I remember when I was a kid in the UK in the 1960's one store still had a pneumatic tube delivery system inside the store for moving cash etc from the counter to the back room (in roughly soup-can sized containers). Even then this was archaic, and a source of wonder!
Drive-thru banks in the US still use something similar for moving cash.
If you are ever unlucky enough to need to spend a night at Stanford hospital one upside is that you can ask the medical staff there to show you the nearest pneumatic tube delivery point. They use them for prescriptions: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pneumatic-tubes-at-stanf...
"A series of tubes" is a phrase used originally as an analogy by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing net neutrality.[1] ... The metaphor was widely ridiculed, because Stevens was perceived to have displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, despite his leading the Senate committee responsible for regulating it.[2][3]
"... They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material...[4]"
Given that almost nothing underground in NYC is ever proactively removed when deprecated, I wonder how much of this system is left, and if any of it is actually visible today.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 23.6 ms ] threadDrive-thru banks in the US still use something similar for moving cash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_vacuum_collection
I've always dreamed of a pneumatic tube burrito delivery system that went straight to my house.