Show and Tell: Brass Pneumatic Cylinder
A past vision of futurism led to a bizarre dating ritual, among other things.
Show and Tell is an occasional recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption, with most of the entries contributed by the site’s readers. Today’s installment is from reader Frank Boscoe. You can see additional Show and Tell posts here.
By Frank Boscoe
Every other Friday back in the early 1970s, I would accompany my mother on her circuit of errands, which included a trip to our local bank’s “drive-through teller.” She would choose a lane, open her car window, and reach into a compartment to retrieve a cylinder. Into it went a deposit slip and my father’s latest paycheck, along with any other checks that might have come in during the preceding two weeks — a 50¢ mail-in rebate from General Mills, say — and then she’d put the cylinder back into the compartment. From there it was whooshed away via a pneumatic tube, up above the other cars, faster than the eye could track. Some seconds later, the cylinder would reappear with a thunk, now laden with cash, and sometimes a lollipop. I felt like I was living in the future, a future that was highly functionally specific, albeit energy-intensive.
In fact, it was more past than future. The first pneumatic tube systems were installed in the 1850s in London to speed connections between stock exchanges and telegraph offices. Many European cities later implemented them for ordinary mail service. The network in Paris at its peak covered nearly 300 miles, as documented in a scene from François Truffaut’s 1968 film Stolen Kisses; Rome’s system required its own special stamps.
Those trips to the bank with my mother instilled in me a certain fascination with pneumatic systems. So when I saw a brass cylinder available for sale at a Pittsburgh flea market while I was in college, I purchased it. It had the heft of a track and field baton, with rotating felt discs at each end to reveal the interior compartment and cushion impacts upon thunkage. It had likely zipped around the Mellon Bank or Pittsburgh Stock Exchange long before I was born, but most of those networks had already been decommissioned by time I was enjoying my lollipops on our way home from the bank.
Some time after acquiring the cylinder, I returned it to active duty when I spontaneously left a note in it for a woman I had begun dating. (This was not delivered pneumatically, alas, but simply placed in her mailbox.) Throughout the summer, we exchanged notes this way — we called them communiqués — and for a while my heart would skip a beat every time I got home and saw the familiar object. Gradually, the notes got shorter and less frequent; one day there were no words, just a cylinder packed full of damp sand, which I took as a goodbye worthy of Truffaut.