In 1869, Alfred Beach built a pneumatic passenger transport system in a 2·5-metre-diameter tunnel under Broadway in New York. It boasted a station with a grand piano but functioned for only a few months. One of its cars was retrieved in 1912 when workers building the current Broadway subway broke into the old tunnel.
Delft University of Technology in the 1980s, was working on a 5-metre- diameter tunnel connecting the main international airport to the flower market and to a freight terminal.
In “The World Is Not Enough”, James Bond goes down an oil pipeline in a pneumatic pod.
Are there any, even small ones like at mine sites?
Any big ones in the works somewhere?
The Living Daylights with, what’s his name as Bond.
I think that the reason they’re not done is because of the complexity of the whole mess. I know that Tesla had an idea for running a tube under the Atlantic to connect America and Europe, but even he discounted it when he started crunching the numbers and saw what it would take to actually get such a thing working. (IIRC, it had mainly to do with a friction problem.)
The closest I’ve seen was a non-pneumatic elevator in a parking garage in Indianapolis. It was a vertical conveyor belt with handgrips and foot stands. You could step onto it on any floor, yank the switch rope, and be whisked up or down to the floor you wanted. It had a rail around it, and a sign said it was for employees only. I rode it anyway. It was scary/thrilling, and it seemed dangerous. I was a young teen at the time, and I don’t know if the thing is still there.
The one where the woman distracts the guard by shoving his face into her chest while “board lights up like Christmas tree” is definitely The Living Daylights. I don’t know if the same sequence has been used in any other Bond films, but I doubt it.
In that case you are right. Because I know Living Daylights was Timothy Dalton.
It just seems older in my head. It seems like it was from the Moore era.
Tim it is.
New York City’s first subway – the first in the world – was a two-block-long pneumatic subway. It seems pretty bizarre and unbelievable, but you ca read about it in histories (such as Ellis’ The Epic of New York). There was an article (with pictures) in American Heritage many years ago. The walls of the Subway sandwich shops include engravings of the pneumatic subway.
Apparently, it was done partly to sneak the idea of a subway past the corrupt Tweed organization, which profited from rthe elevated railways, and didn’t want competition. It worked by comressed air, just like those mail tube systems.
It didn’t work out. It wasn’t popular enough to get funded, and when the world’s first real, functioning subway opened in London, t was a conventional train. As far as I know, no one ele ever attempted a pneumatic subway. I suspect the complex technology made it too much of a pain.