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

Snarky article

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Snarky article

[corsec67]

The last mile is going to be a monopoly, whether it be water, sewer, cable, electricity, phone, or fiber.
You aren't going to have people running a cable to your house in case you might want to use it. If there is already a cable TV connection to a house, the value of adding a second one is very low.

What shouldn't be a monopoly at all is the service provider. The last mile is going to be a monopoly, but the service provider doesn't have to be. Let any company hook up their DSL/phone equipment to the cable going to your house.

Re:Snarky article

[SatanicPuppy]

So the government owned water and sewer pipes that serve your house are a bad thing? You want to see multiple competing water and sewer companies building multiple competing water and sewage treatment systems, and multiple and competing reservoirs, etc? How about competing highway infrastructure? No?

Or maybe you prefer the current system, where one company is granted a monopoly in exchange for shouldering the infrastructure cost?

If we own the infrastructure, we can actually HAVE competition based on service. We sure as hell can't have it when the telecoms own all the pipe.

Educate yourself.

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.