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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!"
The reason the government wasn't into buying the pneumatic tube system is because there was no real standard and no guarantee the system would be worth installing anywhere else. I can't see how anyone who researched it at the time would come to any conclusion but that the last thing the government needed was to be saddled with an expensive, hard to maintain, experimental system...Especially given that they already had the postal service.
The modern situation is a bit different. Government owned local data infrastructure is actually a pretty good idea. Small towns who can't interest the big telecoms in investing have bought bonds and done it themselves with good results, and it really opens the door to local competition since the competition is based around providing actual service...not around providing infrastructure. The technology is also standardized, and much more mature.
Telecoms are getting too uppity these days. Some kind of smackdown is required.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ted Stevens was right, just 100 years late!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The Victorian Internet
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Here's a picture by Joi Ito of a mechanical router, on display in a Tokyo museum. The engine of the steampunk Internet. Imagine BBs being pumped through the series of pneumatic tubes. "ROUTER BLOWOUT! SEVEN SYSADMINS SHOT DEAD BY THEIR ANALYTICAL ENGINES!"
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This seems to indicate that they were considering the use of pneumatic tubes over long distances. The technology simply wouldn't have been feasible, though.
First, you need to consider how much suction would be necessary just to move one packet over more than a few dozen yards. You'd have to set up repeaters at evenly-spaced points throughout the tube network just to keep up the necessary pressure.
With those repeaters in place, you'd still need someone on each end to receive the packet then route it to the next appropriate tube for further transmission.
You could never send anything valuable since any router could remove items as they saw fit. Not only that, but as the recipient, you couldn't know with certainty that the packet was unopened on the way to you.
That's not even considering the possibility of badly-routed packets which end up bouncing between wrong endpoints until they finally get routed to the correct destination. A packet that reaches an endpoint without a router to continue the sequence is likely to be lost and dropped. Without error detection, it is possible that you could never see your lost packet again.
What they should use is a big truck. Not a series of tubes.
I would love to have a pneumatic tube delivery to my front door.. Would beat the crap out of the lazy mail carrier who drives down the street, sits in his truck for half an hour, then drives off without actually delivering any mail (I've seen him do this at least a dozen times). Not to mention it might drastically improve local delivery time.
You insensitive clod. By "insensitive", I mean your sensory nerves don't work. Why else would you insult Brooklyn, which still has 2.5 million residents in what would be the 4th largest US city. Which anyone could know from watching _Welcome Back, Kotter. Then you'd also know that failing to consider Brooklyn gets you "up your nose with a rubber hose", a private application of tubes as "neural interface".
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thanks the large volumes of mail spam.
Wasn't this the original bill that was sponsored by a young freshman senator named Ted Stevens?
He doesn't. Only vodka. Tell me, have you ever seen him drink a glass of water?
If they were never installed, how come people keep saying that things are going down the tubes? What tubes?
Is this what Slashdot has become? So desperate to make fun of Ted Stevens that this shows up on the front page?
I am of course asking all this rhetorically.
But I do wish Debian would take it off their list of supported architectures. I want a new stable by New Years!
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From Wikipedia:
Technical analysis
Stevens's speech was analyzed by Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who said that he disagreed with Stevens's argument but felt that the language "series of tubes" was entirely reasonable as a non-technical explanation given off-the-cuff in a meeting.[12]
The term pipe is a commonly used idiom to refer to a data connection, with pipe diameter being analogous to bandwidth or throughput.[13] For instance, high-bandwidth connections are often referred to as "fat pipes."
Most routers use a data structure called a queue to buffer packets.[14] When packets arrive more quickly than can be forwarded, the router will hold the packets in a queue until they can be sent on to the next router or be dropped.[15] On links that become congested, packets typically spend more time in the queue than they do actually moving down wires or optical fiber...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
I too disagree with Steven's argument. But people who jump on "tubes" often do not even know the concepts behind the analogy. In a lot of cases, the people that laugh at his comment are even less informed about the topic than Stevens.
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.
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That was back before the government nationalized the economy.
