Berlin Pneumatic Post

1865 · Pneumatic Tube Post · Work 155 of 1,871

Berlin Pneumatic Post, 1865, Pneumatic Tube Post

The Berlin pneumatic post machinery in a cellar beneath the telegraph office, steam driven air pumps and receivers feeding iron tubes where felt sleeved carrier cylinders arrive in a padded catcher.

What it was used for
Werner von Siemens was commissioned in 1865 to build a pneumatic tube between the main telegraph office and the stock exchange; the compressed-air carriers covered the 1.7-kilometre route in a minute and a half, according to the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin. What they carried at first was telegrams: the tube was a feeder for the telegraph network, moving the forms between office and exchange faster than a messenger could walk. The public city pneumatic post opened, the museum states, on 1 December 1876 with about 26 kilometres of tube and 15 offices; over 94,000 items passed through in the opening month. The cards measured 10.5 by 14.8 centimetres, weighed at most 20 grams, per the Berliner Zeitung, and cost 30 pfennigs, a card 25, express delivery included.
What was new
What was new was not speed but a guaranteed transit time: carriage to a timetable, independent of street traffic and a messenger's errand. And it moved the object, not just the message - the signed form, the sealed note - which the telegraph could not. It was no first; London's pneumatic despatch is older, and the German accounts claim only the first public pneumatic post in Berlin. The barb is double. Built as an accessory to the telegraph, the tube outlived the telegram and was then finished off by the telephone: its best years ended in the 1920s, the Berliner Zeitung says, displaced by direct dialling. It still refused to die on cue - in West Berlin public service ended in 1963 and internal use in 1972, while in East Berlin it ran until 1976. Its strongest years were catastrophes: over 25 million items in 1918 and in 1944, against at most nine million a year otherwise.

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