airports (now “aerotropoli”) ensuring their inhabitants easy access to the rest of the global urban grid.52 Implementing such systems is obviously very expensive in both time and treasure.

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women Who Worked There by Sinclair McKay

Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, pneumatic tube, Turing machine

In Block A, Josh Cooper’s Air Section got the first floor, while Frank Birch’s Naval Section was moved into the ground floor. There were more Blocks to follow, up to D. Block A was equipped – in one of those nice little touches that always seemed to bring an element of the quotidian into the Bletchley effort – with a pneumatic tube system previously used in John Lewis stores and employed at Bletchley for zipping messages on paper between rooms. It was a step up from the hatchway/tray/pulley arrangement that had previously been a feature of inter-hut communication. The pneumatic system was brought in by Hugh Alexander, who before the war had been Chief Scientist to the John Lewis chain.

How the Post Office Created America: A History by Winifred Gallagher

British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, cotton gin, financial engineering, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, white flight, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

The institution was a monopoly, so it would be the only customer for the complex machines it needed. This fact had naturally discouraged manufacturers’ interest; it also helps explain why advances in postal tools had been relatively limited in the earlier twentieth century to things like electric postage meters and stamp cancelers, stamp vending machines, and pneumatic tubes— pipelines that sped urban letters underground. Little progress had been made regarding the post’s major problem of mail sorting. Summerfield did his best to end this institutional stasis by enthusiastically experimenting with mechanizing the post. Previously, the department’s own engineering staff had designed prototypes for the necessary machines, then contracted with outside companies to have the equipment built.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Increasing Internet identity means increasing identity theft, and whatever I have encrypted, hackers will try to decode. So much so that governments and other organizations often restrict their most secure communications to older technologies, even sending scrolled messages in small capsules through pneumatic tubes. This, of course, fuels the suspicions of Internet conspiracy theorists. Looking at what have I’ve gained: I now hear from a greater range of different voices, discover new talents with something to say—niche writers, collectors, musicians, and artists. I have access to more books, journal articles, newspapers, TV programs, documentaries, and films.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Brains evolved through a long process of progressive adaptation to the environment; nature could not afford to start with a clean slate but had to make do by modifying parts and pieces while keeping the current species viable. In his book Evolving Brains,5 John Allman illustrates progressive evolution on an urban human scale by recounting a visit to the boiler room of an old power plant in San Diego, where he noticed an intricate array of small pneumatic tubes next to a bank of vacuum tubes, alongside several generations of computer control systems. Because the plant was needed for continuous power output, it could not be shut down and retrofitted with each new technology, so the old control systems were left in place and the new ones integrated into them.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

(Although in the future even common laborers will make enough money to take out ten, twenty, or even forty dollars each time they go to the bank!) Flying machines will whisk us in comfortable pressurized air from city to city. Perhaps you might even be served a simple hot meal, high above the clouds! The world's largest encyclopedia—bigger, indeed, than a school library—will be instantly available in homes by means of pneumatic tubes or perhaps electrical wires. A special telephotograph-machine will enable the spread of education throughout the world, giving even the poorest dustbin-cleaner an opportunity to better themselves by learning the classics, eliminating hunger and suffering. Oh, and C# will have anonymous methods, allowing the code associated with a delegate to be written in-line where the delegate is used, conveniently tying the code directly to the delegate instance.

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems by Irene Aldridge

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, automated trading system, backtesting, Black Swan, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, diversification, equity premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, pneumatic tube, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, tail risk, trade route, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

Advanced technical analysts may look at security prices in conjunction with current market events or general market conditions to obtain a fuller idea of where the prices may be moving next. Technical analysis prospered through the first half of the 20th century, when trading technology was in its telegraph and pneumatic-tube stages and the trading complexity of major securities was considerably lower than it is today. The inability to transmit information quickly limited the number of shares that changed hands, curtailed the pace at which information was incorporated into prices, and allowed charts to display latent supply and demand of securities.

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City by Neal Bascomb

buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

He learned how long he could drive rivets before his arms went numb and it was time to switch with the bucker-up. Holding the dolly bar on the other end was an easier job than managing the pneumatic hammer that weighed thirty-five pounds, drove a thousand blows per minute, and shook the steel for a good ten stories. The new guy learned how to avoid the snaking coils of pneumatic tubing under his feet, and why it was not such a good idea to drink at the local Irish bar past midnight the night before. Most of all, he learned to take care in bad weather. Said one riveter, it was “the most dangerous part of the work. We see quite a lot of the weather. When it rains, everything gets slippery.