[Insert pithy quote here]
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The Persian Empire had the fastest information infrastructures of it's time, while not with semaphore, they used loud shouting from tower to tower to transmit orders and news across the empire.
So wait- is the Internet something you dump something on? More importantly, is it a big truck?
I only ask because I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday.
Why? Why?
W
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Oh, to have a pneumatic "Internet" of tubes! It would be wonderful. I say this in all seriousness. Today, I can use the Internet to move data. That's all well and good. But what if I could order Chinese food from across town, to have it arrive via pneumatic tube a minute later, propelled directly to my apartment 300 mph? What if we could move stuff?
If Charles Babbage's difference engine was actually built...
If the Extraordinary International Network of Pneumatic Conduits (as they may have called it) was built... We would have had a Steampunk ICT revolution perhaps a century sooner!
But, of course, the tubes could become literally clogged... by literal fat packets.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
but the problem is we already have it. We have numerous toll roads operated by the government, pseudo-government agencies, or private entities, and we will get more. There are always talks in Atlanta about turning portions of existing interstates into toll roads in order to fund road improvements. If they would stop wasting the collected money on items other than roads it would not be an issue but one local toll road's account was found to have been raided multiple times for things other than itself, something that was promised would never happen.
The simple fact is we can no longer trust just handing off anything we decide is infrastructure to the government because we have lost the ability to guarantee it will not be used to political favors, a new revenue system beyond the item itself, or even be maintained properly.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why? Because pneumatic infosystems are "obviously" a silly idea? If you think that, you need to crack a book now and then. If you did, you'd know that pneumatic mail delivery was widely used in Europe from the late 19th century well into the 20th. (The Paris system didn't shut down until 1984!)
They were also widely used in the U.S. for internal business mail and similar stuff. Many large department stores used pneumatic systems instead of cash registers. The clerk put your money and bill into a tube, where it got sent up to the bookkeeping department, which sent back a receipt and your change. That's more cost effective than totaling out dozens of registers at the end of the day, and also minimized the amount of cash in places where it could be ripped off. Back in the 70s, there were still a few stores that used this system; it took the rise of networked POS systems and credit cards to kill it completely.
So the folks that wanted to build a national pneumatic system had some solid technology and experience to build on. Sure, they failed — but their failure is worth studying now that we're busy arguing about the best way to install a telecom infrastructure that's half as good as the ones in Asia.
There were optical telegraph towers in France in 1795. They had a network of 500 stations that covered much of the country, and used them for military communications for 70 years.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Using flags and torches for signalling between armies is obviously a prehistoric idea. Even Sun Tzu mentions it.
I dimly recollect reading somewhere that the Byzantines used something similar to fixed semaphore lines for military purposes. It's not likely they had something like a full alphabet for transmitting free form messages, though.
One slightly older example is that the Dutch used a permanent semaphore line along the length of the Dutch Water Line during the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678). I have a book (in Dutch) that mentions it. Since the Dutch inundated the area this was clearly more practical than sending messengers to communicate between fortesses and towns. Apparently the idea was there, but wasn't perceived as useful enough to adapt to civilian use.
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.
Yes, IP over Flag Semaphore would have quickly become bogged down with people downloading mosaics over bittorrent.
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would have put the Post Office out of business and cause massive job losses. All one need do is send the letter via a pneumatic tube. But the switching of the tubes would be hard to maintain.
It would have been cheaper to have a tube between each government building that can send messages back and forth rather than every citizen and business. But then they had the Pony Express that could deliver letters fast as well.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Right now my mail carrier has to crush, fold and spindle each piece of mail she brings me by hand. These tubes could have handled at least the first two of these tasks.
Squirrel!
If you're interested in this area the book "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage is quite interesting.
If the government had bought pneumatic tubes, we'd still be using them.
Once the government latches onto something, it will subsidize it to keep it in place until the end of time (Amtrak, AM radio).
This is yet another good reason why the FCC's 'free' wifi plan is a bad idea.
Without regard to cost or practicality?
You home lies at the bottom of Suicide Hill. The escarpment runs 65 miles east-west. You don't have a sight line to the satellite.
