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The return of pneumatic tubes

Pneumatic tubes were supposed to revolutionize the world but have fallen by the wayside. Except in hospitals.

In science fiction, they were envisioned as a fundamental part of the future—even in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, where the main character, Winston Smith, sits in a room peppered with pneumatic tubes that spit out orders for him to alter previously published news stories and historical records to fit the ruling party’s changing narrative. Electrical rail won out over compressed air, paper records and files disappeared in the wake of digitization, and tubes at bank drive-throughs started being replaced by ATMs, while only a fraction of pharmacies used them for their own such services. Steven Fox, who leads the electrical engineering team for the pneumatic tubes at Michigan Medicine, describes the scale of the materials his system moves in terms of African elephants, which weigh about six tons.

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