The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All by Mary Childs

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, break the buck, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, index card, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, skunkworks, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Technically the head of operations, Fisher made the place run. She was in charge of HR and payroll and technology, and for a time, she also invested short-term cash, little spare bits of money that didn’t have a permanent home yet, getting yields of 20 percent overnight. She also orchestrated the company’s move to a new office, adding pneumatic tubes from the trade floor to the back office for processing, so her employees wouldn’t have to venture into the hot zone of the trade floor and risk getting scorched. Her primary job was to make sure there were no mistakes, no trade errors, no numbers transposed or trade tickets lost. She bent the inefficient banking system into the shape that worked best for Pimco, badgering all the custodian banks into getting fax machines in the 1980s to improve accuracy, and further improving it by pitting them against one another for Pimco’s business.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

The Multinet would permeate society, Lick wrote, thus achieving the old MIT dream of an information utility, as updated for the decentralized network age: "Many people work at home, interacting with coworkers and clients through the Multinet, and many business offices (and some classrooms) are little more than organized interconnections of such home workers and their computers. People shop through the Multinet, using its cable television and electronic funds transfer functions, and a few receive delivery of small items through adjacent pneumatic tube networks. . . . Routine shopping and appointment scheduling are generally handled by private-secretary-like pro- grams called OLIVERs which know their masters' needs. Indeed, the Multinet handles scheduling of almost everything schedulable. For example, it eliminates waiting to be seated at restaurants."

…

Instead, Lick pre- dicted, its mode of operation would be "one featuring cooperation, sharing, meetings of minds across space and time in a context of responsive programs and readily available information."2 The Multinet would be the worldwide em- bodiment of equality, community, and freedom. If that is, the Multinet ever came to be. That concern seems a bit mystifying nowadays, since Lick's vision of the Multinet was only a slight exaggeration of what the Internet has in fact become in the new millennium (except for a few items such as the pneumatic-tube net- work, which Lick may have meant as a joke anyway; his OLIVER, of course, would now be called an agent). It seems even more mystifying when you con- sider that from a purely technological point of view, all the essential compo- nents of the Internet were already in place by then: personal computers, local-area networking, packet switching, internetworking protocols-everything.

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

You really don't want to be standing at ground zero when that happens. Which is why we have the Laundry . . . I SLINK BACK TO MY OFFICE VIA THE COFFEE maker, from which I remove a mug full of a vile and turgid brew that coats my back teeth in slimy grit. There are three secret memos waiting in the locked pneumatic tube, one of which is about abuse of government-issue toothpaste. There are a hundred and thirty-two email messages waiting for me to read them. And on the other side of the building there's a broken Beowulf cluster that's waiting for me to install a new ethernet hub and bring it back online to rejoin our gang of cryptocrackers.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

But the robot I’ve come for, and the systems that support it, are, like the automated loom or the steam drill, a singular example of the kind of technological change that drives the economic “gale of creative destruction” first described by economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. In the center of this warehouse, surrounded by concentric rings of automation, the robot I’ve come for doesn’t look like much: just your run of the mill industrial robot arm, pneumatic tubes snaking down its length, ending in a suction device for grabbing items. Darin fires it up, and the hiss and pop of its air-powered system for grabbing packages adds to what was already a loud din. On one side of the robot arm, the same totes filled by the workers we observed earlier travel down an inclined conveyor.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

To measure traffic and its characteristics, the bureau used an assortment of counting machines, some of them permanent, others portable, several of which its engineers invented. One, installed nearly five hundred times over, used photoelectric cells and light beams; others used electric strips or pneumatic tubes laid across the road. The level of detail these machines produced bordered on the microscopic. In studying the physics of passing on a two-lane road, the tests measured the speeds of the passing and passed vehicles before, during, and after the pass; the specific points at which any changes in speed occurred; the distance the passing vehicle traveled in the oncoming lane; the time and distance it straddled the center line; and the actions of both vehicles in response to traffic approaching from the other direction.

