Pneumatic Tube - in Fiction

In Fiction

When pneumatic tubes first came into use in the 19th century, they symbolized technological progress and it was imagined that they would be common in the future. Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) includes suspended pneumatic tube trains that stretch across the oceans. Albert Robida's The Twentieth Century (1882) describes a 1950s Paris where tube trains have replaced railways, pneumatic mail is ubiquitous, and catering companies compete to deliver meals on tap to people's homes through pneumatic tubes. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) envisions the world of 2000 as interlinked with tubes for delivering goods, while Michel Verne's An Express of the Future (1888) questions the sensibility of a transatlantic pneumatic subway. In Michel & Jules Verne's The Day of an American Journalist in 2889 (1889) submarine tubes carry people faster than aero-trains and the Society for Supplying Food to the Home allows subscribers to receive meals pneumatically.

Later, because of their use by governments and large businesses, tubes began to symbolize bureaucracy. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, pneumatic tubes in the Ministry of Truth deliver newspapers to Winston's desk containing articles to be "rectified". Robert A. Heinlein's 1949 novella Gulf offered a more neutral view of their use in general postal delivery.)

In a sequence from the 1968 film Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses), François Truffaut shows the fast transportation of a letter through the underground pneumatic tubes system in Paris. (This scene was later parodied in The Simpsons episode "Marge Gets a Job".)

In 1985, the movie Brazil also used tubes (as well as other anachronistic-seeming technologies) to evoke the stagnation of bureaucracy. At the start of each episode of the 1998 television series Fantasy Island, a darker version of the original, bookings for would-be visitors to the Island were sent to Mr. Roarke via a pneumatic tube from a dusty old travel agency.

The 1994 film version of The Shadow includes a sequence in which the camera follows a message capsule as it speeds through a pneumatic tube system. The implication is that the Shadow maintains a private network of tubes for the transportation of secret messages.

The failure of pneumatic tubes to live up to their potential as envisaged in previous centuries has placed them in the company of flying cars and dirigibles as ripe for ironic retro-futurism. The 1960s cartoon series The Jetsons featured pneumatic tubes that people could step into and be sucked up and swiftly spat out at their destination. In the animated television series Futurama, set in the 31st century, large pneumatic tubes are used in cities for transporting people, whilst smaller ones are used to transport mail. The tubes in Futurama are also used to depict the endless confusion of bureaucracy: an immense network of pneumatic tubes connects all offices in New New York City to the "Central Bureaucracy", with all the capsules being deposited directly into a huge pile in the main filing room, with no sorting or organization.

In Ghostbusters II, the "river of slime" under New York city is found by the Ghostbusters boys to be flowing through an old pneumatic tube line – a reference to the Beach Pneumatic Transit tube.

In the 1998 PC game Grim Fandango, Pneumatic tubes play a role in the part of the story that takes place at Manny's office.

In the American television show Lost, the DHARMA Initiative's Pearl research station has a pneumatic tube system. The character Locke put his drawing of the blast door map in the tube without a capsule. It was sucked up into the tube, indicating the system still functioned. The tube from the Pearl leads to a capsule dump.

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five pneumatic tubes are used as a way to transport information from one place to the next when covering news articles.

In the popular video game Bioshock, pneumatic tubes are used to transport various items throughout the fictional city of Rapture. In Portal and Portal 2, two other popular games, Aperture Science uses Pneumatic tubes to transport larger-scale objects such as boxes of all kinds throughout their enrichment center.

Douglas Adams's 1998 computer game Starship Titanic features the "Succ-U-Bus" in almost every room – being a pneumatic pipe transport system which goes all around the ship; players must understand and use the Succ-U-Bus in order to progress and solve the puzzles. Umberto Eco in his novel The Prague Cemetery has one character, Simonini, send a "petit blue message by pneumatic post". Presumably these messages were on small pieces of blue paper.