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Back to the Future

About fifteen years ago, Don Ives was in the basement of a hospital, working on the building's pneumatic tube system - a pipe that uses compressed air to propel cargo-laden cylinders - when he heard screaming. "I heard this ungodly screech; I thought my partner had hurt himself," he recalled. Instead, his buddy stood in front of an open pneumatic tube, mesmerized by a 9-foot-long python that had escaped from one of the labs above. The animal had found the tube system to be a perfect way to high-tail it out of the medical complex.

He didn't realize it then, but Ives may have been looking at the immediate future of his industry. At about that time, corporations all over the world were beginning to give up on the pneumatic tube as a way of communicating in a world top-heavy with technology. Labyrinthine tube networks - used to transport everything from legal documents to interoffice memos - were being abandoned. There seemed to be little point in maintaining expensive tubes when the cover charge into the world of digital communications was a few computers and some wire. Once-productive pneumatic tube systems became the domain of mice, rats, and the occasional snake.

But now, the very things that helped kill off demand for pneumatic tubes may be responsible for bringing them back. You can't fax engine parts to a Boeing 767 waiting on the tarmac; you can't telephone cash away from a department store's register into the safety of a vault room; and, although some have tried, it's nearly impossible to e-mail a pastrami on rye up to the guy in accounting.

Ives is now the director of sales and marketing for Ascom Communications Inc., a pneumatic tube manufacturing and installation company in Boca Raton, Florida. Companies like his are finding renewed interest in pneumatic tubes from corporations spoiled by the speed and convenience of digital communications. Now these companies want that same potential with actual hold-in-your-hands stuff, rather than just ones and zeros. And until someone comes up with a functioning beam-me-up-Scotty transporter, the US$50 million pneumatic tube industry is doing its best to pick up the demand.

It took a while, but pneumatic tubes are again something that captains of industry are lusting to have installed in their new corporate headquarters. For instance, with all the technology that Georgia Pacific Corp. uses to control its immense forest products business in its Atlanta headquarters, the company also recently installed a pneumatic tube system. It connects the 21 floors of the Georgia Pacific offices and is dedicated to the sole task of delivering the snarl of faxes from the communications center to employees.

Further credit for the tube boomlet goes to updated pneumatic technology. Temperamental WWII-era electronics once governed the position of the heavy steel carrier (the projectile that fits inside the tube and carries the cargo). Now, optical sensors track lightweight plastic carriers. Where bungling employees used to be able to bring down the entire system by, say, putting two carriers in the tube at once, intelligent stations now make that type of human error nearly impossible.

Finally, larger tube networks are now completely computer controlled and can automatically ensure that, for instance, the urine sample from the hospital's third floor lab doesn't collide with the blood sample speeding out of the emergency room. Nauseating as this scenario may sound, it wasn't entirely uncommon when Glenn Miller was king of the airwaves and pneumatic tubes were still considered high technology.

And more than 100 years ago, when pneumatic tubes first appeared, the futurists' passion for the technology mirrored today's excitement over digital networks. They predicted a time when all the country's necessities, from the daily mail to eggs and butter, would whiz their way along a tube-snaked countryside.

In 1897, the New York City Post Office took the greatest stride toward that future the world had yet seen - and probably would ever see. It installed pneumatic tubing connecting most post office branches in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Entire parcels and packages of mail could be tossed into the 2-foot-long carriers and tube-shipped throughout the city within minutes. The postal workers seemed as fascinated by the nearly magical tube system as everyone else and, at least once, even routed a luckless cat through the city's tubes. "He was a little dizzy, but he made it," says Joseph H. Cohen, historian for the New York City Post Office.

In 1953, the post office's higher-ups decided to abandon the system, letting the tubing decay into an underground Grand Prix for the city's rodent population. Arthur E. Summerfield had been appointed postmaster general under President Eisenhower and had claimed that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night could save the tube system. He insisted that the city's mail could be delivered more cheaply with trucks than with compressed air. Conspiracy theorists allege that the pneumatic tube system was dismantled primarily to sell a new fleet of General Motors delivery trucks to the city of New York.

As evidence, they point out that Summerfield owned a profitable GM dealership and that Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson - appointed alongside Summerfield - was on the GM board of directors. "They had us shut down the tube systems," said one postal employee who worked with the tubes 50 years ago and still wishes to remain anonymous. "And then all of a sudden we started getting GM delivery trucks."