You are 56,000-112,000 feet from the co-op's central office.
There are two smallish clusters of rural estate homes - but, looked at honestly, this is a poor and thinly settled district - expensive to service, even for a non-profit.
There is a big difference between infrastructure and service.
In theory, but in practice how does that actually work? There's a single gas pipe coming into my house, and it's connected to the gas pipe that also goes into my neighbor's house. Our gas must necessarily be coming from the same source, it must necessarily be the same gas.
Because I work for a large US utility, I know that most utilities have infrastructure in a separate business unit and the service business unit in another.
But what does that mean outside of corporate accounting and the name on my bill? How can there be meaningfully different service providers using that same natural gas infrastructure?
I see how it is at least possible with something like internet, because unlike a gas pipe, different wires (or the same multiplexed wire and so on) can be carrying different signals, and part of the infrastructure includes the routers at the ISP. This was how different ISPs in Ann Arbor were able to provide meaningfully different ADSL service using Ameritech's phone lines, simply by having better ADSL equipment and better routers and so on. Of course that differentiation ended the very second you had a problem that involved the phone lines themselves. Then you were dealing with Ameritech, who was required by law to lease their lines to 3rd parties and fix problems, but had about zero motivation to do anything in a timely fashion since they sold (shitty shitty) ADSL themselves.
Gas is gas. Water is water. Sewage is sewage. You can't multiplex gas molecules. How can you have differentiated service?
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You need people running cable to your house on demand, when you order the service. This clearly works, since it has been done. If you refute the idea, ensure that your refutation is compatible with the reality of the telephone/cable duopoly found in virtually every US city.
You said "city". Not every part of the world is in a city. The phone and cable TV companies allege that running cable to a rural market is cost prohibitive, giving the customers who grow your food a choice between three options with low throughput per dollar: dial-up, satellite, or GPRS.
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.
You must be thinking of pneumatic tubes as some sort of "web van" stupidity... but it's not. Once you take humans out of the delivery process you start to get economies of scale. It really is a game changer. If this whole "tube" thing just can't get you excited, instead consider an army of UAVs delivering packages. Or consider desktop 3d printers in widespread use.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I too disagree with Steven's argument. But people who jump on "tubes" often do not even know the concepts behind the analogy. In a lot of cases, the people that laugh at his comment are even less informed about the topic than Stevens.
Allow me to quote the same wikipedia page, since I find Stevens's words quite illuminating in a discussion about how much of the internet he understands.
what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
In case you don't know (WTF?), Stevens is talking about an email. While I read "your own personal internet" as "the internet as seen through your eyes" and be happy about that, I suspect many of the people who ridicule Stevens understand the difference between "an Internet" and "an email".
And if we ignore those who jumped on him when it was news, I think many of those who (still) ridicule him, in particular on slashdot and similar sites, understand not only the difference between internet and email, but also know the existence of, differences between and layering of IP and SMTP. They might also know of TCP, UDP, DNS and HTTP (and know when HTTP vs SMTP comes into play in the ctx of webmail), and at least know there's something called BGP which governs routing.
They probably also understand that mail delivery in general is not slowed down two days by high volumes of non-mail traffic. It might be slowed down by a few seconds if the links are highly loaded, but the mail delay is more likely to be caused in the application layer.
It may be that Stevens has a lot of information at his disposal, but then why doesn't he use any of it to distinguish between "internet" and "email"?
I have no idea if this is real or not. Funny? Yes. Real? I have no effing clue.
If we don't protect the freedom of speech how will we know who the assholes are?
No, it isn't a natural monopoly. It only seems that way because of lack of planning on cities part. The last mile should be a PIPE. No, not an internet connection that is called a pipe, but an honest to goodness hole through the ground pipe. The system should look a lot like a storm drain or sewer system. If you want to buy a service from Joe's home movie cable company, you should be able to have Joe's just pull a wire through the existing pipe to the larger main pipe, and all the way to their office where the video source comes from. Heck, if the city had data tubes, I could literally be on a neighborhood by having a line run from my house to my neighbors across the street. Of course, this would create MASSIVE competition, as the barrier of entry for a new cable company, phone provider or ISP would plummet.
