46 ms·
It seems to me they just got the scale of this completely wrong. The tubes should be a lot smaller, say a foot in diameter, and go through the air at streetligh
by w0mbat 6y ago
It seems to me they just got the scale of this completely wrong. The tubes should be a lot smaller, say a foot in diameter, and go through the air at streetlight-top level. The network would need an automated switching system to direct each "packet" from its source to any of thousands of destinations. People could pay to have endpoints in their houses or receive packages at the corner shop.
Letters, cans of beer and indeed cylindrical foods such as hot dogs, burritos or fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, could be inserted into a cylindrical capsule and delivered anywhere in the network area in a matter of minutes.
- handol 6y agoAutomated switching wouldn't even be needed, router could have been a job title.
- waste_monk 6y agoI guess it depends how centralised your tube network is, but I can't see how it would be economical at scale. For a intra-building sized deployment, sure, but metropolitan tube-to-the-premises network with hundreds or thousands of endpoints per node you'd surely need automation. Plus, it would be pretty simple to adapt internet routing architecture to the tube sorting machines. As long as you can embed a destination (node and endpoint) address in a barcode or NFC tag on tube ingress to act as your "packet header" you can leave the routing decisions to the tube sorting machines much like existing interior gateway protocols.
- handol 6y agoI meant in the 1860s.
- divbzero 6y agoI like the idea of pneumatic food & drink delivery, though it would result in rather fizzy cans of beer.
- spatley 6y agoI have once had the unrealized ambition to buy an old drive-through teller bank location and open a burrito place where your food goes through that pneumatic money tube. Would have been perfect for pandemics.
- rodgerd 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXCtY5bBqDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXCtY5bBqDY
- 205guy 6y agoPreviously (or perhaps in an alternate timeline): https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_... The original article is more like a pneumatic cargo wagon. Pneumatic posts of much smaller diameter existed all over Europe before and after the larger one described in the OP: https://www.warwickandwarwick.com/resources/articles-library/pneumatic-posts-of-europe https://www.warwickandwarwick.com/resources/articles-library...