The return of pneumatic tubes
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Buildings have a connection into which trash is sucked away to the central yard for processing. It's pretty neat and helps keep the island tidy. You don't get any of the normal huge trash piles that litter Manhattan on trash day.
Conversely, our local hospital is now using robots for deliveries. They trundle around and deliver things like meds to the nurses stations on request, and announce it with "Your delivery has arrived".
Just watching robots trundle around as though it's normal is an interesting slow creep towards what seemed so futuristic in Star Wars in the 70s and 80s. Now our local supermarkets (BJs and Stop and Shop) have robots that trundle around checking inventory as well.
The factory has two or maybe three different types of robots delivering all sorts of things from packages to packaging to stainless steel bar.
the robots use the same walkways as the humans.
It seems more and more we are designing robots to occupy and utilize the same spaces as humans. And we're designing the robots to make the humans give way: they're slow, large, bulky, and just stop when confronted. I think it's because humans are a much better robot.
humans (generally, of course) are more agile, can route easily, and move our bodies in unexpected ways to accomplish the task (lift a box up from waist height over an obstacle for example)
though I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot in my local stop & shop
How much of this is that the robots are far newer than the buildings? How soon till new buildings are designed with designated robotic paths?
Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations.
But to be called a robot it has to have some human-like (or at least animal-like) quality. Which usually involves either imitating human arms (e.g. typical industrial robot arms), imitating human movement (e.g. Boston dynamics) or using infrastructure designed for humans. If you put a delivery robot on a purpose-built path it has none of those qualities and reverts back to being a normal machine.
For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes.
What's the problem supposed to be with running cables through clips on the wall? That you'll know they're there? That you can easily access them?
Install flexible plastic tubes instead and you can just pull out cables when you need to replace them for whatever reason.
People want to see a finished wall, not cables, pipes, and ducts.
I ran into one of these things late one night after checking into a hotel. Dead tired, I got off the elevator and was walking down the hall when this 3-foot high dalek started following me. "Can I get you some towels?" I retreated into my room. The next morning I almost tripped over it. It had spent the night outside my door... stalking me.
Robot: can I get you some towels?
Man, confused just enters room and shuts door.
Eight hours later he emerges for breakfast.
Robot: well?
Jobs are already really hard to come by on all the unskilled levels, it's a bit grim to be honest.
trun·dled, trun·dling. to cause (a circular object) to roll along; roll. to convey or move in a wagon, cart, or other wheeled vehicle; wheel: The farmer trundled his produce to market in a rickety wagon. Archaic. to cause to rotate; twirl; spin.
>wheel
>rotate
Trundle sounds vaguely treadmill, which also has something to do with rotation :)
Wonder if the two words are etymologically related.
(The word is not use much nowadays; archaic, as the dictionary entry says.)
I was only speculating about the connection between the two words (trundle and treadmill), because they sound vaguely similar. Maybe they have a common Latin or Old English or Old German root, as many English words do.
Update: I checked, and it seems I may have been partly / loosely correct about the etymological connection:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trundle
Etymology
Noun and Verb
from trundle small wheel, alteration of earlier trendle, from Middle English, circle, ring, wheel, from Old English trendel; akin to Old English trendan to revolve
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/treadmill
c : a mill worked by persons treading on steps on the periphery of a wide wheel having a horizontal axis
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tread
tread 2 of 2 noun 1 a(1) : the part of a wheel or tire that makes contact with a road or rail
Italics mine.
Tread derives from Middle English treden; the difference here is to step vs to roll. The latter definition you cite is a newer usage (from the 20th century) which is more directly analogous to the tread on the bottom of one's shoe.
The use of a wheel in a treadmill seems more like an implementation detail; the obvious tie-in (IMO) is "persons treading on steps".
I meant to write:
vaguely like treadmill
”Type in haste, correct at leisure" - Me.
Like the quote: "Marry in haste, repent at leisure".
:)
If you liked that, you must read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, if not already read.
He was a polymath: a businessman, a scientist, a diplomat, and much more.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjami...
>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the traditional name for the unfinished record of his own life written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771 to 1790; however, Franklin appears to have called the work his Memoirs. Although it had a tortuous publication history after Franklin's death, this work has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
>Benjamin Franklin FRS FRSA FRSE (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705][Note 1] – April 17, 1790) was an American polymath: a leading writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher.[1] Among the most influential intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence; and the first postmaster general.[2]
"regret" at leisure would make more sense, because "repent" doesn't really have the right meaning (is more about wrongdoing/sin).
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/married-in-haste.html
Phrases are sometimes literally meaningless.
>"regret" at leisure would make more sense, because "repent" doesn't really have the right meaning (is more about wrongdoing/sin).
Makes sense, now that I read you say it, though I had not thought of that before.
That wouldn't work at all; "regret" doesn't have an intransitive use. You have to be regretting something.
there is a term for your latter point:
poetic licence:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license
aside: I realize i also kind of applied artistic licence in my comment here :), by not capitalizing the first words of my sentences, partly because feeling a bit lazy (on my mobile, typing is tedious and slow enough, even without switching case), and partly because I think single case (no concept of upper and lower case) is a better option.
sanskrit, for example, does not have upper and lower case, just one case, or maybe none.
go figure, er, i mean, go letter ;)
What? Where'd you learn English?