No, the last mile is definitely not a natural monopoly.
If this had been done, it would have set up some AWESOME right of ways that could be used to run fiber across all major cities for nothing.
Those hollow pipes would have been so big that you could have run fiber for every company that even considered entering the ISP business for very little money.
Taxpayers would have probably made money off the whole deal, and we'd be much further ahead in our internet infrastructure.
I wonder if they have ever made one of those grade-school documentaries on things we wouldn't have if it weren't for "Plastics", but analyzing government tax-and-spend instead.
We wouldn't have the internet, velcro, pens that write upside-down, the nuclear program, highways, street-lights, ...
Some (many?) large supermarkets in the UK still do use pneumatic tubes for shifting high-value paper notes from the tills quickly to a safe central area.
Just because an idea's an antique doesn't mean it's a bad one.
Until of course it reaches the front page. Like a few stories lately.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
In reality, I wonder how the economics of a 17th century system would stack up. They used letters through a cheap & effective postal system, but semaphores would require a lot of semi-skilled (at least literate) people to operate semaphores to transmit/receive/route messages*. Takes a lot of nodes to be useful so I wonder how much communication of the right sort (short telegrams/sms type messages) would be required at the right amount of distance where the speed of transmission would be useful.
Am interested enough that I might see if I can find his presentation to the RS.
*Exercise to the reader to figure out how to automate long distance message handling using 17th/18th century tech. Figure that once you have steam & steam train tech it is easy, but until then... fancy clockwork?
... how is it not like a truck? Data flow is not continuous, it's sent in discreet packets of variable sizes, it can take multiple routes to get to a destination, and every so often at a switching point there's a collision so the data never arrives and has to be resent. Honestly, I think roads and trucks is a much better analogy.
And we're back to the "Information Superhighway" analogy and terminology. Which, while accurate, was coined to prepare the public for government entry into network construction - and from there, to content control.
Fortunately private enterprise stayed ahead of government attempts to run and control the show - at least in the urban areas. So the government tried to get its camel's nose into the tent by wiring the schools - then censoring the net to "protect the children".
But rural areas are underserved. And the Democrats are back in power. So watch for another try in the next couple years predicated on the "information gap" of inadequate broadband internet service in rural areas.
Will the WISPs will head off THAT effort at the pass? Stay tuned...
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Private, unregulated monopolies ARE bad. Unequivocally. They inevitably distort markets to their own ends, which does not allow the Adam Smith "invisible hand" of Free Market forces to work their wonders. And they do indeed work wonders... when allowed to.
On the other hand, highly regulated monopolies, if they are what are often referred to as "natural" monopolies, can be a very good and workable thing. An example is the early telephone system. It would not have been reasonable to have competition in assembling the copper "backbone" of telephone communications, in the day that was done. Economically and technologically, it would not have made sense. So the government gave "Ma Bell" a monopoly... a very carefully watched and controlled monopoly.
Most people do not know the true reason for the "breakup" of Ma Bell. However, it was a case study in a Business Law class I had at University. It was not broken up "because it was a monopoly". That's what many people think, but that is ridiculous. It was designed to be a monopoly! A highly regulated one.
But Ma Bell was designed to be a monopoly solely for the purpose of infrastructure and service. It was never supposed to be in the "hardware" (telephone set) business. But after a time, Ma Bell (which consisted of AT&T and the Bell System) gradually started using its monopoly position to start pushing people to use telephones from a company called Western Electric. Eventually, it came to the point that it was not feasible to connect anything but Western Electric-built equipment to any telephone line in the United States. For any "foreign" equipment to be hooked up, "Ma Bell" required that a technician be present to check it out and plug it in; they required an expensive "adapter" to be installed between the "foreign" equipment and the phone line, and they charged an exhorbitant monthly fee for having that equipment attached to the phone line.
This was all done, of course, in the name of "compatibility". The effect, however, was that Ma Bell controlled not just the telephone lines, but what could be connected to them. Pretty soon, all telephones in the United States were made by one company.
