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Mail System Down the Tube - Predictions from the past that haven't come true ... yet

NEARLY 100 YEARS ago, Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith looked into the 20th Century and made two predictions about the future of mail delivery in America. He was right about only one of them.

Smith's prediction that the new century would bring daily house-to-house mail delivery in every section of the country came true by 1910. But how he had expected it to be done was a bit more speculative:

"It would not be surprising to see . . . the extension of the pneumatic tube system to every house, thus insuring the immediate delivery of mail as soon as it arrives in the city," Smith wrote in The Brooklyn Eagle on Dec. 30, 1900.

Smith foresaw miles of underground tubes to be built crisscrossing U.S. cities to replace mail carriers. The system would use compressed air to send canisters filled with mail zooming beneath the streets to each home.

Others had seen such promise in pneumatic technology. In 1893, poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox predicted that within 100 years, "Airships will facilitate travel, and the pneumatic tube will be the means of transporting goods." Felix L. Oswald, a writer and naturalist, suggested the system would even traverse the oceans: "Transcontinental mails will be forwarded by means of pneumatic tubes."

There was even an attempt to adapt pneumatic tubes for the Manhattan subway system, and about 300 feet of tunnel was built in 1870 along Broadway as a demonstration. But it got no further.

The once-futuristic notion of mail whizzing underground now seems quaint. But what is most significant is not so much that Smith's prediction failed, but how widespread pneumatic tube use actually became before being eclipsed for good by cheaper forms of transportation.

Pneumatic tubes connected main post offices to a network of substations in New York and at least four other American cities, beginning in Philadelphia in 1893. By 1916, there were more than 112 miles in place, according to a brochure published by the company with contracts to operate the system in Boston (13.6 miles), Chicago (19.8 miles), New York (55 miles), St. Louis (3.9 miles) and Philadelphia (20 miles).

The $8 million system was launched after Smith, an itinerant newspaper editor, Republican stalwart and former ambassador to Russia, was appointed postmaster general by President William McKinley. The network featured canisters eight inches in diameter, each capable of carrying 500 letters per trip -- an estimated 200,000 letters an hour.

In Manhattan, mails silently flowed under city streets at upwards of 30 mph, moving down to Wall Street and up to 125th Street.

By 1898, the system connected 21 neighborhood post offices in Manhattan to the main branch there. Well into the 20th Century, 30 percent of the first class letters that passed through New York's main post office were distributed to branches by pneumatic tube.

"As the service is extended, business expands. Service is direct, efficient, economical and almost instantaneous," boasted the brochure. "Postal Pneumatic Tubes keep the mail moving. There is no chance for congestion . . . Pneumatic Tubes continue the speed of the 'Twentieth Century Limited' right through the distributing system."

But by 1918 there was a growing debate about the cost-versus-benefits of what had essentially developed as an inner-city, business district service. After World War I, Congress balked at the pricetag to continue the service.

"In the 1890s it seemed to many like a practical method to deliver the mails, but by 1920 it had grown into disfavor as Congress argued whether it could afford to buy, instead of continue leasing the system," said James H. Bruns, director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Postal Museum in Washington.

As one fundamental change in the mail delivery landscape, a committee appointed by the postmaster general in 1916 suggested the "advent of the automobile."

"It is clear that the automobile seemed a better alternative to move the mails, and once the cities adopted traffic control systems, the mails could get through," said Bruns.

The committee found "the $17,000 per mile per annum" for the pneumatic system was more than the total amount per mile paid for the mails on all the railroads entering New York City. The rental of tubes from the company that ran the service was labeled "exorbitant, unjustified and an extravagant waste of public funds" and was equal to one sixth of all the money being spent on the cost of vehicle service in all the cities of the country.

Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis lost the service first. New York briefly stopped it, but it was resumed in 1922 and remained in place until 1953, when the post office announced it had undertaken a review.

Its conclusion was that pneumatic mail delivery "may have outlived its usefulness."

Nowadays, the U.S. Postal Service, according to its historian, Meg Ausman, still gets inquiries from builders in Manhattan who come across remnants of the cast- iron pipe system. "We've kept the maps," she said.

In Paris, a more ambitious system of pneumatic dispatch called the carte pneumatique survived much longer.

The Paris system, in place for more than a century, evolved into a network spanning 269 miles, delivering millions of messages and mail annually. At first the system was designed to accommodate short messages, but later regular letters could be sent to post offices by canister -- and then often forwarded the rest of the way by a mailman riding a bicyle. The age of the computer and the fax arrived before the system was finally abandoned as unprofitable in 1983; but for a long time it was considered preferable to the telephone.

"You have to remember the phone system was once lousy; if you could get a phone, it was still a joke," recalled syndicated columnist Art Buchwald, who was the Paris-based correspondent for the old New York Herald-Tribune after World War II. "That's why the pneu was so popular ... it really worked."