Here at Untapped Cities, we’re big fans of New York City’s antiquated system of pneumatic tubes. That’s why we were beyond thrilled when artist Julia Wertz sent us a few pages of her book, Tenements, ...

Pneumatic tubes were supposed to revolutionize the world but have fallen by the wayside. Except in hospitals. Pneumatic tubes were touted as something that would revolutionize the world. In science ...

Imagine, if you will, a secret community dwelling beneath the streets of New York City, its inhabitants never allowed to travel to the surface or to interact in any way with the dreaded “Topsiders.” ...

Elon Musk is not the first inventor to put his hopes into vacuums. Respect to the Hyperloop, but pneumatic tubes have a centuries-long history -- in both human infrastructure and in the minds of ...

The inaugural episode of The Untapped New York Podcast was a dive into my favorite subject of all time: New York City’s pneumatic tube mail system. One of the highlights of this exploration was ...

A Globe reporter in 1900 asked the city’s top minds what the year 2000 would look like. Some things they got right, others they got wrong. One prediction was that a pneumatic tube system would connect ...

In 1953, NYC retired its pneumatic tube-aided mail system, which stretched 27 miles long and connected 23 post offices. But there are still remnants of the obsolete technology scattered throughout the ...

The benefits of pneumatic tube systems in hospitals extend far beyond the end users and are realized in delivering optimal patient care. Medical facilities need operation technology more than ever and ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...