Blowing the Mail

Truffaut's film Stolen Kisses (1968) depicts the Parisian pneumatic postal system in a memorable montage of scenes.

It's emblematic of the extent -- especially in Europe -- to which pneumatic mail a century ago was the proto-technology of the postal system in urban areas. Not only across the pond,but here in the U.S. as well.

Henry Nass, in an op-ed in today's New York Times, recounts the wonder of New York City’s now-defunct 27-mile underground first-class mail network that was fueled by pressurized air and two-foot-long canisters from Manhattan’s General Post Office to postal branches around the city.

Pneumatic mail in the Big Apple carried about about a third of the city's mail volume and continued until 1953, when in typical fashion a political fight over the post office's lease with the company that ran the network triggered a decision that was too expensive to blow the mail and that it was more efficient to use trucks.

Nass writes, "This alternative to highway transport should be brought back, especially for shuttle routes between airports and downtown central offices, and updated with new technologies. If we had a pneumatic tube system between the airports and the city's general post office in Midtown Manhattan, we could reduce the number of diesel-burning, mail-carrying 18-wheelers on the city's streets."