Remember the good old days of using pneumatic tubes? No? That’s okay – invented back in the 1850s and largely phased out in the 1900s, it’s doubtful that you got your hands on them.
Propelling cylindrical containers through small pipes via compressed air, pneumatic tubes were used to get packages, mail and important documents sent around offices and buildings at high speeds.
But despite frequent references as the future technology of deliveries, appearing in the likes of Futurama and Star Trek, this old-school delivery system is rarely used today, killed off by the speed of communication brought around by the internet.
That, however, could be about to change. Pneumatic tubes seem to be making an unlikely high-tech comeback, reappearing in hospitals and seeing an overall increase in funding.
How did pneumatic tubes come about?
Before pneumatic tubes slowly disappeared into the background, they went through a period of being used everywhere.
In its earliest days, there were plans to build pneumatic tube public transport, placing people into giant train-like containers and launching them through tubes at high speeds with a blast of air.
In fact, while many simply theorised this idea, one inventor actually made a block-long pneumatic public transport system in New York. It sold 400,000 rides during its first year of operation before being shut down due to its massive impracticality – the system only comprised of one small passenger car that moved around 16km/h (10mph).
But that wasn’t the end of its popularity. These pipes were used to deliver everything from food, to cats and goldfish. One bar in Berlin even found a way to use them to send flirty messages between tables – who needs dating apps when you’ve got air-compressed tubes?
While these more unique examples were popping up here and there, the tubes were equally finding their way into just about every industry. Money being moved around banks, parts passed across factories and postal offices moving parcels were all prime uses for the tubes.
But just as quickly as the hype built up, it was quickly killed off. The introduction of delivery trucks, computers and smartphones left the idea of launching messages through tubes feeling a bit rudimentary and overly complicated.
That paired with a rise in online purchases, credit and debit cards and improved localised delivery systems saw the pneumatic tube nearly stripped of any use.
Why are they making a comeback?
So the pneumatic tube completely disappeared from the world? Well, actually one industry kept them around and has continued to make use of the tubes around the world – hospitals.
Pneumatic tubes are clean and sanitary, fast, secure and in more recent years, highly automated. For hospitals, this is the dream combination, passing samples, organs and sensitive information around a large building on a near-constant basis.
One American pneumatic tube company based in America listed around 3000 companies using their technology, and in the UK hospitals are not only still using this strange system, but spending millions to keep them up to date.
But, unlike the pneumatic tubes of yesteryear, which now feel somewhat primitive, the technology used today has all of the modern features you’d expect. Thousands of items need to be sent around a hospital every day, all going to different floors and rooms and, in most cases, are carrying sensitive items.
At Bristol Royal Infirmary, a hospital recently refitted with new pneumatic tubes, the system acts mostly automatically. Each transportation is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tagged for tracking and statistics.
By using this system, the pneumatic tubes are able to connect up 60 separate rooms for the delivery of patient specimens. Drugs from the hospital pharmacy can also be sent around the hospital in a matter of seconds.
Revolutionising your bins
But it’s not just hospitals making use of the technology. Roosevelt Island in New York has been continually using pneumatic tubes for nearly 50 years. Below the 2-mile-long island is a large system of pneumatic tubes that over 14,000 people use each day, magically whisking away their rubbish.
In dozens of apartments on the island, rubbish chutes lead directly to a series of large, heavy-duty pneumatic tubes. Shot through the tube at 104km/h (65mph), the system has been in operation since 1975, freeing up the need for any trucks or staff to remove the rubbish on the island.
Not just a magical system found on this one island, Envac, the makers of the technology are installing similar systems in Seoul, Doha and Barcelona, with other major cities showing interest in the technology.
In Stockholm, roughly 120,000 households have these vacuum tubes built on their street or in their apartment blocks. Food waste goes down one chute, recyclables in another, and mixed waste in a third. Just like on Roosevelt Island, no rubbish trucks are seen, and Envac claims efficiency can curb truck emissions by as much as 90 per cent.
Whether it's hospitals or bin disposal systems, pneumatic tubes are seeing a major comeback. Sure, it’s not exactly glamorous, but from 2023 to 2024, the pneumatic tube market saw a 4.43 per cent increase in valuation, with projects being built around the world.
However, while these two industries are responsible for a lot of this drive, pneumatic tubes are popping up everywhere. On farms to transport dairy, moving fish to new homes, picking and sorting fruit from trees, and huge growth has even been seen in the cannabis industry in the States.
In the next few years, we can expect to see pneumatic tubes all around the world, in hospitals, when we take the bins out, send a parcel or when we make a bank deposit. All thanks to technology that originates from the 1850s.
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