Marital infidelities in French ‘end of the (last) century’ novels are maintained via Le Petit Blue, a pneumatic postal network that ran around central Paris from mid nineteenth century until the 1980’s. Though I’ve got the occasional glimpse of them in department stores and banks I had thought it was only a French thing but apparently the ‘Despatch’ system was developed for banking information in London, where there were on-street pneumatic post boxes and even pneumatic links into people’s homes. You placed your letter into a large lead capsule then they were then blown to the next station. There was even a human scale version tested between Holborn and Euston. In New York someone built a secret pneumatic mail system that went under Broadway. NASA’s Houston control center used them during the first moon landings. Prague still has a 55km network of piping in place but it is inoperative due to flood damage a couple of years ago.
www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneu…
