Fifteen Miles an Hour Through a Metal Pipe

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Oct 12, 2026 · 29m

For over a century, cities moved their urgent mail through sealed tubes using nothing but compressed air and vacuum. Paris built a 427-kilometre network, New York pushed more than half its mail through pipes, and Berlin moved 2.3 million items in 1898 alone. This episode digs into how the capsules actually flew, why water-powered compressors were built to keep the neighbours quiet, and how a mechanical switching network amounted to packet switching decades before anyone said the words. Then the decline: worn pipes, 270 blockages in 1970, and a cost premium that climbed from 3x a letter to…