As it turned out, of course, Western Electric was a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T.
After enough people made enough noise, AT&T was given an injunction by a Federal Court, stating that it could not use its monopoly power of telecommunication infrastructure and service, to influence other markets such as hardware, or electronic equipment.
When it came to the actual breakup, "Ma Bell" had been pretty much ignoring that Federal court order for nearly 20 years! Someone finally got fed up with their bullshit, and an end was put to the practice. Ma Bell ended up getting hit a lot harder than they expected.
But the lesson here is not that "monopolies are always bad". To conclude so would be to ignore history, which clearly indicates that the United States government, at that time and given those circumstances, made a good decision in giving Ma Bell regulated monopoly control over telephone infrastructure and service.
At the same point in history, European countries were allowing "competing" companies to set up their own telephone systems. The result was pandemonium. A single country (much smaller than the United States) might have 7 or 9 telephone companies operating at the same time. A single city might have 3 or 4. Their systems were physically and electrically incompatible. Each company had its own "backbone" (imagine the wires!!), and if you subscribed to one company, often you could not speak to someone who used a different company. Converting from the signals of one company to those of another was usually too expensive to even try.
During the same period of time, the United States (much larger than those countries) got a single, universally compatible, monolithic telephone system installed from coast to coast, Canada to the Gulf. And it WORKED! Anybody could talk to an
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>>The Romans certainly had the engineering ability to connect their empire with a series of semaphore towers; the only thing wanting was the idea.
Huh? The Romans used towers with a series of mirrors to transmit messages and orders. Their communication problems across the Empire were still some of the most important reasons why it eventually fell apart, though.
>>If you did, you'd know that pneumatic mail delivery was widely used in Europe from the late 19th century well into the 20th. (The Paris system didn't shut down until 1984!)
Yeah, and various Eastern European cities also had extensive pneumatic tube systems. All things considered, it's not actually that bad an idea. Heinlein had a couple different books where you could buy CDs, or hot food, or whatever, and have it delivered through a tube system, and I don't think the idea was really all that impractical.
And in a related article (found on page 9), Al Gore has claimed responsibility for inventing the pneumatic tubes, while Ted Stevens admitted he doesn't understand them. John McCain admits the he doesn't use pneumatic tubes... The more things change, the more they stay the same!
And don't forget their use in Middle-Earth. Of course the refresh time was a pain and all signals had the same meaning.
So it's genuine fast food then?
(sorry...)
Don't remember the Heinlein bit. But one of the intriguing little details of Sam Stirling "Draka" alternate history is that machine tooling to fine tolerances developed much faster than in our timeline. One of the consequences of this is that pneumatic technology is used not just for delivering stuff, but also for distributing power, not just for industrial uses, but for home appliances. Electricity doesn't displace pneumatic power until the middle of the 20th century.
Stirling doesn't actually write any fiction about this period: it's all part of an elaborate backstory for a series of stories that begin in 1942. The dude puts more work into the background for his fiction than any SF writer I know of. I don't always agree with his assumptions (in fact, I usually don't) but that only adds to the fun of reading his work.
Here's an interesting discussion of Stirling's alternate universe:
http://www.americanheritage.com/blog/200712_21_1354.shtml
when it is "owned" and maintained by a local municipal government, rather than the state or federal government, at least "the people" retain some measure of control over it. It would not be out of line to say it belongs to "the people". Which is not the same as a monopoly.
I still disagree though with the knee-jerk reaction of "monopoly=bad". "Natural" monopolies have existed in the United States, and as long as they had good oversight and were properly regulated, they worked very well. It was only when they overstepped their bounds (Ma Bell), or were "deregulated" (certain power companies that were formerly highly-regulated utilities), and began throwing their weight around in private markets, that they became "evil".
As long as monopolies are properly kept in their cage and fed only the proper diet, and thus kept working for the common good, they have been and can be very useful tools of the U.S. economy. It is the abuse of same (and we have seen much of that in the last couple of decades) that causes the problems.