Essential sections of the 40 miles of tubing were steadily ripped out as telephone and electrical wires, as well as sewer and water pipes, were installed under the street. Similar fates eventually befell other large tube systems, even as recently as 1984 when Paris stopped using its special-delivery postal pneumatic tube system, a casualty of the fax machine and electronic mail. Re-installing the same type of system in New York City now - with all the city's subterranean congestion - would be nearly impossible or at least terribly expensive. "It would cost anywhere from about $6 billion to $9 billion to put the same system in now," says Cohen.

Until recently, the biggest problem with most tube systems was their temperamental nature. While whooshing through the tube, the carrier found its destination only by means of an electrically activated deflector that sprung up in its path. Moving anywhere from 20 to 40 mph, the carrier would slam into this deflector and crash-land into the receiving station. Unless maintained religiously, parts would break and fail, with carriers regularly getting stuck in the network.

An entire collection of excuses grew around the pneumatic tube's notorious unreliability. Where office staffs now blame late work on software bugs and malfunctioning hardware, the tube era's hapless workers who didn't meet deadlines could always claim that their papers "must be stuck in the tube somewhere."

The newest generation of tube governing systems - using personal computers that monitor and control the entire system - are considerably more user friendly as well as being nearly impervious to operator error. And the easily damaged deflectors have given way to diverters - which gently guide the carrier into its proper path. "They've almost got it now where it's impossible for the user to screw it up," explains Duncan Hill, president of A-Ware Systems of New York Inc., a company that installs pneumatic tube systems. "Of course, we keep saying that and every year they keep finding new ways of screwing it up." Ives of Ascom says: "One of the biggest things to happen is the ability to see, graphically, our entire system on a computer screen. If there's a fault in the system, you'd be able to see where it is on the screen, even to the point that it would tell you what tools to take with you to fix it."

Hospitals have been using tube networks almost since their invention, but they have had problems with the shipments' very bumpy ride. Pneumatic carriers around hospitals often subjected medical samples and drugs to extremely rough landings, sometimes causing tissue and lab samples to explode inside the carrier. Modern systems, however, cause a buildup of air pressure in front of the carrier that softens landings and averts mishaps.

While the most complex tube systems are installed in hospitals - often having several hundred stations and miles of tubing - much of the resurgence of pneumatic tube systems springs from concerns about having cash pile up in retail outlets. Colossal all-in-one retail outlets such as Costco and Home Depot and multiplex movie theaters can fill their registers with thousands of dollars in cash within a few hours. Most tube installers have at least a few such clients that need simple point-to-point tube systems that can whisk cash into a vault room.

Ironically, the proliferation of the fax machine as the second most important business communication tool after the telephone has also spurred a new need for tube systems. Despite e-mail's increasing acceptance, large corporate offices are being buried under a mountain of incoming faxes. Many office managers are finding that the only really efficient way of getting those faxes properly delivered to several thousand employees is via tube systems. Typically these networks originate in rooms packed with constantly running fax machines and then slither their way through several buildings.

Inherent limitations plague any tube system. But while it may sound utterly fantastic now, the turn-of-the-century vision of having a pneumatic superhighway piped into everyone's home is not entirely inconceivable, at least in a city that has a fairly uncluttered underground. Like electronic cables, one main tube could serve an entire neighborhood and then intelligently branch off into each person's house. Unlike digital lines, however, the greater the transmission distance of the carrier, the greater the amount of compressed air needed to get the payload to its destination. A serpentine tube system like the one installed in Minnesota's Mayo Clinic can move nearly anything in a few blinks of the eye, but the cost of doing so is a number of energy-chugging air generators along the route.

Unlike the more ethereal digital networks, tube networks need actual stompin' room to do their magic, and that imposes some absolute limits on their future. Systems like the one just installed by Denver's Translogic Corp. in that city's new international airport - its 10-foot-diameter tube whisks around airplane parts weighing up to 17 pounds - seem to be pushing the practical limits of pneumatic tube systems.

Instead, the future of the pneumatic tube seems to lie a bit more to the west, at companies like JLG Enterprises, a bovine semen processing company in Oakdale, California. Using a fairly simple setup, the company collects bull semen and tubes it up to its central lab, where it is prepared for its real destination. "We used to put it in ice chests and move it that way," says Jack Lerch, part owner of the company. "But (the tube system) saved us two people."

So, in the interest of healthy and happy bull sperm, the pneumatic tube is steadily merging into the digital highway. It's been updated significantly in the last 100 years - but it's still one of the very last survivors of the mechanical age of communications.