I remember when I was a kid in the UK in the 1960's one store still had a pneumatic tube delivery system inside the store for moving cash etc from the counter to the back room (in roughly soup-can sized containers). Even then this was archaic, and a source of wonder!
Drive-thru banks in the US still use something similar for moving cash.
I’m fairly certain the Tesco and Sainsburys near me were still using vacuum tubes to send money and receipts up to their back-offices well into the 1990s.
I remember a small local dept. store in the US still using them in the mid-70's.
If you had to take a little boy or few shopping for clothes, the combination of "small, local, has a fascinating pneumatic tube system" was often a winner.
If you are ever unlucky enough to need to spend a night at Stanford hospital one upside is that you can ask the medical staff there to show you the nearest pneumatic tube delivery point. They use them for prescriptions: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pneumatic-tubes-at-stanf...
My mother was a pharmacist in a major city hospital, and I spent many days as a young child bumbling around the pharmacy while she worked. One of my memories of that time was being utterly fascinated by the tube system that they used to send IV bags and whatnot to the various floors.
Given that almost nothing underground in NYC is ever proactively removed when deprecated, I wonder how much of this system is left, and if any of it is actually visible today.
I don't know, there's some good reasons against it on the page. For example, needing to dig up tubing to make repairs.
I think these systems are really cool but it isn't clear that they are net positive. Even today I would suspect many parcels being too heavy or large for the tube system. You might just end up with the tube system AND vehicular delivery.
The issues section noting how big a pain the breakdowns were reminded me of the first hospital I worked at. There was a lab across the street (and a few more of the hospital's buildings/parking lots before that) for processing blood/urine samples and so they put a the tube system in to make things "easier". It didn't break down every week or anything, but when it did... it was chaos.
They also ended up switching to someone just driving a van - which they already had to have ready to go for when the tube system broke down for days at a time anyways.
"A series of tubes" is a phrase used originally as an analogy by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing net neutrality.[1] ... The metaphor was widely ridiculed, because Stevens was perceived to have displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, despite his leading the Senate committee responsible for regulating it.[2][3]
"... They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material...[4]"
Drive-thru banks in the US still use something similar for moving cash.
If you had to take a little boy or few shopping for clothes, the combination of "small, local, has a fascinating pneumatic tube system" was often a winner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_vacuum_collection
I've always dreamed of a pneumatic tube burrito delivery system that went straight to my house.
I think these systems are really cool but it isn't clear that they are net positive. Even today I would suspect many parcels being too heavy or large for the tube system. You might just end up with the tube system AND vehicular delivery.
They also ended up switching to someone just driving a van - which they already had to have ready to go for when the tube system broke down for days at a time anyways.