matthew_w100 wrote:Those pneumatic things still exist - we have one in one of my hospitals. The most brilliant bit is the huge electro-mechanical router in the basement.
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Lamson Tube:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tubeThey used to connect all the hotels, stations and major office buildings in Paris; I can still remember people talking of any rapidly delivered message as a 'pneumatique', just as later people talked of documents being 'biked'.
I worked on a large, multibuilding, site where this system had been built in many decades earlier. The system was still being built into new buildings on the site - both within the new building and connected to the wider network - as late as the '80s.
The 'exchange' was in a large office which at the beginning and for other reasons had to have many lowlyish people working 24/7 (manual switchboard, TELEX, operators etc) . One of these on each shift was assigned to the tube exchange duty, which was manual and at times intensive (eg, at peak TELEX flow, related to office hours). Unfortunately, as so many of the other tasks in that room became automated, that one shift post became a visible extravagance, and the system was withdrawn; which was a pity: it was very fast, and could take documents which were no longer or had never been in electronic form. But size and weight of contents were limited.
(mere guide at) Jet Age Museum, Gloucestershire Airport
http://www.jetagemuseum.org/TripAdvisor Excellence Award 2015
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction ... gland.html