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever by Christian Wolmar

Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, Crossrail, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, invention of the telephone, junk bonds, land bank, lateral thinking, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

Even Pearson aficionados did not always have faith that the idea was truly viable. Henry Mayhew, the writer and campaigner, discussed ‘our joint schemes’ and ‘often smiled at the earnestness with which he advocated his project for girding London round with one long, drain-like tunnel and sending the people like so many parcels in a pneumatic tube’.17 Mayhew pointed to the difficulties Pearson faced in trying to persuade his contemporaries of the viability of the idea. Writing after the opening of the first section of the Metropolitan, Mayhew recalled how Pearson had to overcome all kinds of superstition and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo: Such a scheme, though it has proved one of the most successful of modern times, met with the same difficulties and oppositions that every new project has to encounter.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

disinformation, Drosophila, failed state, Future Shock, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pneumatic tube, technological singularity, Vernor Vinge

As they walked farther on, things became less familiar. Glassy tubes ran along the walls. Robert saw signs printed on the walls, cryptic physical backup for nodes that wouldn’t respond to his computer box. Thunk. Something white and the size of a volleyball whizzed by in one tube. Thunk, thunk. Similar traffic in the opposite direction. Pneumatic tubes had once been a sign of the brave new world. When Robert was a child, he’d seen such things in dying department stores. “Why the pneumo tubes, Tommie?” “Well, this is where theory meets reality. Proteomics, genomics, regulomics — you name the ‘omic,’ and it’s here. These labs are huge. The local data traffic is a million times what you have on a public trunk, with the latencies of a home network.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

There’s been this long wind-down of the space program, and people have abandoned the optimistic visions of the future that we had in the early 1970s. SpaceX shows there is a way toward bringing back that future. There’s great value in what Elon is doing.” The true believers came out in full force in August 2013 when Musk unveiled something called the Hyperloop. Billed as a new mode of transportation, this machine was a large-scale pneumatic tube like the ones used to send mail around offices. Musk proposed linking cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco via an elevated version of this kind of tube that would transport people and cars in pods. Similar ideas had been proposed before, but Musk’s creation had some unique elements. He called for the tube to run under low pressure and for the pods to float on a bed of air produced by skis at their base.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Virtually all of their accounts include descriptions of the many new labor- and time-saving machines that will free people for a life of increasing leisure. Of course, all are powered by the miracle of electricity. They correctly predicted electric clothes washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, refrigerators, garbage disposals, even electric razors. Underground pneumatic tubes would connect factories, wholesalers, distributors, and customers and provide a twenty-four-hour pipeline for shipping goods to every household and to the far corners of the megalopolises. The pneumatic underground, says one citizen of utopia, is "like a gigantic mill, into the hopper of which goods are being constantly poured by the trainload and shipload, to issue at the other end in packages of pounds and ounces, yards and inches, pints and gallons, corresponding to the infinitely complex personal needs of half a million people."12 All of these inventions, claimed the new technological utopians, would mean freedom from "all of the annoyances" of housekeeping and work.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 1906, Sears and his business partner, Alvah Roebuck, took the company public and opened a $5 million mail-order plant in Chicago, the largest business building in the world, featuring an assembly line for customer orders. “Miles of railroad tracks run lengthwise through and around this building for the receiving, moving and forwarding of merchandise,” boasted the Sears catalogue. “Elevators, mechanical conveyors, endless chains, moving sidewalks, gravity chutes, apparatus and conveyors, pneumatic tubes and every known mechanical appliance for reducing labor, for the working out of economy and dispatch are to be utilized here in our great works.” One of the first people to visit this industrial marvel was the ever-curious Henry Ford. THE URGE TO MERGE The corporations that spread across the American business world, from transport to production to retailing, all had one thing in common, the quest for size.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

biofilm, bioinformatics, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Drosophila, energy security, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Hernando de Soto, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, peak oil, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, women in the workforce

He need not have worried. Only another miller could have toured his plant and understood the first thing about what was going on deep inside all those freshly painted tan steel contraptions. Since the millstones and rollers are encased in steel and the flour moves between them in sealed pneumatic tubes, just about every step in the milling process takes place out of sight. What seemed distinctive about Vanderliet’s operation is that the grain went through a multistep milling process that partakes of both traditional and modern technologies. So, after being milled whole on stone, the grain is passed through a roller mill and a hammer mill.

