>>Molly Wright Steenson: I'm the second-to-last person. My name is Molly Wright Steenson and
I'm here to tell that you I'm dedicating this to Senator Ted Stevens, the late senator.
It really is a series of tubes. He just had the century wrong. What kind of tubes?
Pneumatic tubes. And in fact, pneumatic tubes, in this particular
picture -- this is a picture of the tubes in Paris -- pneumatic tubes run four continents
in every single major city that had major finance and a lot of traffic. Why?
Because telegraphy was too successful in the late 19th century.
Here's the situation. Here you have a crowded Paris street. Paris
also had really great boulevards and it had fantastic sewers. The combination of boulevards
and sewers meant for good conduits, and therefore it was possible to line the sewers, as we
just saw, with tubes. Here we see some of the success of the telegraph.
You see also some of the problems. You see all the labor that would be required to send
a message from Point A to Point B. You also kind of see the surveillant guy in the background.
He's going to show up again. But what -- what pneumatic tubes meant was
that you could get a message across the city. It's effectively a last-mile problem, 19th
century style. In Paris, it started with a polygon of six
or seven stations and it grew to 450 kilometers of pneumatic tubes running under the streets
by 1945, processing 12 million pneumatic tube missives a year. It was called attraper un
bleu. To catch a blue was what would happen when
you would receive a pneumatic tube message. They used to be blue. Stopped being blue around
18- -- I don't know -- -90 or so. In the steam age, massive, massive installations
would create the compressed and rarefied air. This is in the L'hotel des Post (phonetic)
built in 1880 and you see again lots of labor. These would run day and night and produce
the air that would be stored here in these massive tanks 19 meters wrong, 1 1/2 times
as high as the guys standing next to it, and these would pump day and night moving the
pneumatic tube receptacles through the city between all of the offices.
Here are some of the receptacles. This is old-style, but check out these ones here on
the end. Physical packet switching.
You could put in an address and the tube would -- the tube receptacles would route themselves.
But I'm going to talk first about the steam age stuff. They weren't quite that far.
Here's how it worked. You would crank open the pneumatic tube thing,
you'd pull back, and you'd put in a bunch of pneumatic tube receptacles, crank it shut,
ring a bell, off it went, 50 kilometers an hour, to the next stop two minutes away.
You could get from one end of the city to another in, I guess, two hours.
This is the biggest pneumatic tube installation in Paris. This is at the stock exchange. Tubes
went where capital went, where money went. You see nine people here. You see the "Where's
Waldo" guy and you see a child laborer as well.
The best part is when the tubes got stuck or when a receptacle got stuck, they'd fire
a pistol into the pneumatic tube and they would measure the -- they'd measure the sound
waves, and find it within two meters and -- because they could get to it. In Berlin, they just
poured lots of wine down when they'd get frozen in the tubes and get stuck.
This is an amazing chart that I'm not even going to have to talk back but this is the
plan section and elevation of pneumatic tubes running under the central Paris post office.
1903, again, it's kind of a part of a public zeitgeist. This woman is licking her lips,
sending off a message to her lover through the tubes. We see the same kinds of things
that we saw here. But that's only part of the story. I was telling
you about pneumatic tubes and telegraphy. In the United States, pneumatic tubes started
in 1890 and they delivered first-class posts. So there was a pneumatic tube going over the
Brooklyn Bridge until 1953, pneumatic tubes in Chicago and Philadelphia.
But they're kind of the size of Shriner cars, these big things, and they were dealing with
first-class posts. They got put out of business by the truck,
which incidentally was invented in 1912 and it was the truck lobby that lobbied to shut
down the pneumatic tubes. But what happened once you reduced the size
of the installation -- remember, we had the steam -- when -- with the invention of the
geso (phonetic) apparatus in 1907, pneumatic tubes became electrical and they went inside
and they probably become like the things you think of from the banks of your childhood
or the movie "Brazil." What it brought to people here is desktop
computing, in a sense, or you see people, rather than being deep in the dark bowels
of a post office, you see beautiful well-lit places like with this Lamson Pneumatic Tubes
catalog from 1920. It also meant you could do work in all kinds
of places. I did say that it's possible to do work in a light place. I don't know why
all those people are kind of hiding in a dark thing. And 136,000 pneumatic tube messages
a day sent through Sears Roebuck in Chicago. And finally, it really is a series of tubes.
When I did the research for this, New York Public Library, I wrote down the information,
I sent it off by pneumatic tube. So Senator Ted Stevens was right.
Thank you.