100 Years Ago, No Free Broadband Pneumatic Tubes

TheSync writes "The Division of Labour blog spotlights a report written 100 years ago by a commission appointed by the Postmaster General, that came to the conclusion: 'That it is not feasible and desirable at the present time for the Government to purchase, to install, or to operate pneumatic tubes.' Here is a scan of the original NYTimes article. If only we had gotten the free government Intertubes in 1908!"

Comments

Re:WTF?

[hey!]

I actually think that technology history is a very interesting topic.

For example, in 1684 Robert Hooke presented a scheme to the Royal Society for setting up lines of towers to relay semaphore signals over long distances. This was an eminently practical suggestion. In fact the Royal Navy in the following century developed the capability of coordinating complex land and sea operations using semaphore. Still it wasn't until over a hundred years later that an attempt was made to make a practical land based network. By that time, the first practical demonstrations of electrical telegraphy had already taken place. Electrical telegraphy was both cheaper and nearly 8x as fast. Once electrical telegraphy was possible, semaphore was doomed.

What's interesting about semaphore is that it is intrinsically low tech. It's most efficient with some kind of mechanical shutter system, but you can make do with a pair of flags. The Romans certainly had the engineering ability to connect their empire with a series of semaphore towers; the only thing wanting was the idea. You can imagine how history would have been different if it had occurred to them. At the very least, the slow and easily intercepted nature of semaphore might have lead to many computer science and cryptography ideas being discovered thousand of years earlier.

A pneumatic tube system, on the other hand, is only possible for a civilization that has at least stem engine technology. Such systems were unlikely to scale beyond local service in any case. It's an interesting concept, but not nearly as potentially revolutionary as semaphore might have been.