A Love Letter to the Lost World of the Parisian Pneumatic Post
www.messynessychic.com
Pneumatic post, 1947 © Alamy Years before the Paris Métro opened, there was another subterranean transport system rattling away beneath the city streets. Instead of messages floating around in the internet ether of apps and social networks, if you wanted to send a note to someone in your city in

I was reading A Coffin for Dimitrios (great book), and found a character saying “send me a pneumatique when you get to Paris.” And in fact, there was a series of pneumatic tubes to speed the mail in Paris for over 100 years. Thought it was cool. Here’s the wiki as well.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•9 hours ago

      Oh yeah, the people mover is really cool. Always been a goal to actually ride it if I ever make it down to Brazil.

      It’s a little bit easier to make them work nowadays with modern materials, rubber is probably a little more pleasant of a sealing material to work with compared to the og bearskin and lard.

      Though one of the benefits of the lard is that the og one always smelled like a fry up when in use.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 hour ago

          In 1824, a man called Vallance took out a patent and built a short demonstration line; his system consisted of a 6-foot (1.8 m) diameter cast-iron tube with rails cast in to the lower part; the vehicle was the full size of the tube, and bear skin was used to seal the annular space.

          Back in the days before vulcanized rubber and plastics if you wanted to make a somewhat air tight seal you had to soak an animal skin in fat. With the amount of pressure you need to move a train, you need a pretty big and durable animal skin.