Once upon a time, pneumatic tubes and the canisters they transported with air pressure were a really big deal.
“The golden age of pneumatic tubes was the late 19th into the early 20th century,” said Holly Kruse, a communications professor at Rogers State University in Oklahoma who studies obsolete technologies. Back then, she said, major cities like New York, Philadelphia and Washington had miles of underground pneumatic tubes. The systems were “a way to quickly transport messages, both the mail and telegraph messages, in urban areas, bypassing the slow traffic on the streets.”
In 1900, Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith said it wouldn’t be surprising to see “the extension of the pneumatic tube system to every house.” Alas, modern improvements like the telephone and highways killed that idea. But the tubes are still used in hospitals for moving medications and specimens. And in recent years, another industry has led to a bump in sales: cannabis dispensaries.
“There’s always some sort of physical product that needs to be transported, and that’s what pneumatic tubes do,” said Matthew Kelly, a sales rep for his family’s company, Kelly Systems, which has been in the pneumatic tube business since 1904. He said the systems are becoming common in cannabis dispensaries.
“To move their product from the vault to the retail floor is a very controlled and policed system in the dispensaries, and you can either have somebody doing that or a system like this where it can’t be interrupted or tampered with,” Kelly said. Plus, pneumatic tubes are just kind of fun. |