When the US Mail Was Delivered Underground at 35 MPH Through a Network of Pneumatic Tubes (1893–1953)

When the US Mail Was Delivered Underground at 35 MPH Through a Network of Pneumatic Tubes (1893–1953) Twenty years ago, United States senator Ted Stevens drew long-lasting online ridicule by describing the internet as “a series of tubes.” While some commentators noted that the analogy wasn’t quite as outlandish as it seemed, most reacted with nothing more than amused bafflement. Where had Stevens come up with that image? Given that he was born in 1923, perhaps he was drawing on memories of a technological wonder of his childhood: the underground pneumatic systems through which mail was delivered in major American cities from the eighteen-nineties until the early nineteen-fifties, whose story is told in the It’s History video above. Such series of tubes entered service in London, Paris, and Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1893, Philadelphia became the first American city to get one, thanks to the advocacy of technologically minded department store magnate-turned-Po

Added 14 Aug 2026