“One might as well open the window and shout down the street.”
A pre-telephone 911 call from Dickens’ Sketches by Boz:
Two little boys run to the beadle as fast as their legs will carry them, and report from their own personal observation that some neighbouring chimney is on fire; the engine is hastily got out, and a plentiful supply of boys being obtained, and harnessed to it with ropes, away they rattle over the pavement…
In the late 1800s, many cities had such a system. Philadelphia had a fairly extensive one, which first connected post offices, but later extended to various businesses and the stock market.
Many cities had pneumatic mail systems. Many pneumatic mail systems connected to the stock exchange mail office. A few cities had a few pneumatic tube stations co-located at other business locations (the technology made this difficult). Some cities had “pneumatic” postal offices in the same way that they had “telegraph” offices. Some cities had “pneumatic” delivery boys the same way that they had “telegraph” delivery boys.
Paris was different because it had a popular postcard system (“petite bleu”) specifically operating through the pneumatic mail system. Although I am aware of other cities with delivery boys and pneumatic mail offices, I am not aware of any other city where pneumatic post cards were a popular and common enough to be used as personal notes.
Fun fact: The London Pneumatic Dispatch Company operated a pneumatic message service in central London in the nineteenth century, but went bankrupt in 1875. Its network of pneumatic tubes, laid under the streets, was simply abandoned. Eventually the Post Office bought the tubes from the liquidators and used them for its own pneumatic messaging system, which linked London post offices,and railway stations, major banks, newspaper offices and major government offices with the Central Telegraph Office. That system was gradually run down after the Second World War and closed entirely in 1962 but, again, the under-street tubes were left in place.
Then, when the UK broke up its telephone monopoly in the early 1980s and licenced Mercury Communications to compete with British Telecom, Mercury bought the remains of the London Pneumatic Dispatch Company’s network from the Post Office, and ran its own phone lines through the nineteenth century tubes as a quick way of acquiring a central London landline network independent of BT’s. Mercury no longer exists but the phone lines it laid are still in use, so pneumatic dispatch tubes laid in the nineteenth century are still conveying messages to this very day.
Featured in Truffaut’s Baisers volés.
The London Pneumatic Dispatch Company was a rail system. 1 foot rail track, 4 foot tube. Connecting a post office to a railway station.
London also had a normal tube system: I think the first tube was between a post office and the stock exchange, then the busiest telegraph link in London.
Yes. The LPDC tubes were quite large in diameter, and they did operate a rail system — as in, the message containers ran on rails. But they were pneumatically propelled.
The Post Office system used small bore tubes. When they acquired the LPDC system and added it to theirs, they extended their own system by laying narrow-bore tubes inside the large-bore LPDC tubes.
When Mercury came along, they weren’t interested in narrow-bore Post Office tubes — just in the large-bore LPDC tubes. So that’s all they bought. Presumably it wasn’t technically possible to lay telephone lines along the length of the narrow-bore tubes without digging them up and opening them, which would have defeated the point of acquiring existing tubes.
They had to find boys young enough and skinny enough not to get jammed up in the tube.
Railroads generally carried the mail in that era, to the small towns. Farmers would periodically come into town to get their mail. I know farmers who still do it that way. It wasn’t a way to get someone’s attention quickly. Telegraphy would be that, but only from some distance. There’s a reason why telegrams were depicted as alarming to get – for most people, they brought bad news from afar.
In the US, outside the big cities (and remember, three quarters of the population did not live in a city), the main way to urgently contact someone was to go find them.
Willy Wonka missed that memo…