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Comment by tfehring | Hacker News Reader

It's not just a single drive-through window either, even in small towns in the US there will be multiple lanes at the bank drive-through, with pneumatic tubes to send your money and documents from the car to the inside of the bank [0]. When I was a kid, I loved watching the container get sucked through the tube, plus they'd usually send back candy with the receipt.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5pVJ8ID0DQ

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Fun fact, there were originally plans to build entire city networks of those pneumatic tube delivery systems until the USPS decided it would be too much fun (as well as bypass their mail delivery monopoly). They successfully convinced congress to ban them in any situation where they could compete with delivered mail (basically, they can't run between any two addresses).

After email killed off intra-office mail, banks are one of the last viable economic uses for pneumatic tube systems.

Still bums me out.

Although they’re using rails in pipes, not pneumatics, you might like https://i.pipedreamlabs.co/

They’re aiming to solve last mile delivery with city wide networks of pipes

I'm not sure where you got that story from, but there was pneumatic tube mail in New York city from 1897 to 1953, operated under contract to the USPS. Networks existed in four other cities but New York's was the largest. It eventually halted because it was ridiculously expensive compared to moving mail on trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

An example of USPS operating them doesn't really contradict parent's story about USPS forbidding anyone else from operating them.

Trucks probably weren't very competitive in 1897.

They’re used quite a bit in hospitals to transport blood transfusions, medications, etc. as far as I know

My pneumatic tube story about things that can go wrong with them: A customer pulls up to the drive-thru, puts their money and deposit slip in the carrier and sends it off into the building. The teller receives it but it's empty and tells them "I'm sorry, but you need to include your paperwork" and sends the carrier back. The customer holds up the carrier so the teller can see that there's paper & money in there and sends it off again. The teller holds up the carrier they received at the window, and it's empty!

What had happened was a previous customer had driven off with the carrier, and the teller put their spare into the tube. Then the customer who had absconded with the carrier realized what they had done, and returned to the drive-thru lane - putting the carrier back in and leaving without saying anything. Now there were two carriers in the tube. So when the next customer arrived, the carrier that arrived at the teller was the spare, the one that didn't have their documents in it.

The drive-thru windows are often open LATER and EARLIER than the branch itself, because it's secure the teller can open it the moment she arrives and keep it open almost until she leaves. It's not uncommon for the window to open half an hour before the branch and close up to an hour later.

pneumatic systems like these are so fun, costco used to have big tubes they sent wads of cash and other things through, and of course there are great articles about the old pneumatic postal infrastructure in paris

Obligatory: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

The Home Depots around here seem to still have them but I’m not sure how much they’re used.

From 1897 to 1953, New York City operated a pneumatic tube mail transport system. It consisted of 27 miles of tubing connecting 23 post offices and carried 95,000 letters per day, amounting to 30% of the city's mail volume. The canisters were two feet long and eight inches in diameter and could carry 600 letters.[1]

Jams were a bear. Crews would travel the route of the tube and check air pressure at test points every two blocks where the tube surfaced. When they found a drop in pressure at a test point, they would try to free the stuck canister by injecting extra pressure. If that failed, they would have to dig up the street.[2]

In the early 2000s, parts of the network were repurposed to run fiber optic cable.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor... [2]https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01870447/document

Imagine an automated system to transport, plug, and unplug fast SSDs on that system. It could be faster than the fiber.

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