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street by John Brooks

banking crisis, belling the cat, Bretton Woods, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Ford paid five dollars a day, Gunnar Myrdal, invention of the wheel, large denomination, lateral thinking, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, short selling, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, very high income

The lateness of the tape meant that the machine was simply unable to keep abreast of what was going on, so fast were trades being made. Normally, when a transaction is completed on the floor of the Exchange, at 11 Wall Street, an Exchange employee writes the details on a slip of paper and sends it by pneumatic tube to a room on the fifth floor of the building, where one of a staff of girls types it into the ticker machine for transmission. A lapse of two or three minutes between a floor transaction and its appearance on the tape is normal, therefore, and is not considered by the Stock Exchange to be “lateness;” that word, in the language of the Exchange, is used only to describe any additional lapse between the time a sales slip arrives on the fifth floor and the time the hard-pressed ticker is able to accommodate it.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Despite the gruesome aspects of the job, Miller succeeded nearly every time in finding the now familiar iron box, and from one of the 25 U-boats that he explored—no Englishman was more familiar with their interior than he—he recovered the badly needed new German naval code. After the war, he was decorated at Buckingham Palace by the king. Miller’s find helped the cryptanalysts in reading the increasing volume of enemy messages. Room 40 was now approaching the height of its power. Intercepts poured in through the pneumatic tube so fast that at times the discharge of its small containers sounded like a machine gun. (After the war it was estimated that from October, 1914, to February, 1919, Room 40 had intercepted and solved 15,000 German secret communications.) Work went on round the clock on the naval messages, even during the Zeppelin bombings, when the lights were dimmed behind the close-fitting dark blinds.

…

In addition to dozens of offices and basement facilities for computers, the structure encloses a cafeteria accommodating 1,400 and an auditorium seating 500, eight snack bars, a post exchange, a dispensary with X-ray and operating rooms and dental chairs, a shoe-repair and clothes-cleaning shop, a barber shop, and a branch of the State Bank of Laurel. A system of “security conveyor belts” runs through the basement, carrying trays of documents to eight substations. A German pneumatic-tube system can whisk up to 800 containers an hour at 75 feet per second to interoffice destinations selected by a dial at each station. The building is fully air-conditioned. It has a public-address system. It is said to have more electric wiring than any building in the world. Its institutional, characterless offices, filled with metal desks, partitions, and lockable file cabinets, are the black chambers of today.

…

Jellicoe does not mention the Admiralty message to him in his The Grand Fleet 1914-1916 (London: Cassell, 1919). 273 gamma epsilon and gamma u: James, letters, October 8, 1962, February 4, 1964. 273 German suspicion: Churchill, III, 113. 273 change of code: James, 115. 273 L-32: James, 116. 273 Miller: “A War Secret,” The Saturday Evening Post, CCII (October 23, 1926), 44, 46, 74. 274 pneumatic tube: James, 129; Ewing, 182; James, letter, September 12, 1962. 274 15,000: W. R. Hall, affidavit of March 28, 1932, Mixed Claims Commission, U.S.A. on behalf of Lehigh Valley Rr. et al. against Germany, Docket 8103, Exhibit 920. Reprinted in Friedman and Mendelsohn, 30-32. Cited henceforth as “Hall affidavit.”

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

The most dramatic symbol of the scale and shape of the new military edifice is the Pentagon.10 This concrete and limestone maze contains the organized brain of the American means of violence. The world’s largest office building, the United States Capitol would fit neatly into any one of its five segments. Three football fields would reach only the length of one of its five outer walls. Its seventeen and a half miles of corridor, 40,000-phone switchboards, fifteen miles of pneumatic tubing, 2,100 intercoms, connect with one another and with the world, the 31,300 Pentagonians. Prowled by 170 security officers, served by 1,000 men and women, it has four full-time workers doing nothing but replacing light bulbs, and another four watching the master panel which synchronizes its 4,000 clocks.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Already geared toward consumption, the American economy boomed when millions of families bought big-ticket items like cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and dryers. A change in lending and borrowing made this great spending spree possible. Earlier, department stores and upscale groceries had created charge accounts. One of the conspicuous features of department store interiors was the pneumatic tubing that carried charge slips from every department up to the credit office, where they were sorted for monthly bills. So credit was not new to Americans, but it had never before been crafted into one of the pillars of prosperity. After the war, banks, retailers, manufacturers, lenders, collection agencies, and state and federal officials took the haphazard local lending industry of America and turned it into a coherent national system.

