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"It is change ... that is the dominant factor in society today... the world as it will be. This means that ... every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.""
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I had to laugh just a little when I read this term.
This is essentially a small urban capsule like the single car of a train.
The concept of pneumatic tubes as a means of delivering freight was not created by science fiction authors; it was originally proposed by George Medhurst, a London businessman in the early nineteenth century. Pneumatic tube system using small (six inch diameter) tubes were commonplace in the first part of the twentieth century in large buildings, or interconnected locations like hospitals.
I occasionally worked in a hospital tube room in the early 1970's; it was used to take doctor's orders from nursing stations to remote locations like the pharmacy, as well as send (carefully wrapped) blood samples to labs for analysis.
Imagine a ten by twenty foot room with open, padded troughs around three of the sides. The padded troughs were perhaps two feet deep and extended two feet from the side of the room. Directly above these padded troughs were the cylindrical tubes protruding from the ceiling, each one coming from a different nursing station or from a different department, like pharmacy or blood testing.
The room was at all times filled with a whooshing sound coming from the mostly closed ends of about fifty tubes leading into the room. Suddenly, you'd hear a distant clanging sound that would get louder - a pneumatic tube was coming in!
ping.. ping.. Ping.. Ping.. PING! PING! and then ka-chunk! the little door that sealed the tube would pop open and a tube would drop into the padded trough. The pinging sound came as the tube traveled through the pneumatic system; each ping meant that the messenger tube traversed a joint.
The attendant would read the cylindrical ring code, walk over the appropriate tube and insert it. Whoosh! off it would go.
I wonder if the people of Zagat's time got the joke, the idea of a commuter capsule with a half-dozen people in it popping out of a pneumatic tube system into a "trough" where it would come to a stop...
Compare to the submarine tube from An Express of the Future (1895) by Michel Verne, the
sub-Atlantic tunnel from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback, the
air tunnel from Through the Air Tunnel (19129) by Harl Vincent, the
pneumatic tube station from Exiles of the Moon (1931) by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat), the
pneumatic-tube zone from Mechanocracy (1932) by Miles J. Breuer, the
vacuum cylinder from Wandl, The Invader (2839) by Ray Cummings, the
vortal tube from Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert, the
public vehicle tube from The Houses of Iszm (1954) by Jack Vance, the
vacutubes from Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein and the
bounce tube from Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
Brin's 1990 Novel Earth Still Full Of Predictions
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
Gaia - Why Stop With Just The Earth?
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
Splendid View Of Eclipse From Orbit Visualized And Repurposed By Arthur C. Clarke
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
SpaceX Wants A Moonbase Alpha
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
NASA Wants Self-Driving Or Remote-Controlled Vehicles For Lunar Astronauts
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
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