In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

s7 Leffingwell recognized that the growth in the size of the office was a major force that would increase the coordinative demands on the office worker, and he saw his own principles of organization, together with the appropriate use of mechanical devices, as the chief bulwark The White-Collar Body in History 119 against the threat of inefficiency and chaos: "A larger volume of busi- ness requires a large force of clerks to handle it; . . . this. . . makes the necessary communication between them more difficult, and there will be much walking back and forth between them for this purpose, unless some means is adopted to prevent it and save the time thereby expended. . . . Routine. . . tends to reduce communication. ,,58 Layout, standardization of methods, a well-organized messenger service, desk correspondence distributors, reliance on written instructions, delivery bags, pneumatic tubes, elevators, automatic conveyors, belt conveyors, cables, telautographs, telephones, phonographs, buzzers, bells, and horns-these were just some of the means Leffingwell advocated in order to insulate the clerk from extensive communicative demands. These efforts illustrate how scientific management in the office tried to provoke a discontinuity between the new clerical activity and the tra- ditional clerical work that had preceded it.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

One of the blockbusters of the age was a work of science fiction, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy. It imagined a man falling asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakening in the year 2000 to a luminously bright future, a future where everything worked. Bellamy’s prophecies were exhilarating. Consumers, he predicted, would no longer buy goods in stores. They’d place orders into pneumatic tubes, using what he called “credit cards,” and their purchases would come whooshing back via the same tubes. For a small fee, they could even have music piped into their homes as if it were water. “It appears to me,” Bellamy’s time traveler marveled in a retrospectively hilarious passage, “that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limits of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.”

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

British Empire, clean water, dark matter, defense in depth, digital map, edge city, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Mason jar, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, the scientific method, Turing machine, wage slave

Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence. Next was a castle divided into many small rooms, with a system for passing messages between rooms through a pneumatic tube. In each room was a group of people who responded to the messages by following certain rules laid out in books, which usually entailed sending more messages to other rooms. After familiarizing herself with some of these rule-books and establishing that the castle was another Turing machine, Princess Nell fixed a problem in the message-delivery system that had been created by the vexatious dark knight, collected another ducal coronet, and moved on to castle number six.

Apollo by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cuban missile crisis, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, index card, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, old-boy network, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ted Sorensen, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty, white flight

During one of the later Apollo missions, Jerry Bostick was in SPAN, working the Flight Dynamics position. SPAN, like the MOCR, always had visitors, and one of them, an unassuming gentleman who looked, someone once said, like a carving of a Black Forest elf, was sitting between Bostick and the pneumatic tube (P-tube) that Bostick used for sending messages to the MOCR and back rooms. Finally Bostick said. “Look, I don’t know who the hell you are or what you’re doing here, but you could make yourself useful and help get the messages out.” And so the man took off his coat and sat there the rest of the shift stuffing messages into the P-tube at Bostick’s direction.

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris

air freight, airport security, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, disruptive innovation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, inventory management, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, Pepsi Challenge, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

But that Hollywood-esque supersecret teaser mentality changed on October 8, with the beginning of Sega’s Sonic 2 Store Tour. Since then, 345 retail locations (and three air force bases) in sixteen markets gave customers an exclusive opportunity to play the game. TOM KALINSKE “To watch Sonic kick into overdrive, or be hurled through a pneumatic tube at what seems like the speed of sound, is really amazing.” —Associated Press “What’s faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings with a single bound? Well, him too, but we’re talking about Sonic The Hedgehog.” —GamePro “Not enough adjectives describe this game. . . .

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

So any alternative means of rapid transportation was bound to be either killed off by Tweed or cost its proponents dearly in Tammany blackmail. Beach recognized all this and decided therefore to do what he wanted secretly. In 1868 he managed to get past Tweed an inconsequential-appearing bill permitting him to establish an experimental pneumatic tube for moving mail. Then, toward the end of the year, with no more legal right than that, he went to work. He had rented Devlin’s clothing store at Broadway and Murray, and there, in the cellar, he began digging a tunnel, nine feet in diameter, that was to run a block uptown, to Warren Street, directly beneath Broadway.

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, David Brooks, Etonian, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, loose coupling, low cost airline, oil shale / tar sands, period drama, pneumatic tube, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, work culture

Here the unaccompanied wagons glided along their appointed paths with eerie steadiness, amid the strange nagging sounds made when the dash pots engaged with their wheels. Innovative systems of communication were also developed. Thornton depended on the compilation of ‘cut cards’ at the point where incoming trains entered the yard. Duplicate copies of these were shot through pneumatic tubes to the inspector’s office and the control tower, which was effectively a specialised signal box from which the correct sequence of changes to the points could be set. At Tinsley, the cut cards and pneumatic communication tubes were set aside in favour of a Telex-like system of electronic signals for encoding on punched tape at the control tower.

Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

anti-communist, British Empire, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, full employment, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

CHAPTER TEN “The World Is on Fire” On Wednesday morning, January 17, 1917, mired in the third year of its Great War against Germany and the other Central Powers, Great Britain was almost desperate for the United States to come to its aid.*1 In London’s Whitehall neighborhood, Rear Admiral William Reginald Hall, the director of British naval intelligence, looked out his office window at the falling snow, while rolled-up messages shot from pneumatic tubes into wire baskets. In came one of Hall’s best codebreakers, Nigel de Grey, perspiring with excitement. De Grey asked the Admiral, “Do you want to bring America into the war?…I’ve got something here which—well, it’s a rather astonishing message which might do the trick, if we could use it.” De Grey produced his handwritten version of a partially decoded German telegram: “It isn’t very clear, I’m afraid, but I’m sure I’ve got most of the important points right.”

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Long before electrification entered the working-class American home, electricity was adopted for lighting and other functions in the department stores. Electric elevators, electric light, and electric fans encouraged customers to visit the upper floors, helping management improve use of space and personnel. Electricity-powered pneumatic tube systems allowed centralized cashiers to provide receipts and make change. During this period, stores operated on a cash-only policy that allowed them to pay their suppliers rapidly, and they made most of their profits on discounts from suppliers.81 These temples of merchandise became the prime sightseeing destinations of their cities, not least in the case of Marshall Field’s landmark State Street building, completed in 1907, with its Tiffany glass ceiling, both the first and the largest ceiling built of Tiffany’s unique iridescent art glass—containing 1.6 million pieces.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

By the early twentieth century the Párisi department store in Budapest, on the prestigious Andrássy Avenue, close to the Opera House, was selling goods on six floors of a magnificent building whose vast galleries, adorned with specially commissioned paintings and decorations, offered a huge range of goods at all prices, advertised in plate-glass windows along the frontage. The Samaritaine in Paris, constructed in 1910, had steam heating ducts, a pneumatic tube system for messages, motorized conveyor belts to deliver packages, and electrically powered awnings on the exterior to protect the windows from the sun. Yet all these new forms of retailing did not really account for more than 15 per cent of turnover in the sector. The small shop, the butcher, baker, grocer, greengrocer, dairy and so on, continued to grow in numbers to meet the ever-increasing demand.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Shops added covered arcades that extended their displays into the street. It was hard to tell where commercial space ended and public space began. Once inside, the pull continued. At Harrod’s, a ‘moving staircase’ started rolling in 1898, transporting up to 4,000 customers per hour.58 Conveyer belts transported merchandise. Messages flew through pneumatic tubes. Rapid turnover ruled. ‘Sales’ had existed for a century or more. The department store turned them into seasonal rituals. Muir and Mirrielees held sales on gloves in March, perfume in April and carpets in August. All stores had ‘white weeks’, mostly in January, as well as ‘special price’ or ‘95-pfennig’ weeks.

The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

Whirling, I scanned the dark glass, but there was nothing there, no moths, no wings, just the lights of the decaying city flung randomly across the blackness and the sound, faint and very far away, of a siren wailing out somebody else’s disaster. I shivered. Putting on a sweater and turning up the heat made me no warmer. Then the mail slot chimed softly and I turned in time to see the letter fall from the pneumatic tube from the lobby, the apartment house sticker clearly visible, assuring me that it had been processed and found free of both poison and explosives. Also visible was the envelope’s logo: INSTITUTE OF THE BIOLOGICAL HOPE, all the O’s radiant golden suns. But Devrie never wrote paper mail. She preferred the mailnet.