Take a look at the first two senses listed in wiktionary ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/marry#Etymology_1 ):
> 1. (intransitive) To enter into the conjugal or connubial state
> 2. (intransitive) To enter into marriage with one another.
It's a transitive verb.
The problem in your sentence is that the plain form of a verb is used for states, not activities, and marrying is an activity.
"I am marrying today" is just as intransitive, but without the artificially induced grammatical error.
That's not a valid sentence, unless the person you are to wed is named "Today". Such is stuff as Abbott and Costello cashed in on.
Of course, taken in context there may be implied antecedents in spoken dialog. Spoken dialog is often incomplete and rife with implied antecedents and frequently does not follow the rules of grammer. Sentence fragments and one-word sentences can about because of that.
"trundle" is related to "trend", also German "trent" and "entrinnen".
"tread" is related to "trot" and "trade".
ModE tread < MidE treden < OE tredan < PWG *tredan < PG *trudaną < PIE *dreh₂
ModE trade < MidE trade (meaning "track") < MLG trade < OSax trada < PG *tradō < PIE *dreh₂
Also possibly related, assuming we merge the PID *dre_ variants which all have similar meanings:
tramp[le]
trap (something that gets stepped on)
dromedary
palindrome (run back again)
? troll
? dorm (allegedly there's an old "sleep" meaning with the same spelling - this is unrelated to "dream, draugr" which means "deceive" though!)Cars don't trundle, overloaded trucks do.
Trundle seemed appropriate.
Hypothetical, but when you have a single block of 10 buildings, each housing 500 people - the trash generated is a lot and if each were to have their own dumpster parked outside, where would cars or delivery trucks park? If parking is allowed between the dumpsters, how would the trucks access those dumpsters? There's no room to park them off-street because the buildings typically abut next to each other without alleys in between.
That's without even mentioning that even if multiple buildings share a dumpster - then you run into the question of how do you deal with illegal dumping? How do you bill each building for trash removal? See: "The Absurd Problem of New York City Trash" by NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/upshot/nyc-tr...)
No paywall version: https://archive.ph/XFAFg
Discussion on that article: https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/1b5i1xk/the_...
A study: https://manhattan.institute/article/innovative-waste-managem...
What I'm trying to get at is that the trash problem in NYC, and any proposed solution, raises a lot more questions than anything else.
I for one, would love to see Amsterdam inspired under-sidewalk bins (https://www.core77.com/posts/102208/Amsterdams-Smart-System-...)
My nostalgic reference for this is R.A.L.F. from Flight of the Navigator - https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F.
The correct link is: <https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F.>
The chute terminals had quite a small aperture, with a sealed door; presumably to make it easier to create the necessary pressure differential. This happened regularly; every 30 minutes (or so) during daylight hours. It was loud. Really loud! With several terminals in a courtyard, running in a sequence, it was almost a never ending reverberation.
Of course, you can’t use them while they’re in this cycle. If anyone overfilled them — which was very easy — or ended up jamming the door open with some misshapen detritus then, try as it might, it just wouldn’t work at all. The building management were regularly seen wielding a broom, to try to force stuck loads down. Then, if you had anything that just couldn’t be made small enough for the chute, you had to use the (limited) dumpsters anyway; many did, because it was often just easier.
That’s not to say I think it wasn’t a good idea. It just needed its rough edges smoothed out a bit.
When I was building something and needed a certain component I could just ride my bicycle a few kilometers over the country, say what I needed and a couple of minutes later it would pop out of a tube behind the counter.
I am not very nostalgic, but I miss this immediacy and hope to live long enough to see drone delivery become ubiquitous.
[1] Think RadioShack, but not RadioShack. They claimed to be Europe's biggest, but I have no idea if this was ever true.
Using a grocery store as an example. I'm not a fan of shopping on my phone for some things like groceries. I like to look at the boxes and visually scan the shelves and see things I might not think to search for on my phone. This would allow for it but remove the need to walk up and down 30 aisles. I would still want to pick my produce/meat so this would require a slightly different approach, but the dry goods and other stuff that's typically in center of the store could work.
Yes. And when you do that they tend to buy more than they originally intended.
> I like to look at the boxes and visually scan the shelves and see things I might not think to search for on my phone.
Precisely. The store and those products are designed with this exact outcome in mind.
> but the dry goods and other stuff that's typically in center of the store could work.
That's why many warehouse stores have home delivery but put a hefty fee on those items. Unless, of course, you spend more than a minimum threshold. It's a narrow margin business so it's hard to reliably make any other type of model work.
On the Home delivery point. You're right free home delivery and narrow margins don't mesh. Yet, I have FREE home delivery options at dozens of stores/grocers in my area. I've never seen what I'd call hefty fees for this service. It's usually in the $1-10 range. They really compete for customers with this option; in my area anyway. Also, they push curbside pickup really hard now and it's always free. I've never seen that have a fee, yet someone in the store is being paid to walk around and pick your order off the shelves. We're paying for it somehow and this trend really took off during the same time as inflation ratcheted up, so my guess is it's being baked into prices and every customer is sharing the cost. In any case, I don't see why the in store shopping process couldn't be improved while home delivery coexisted. They each have their place and each customer has their preferences. Using myself as an example again, I do like pickup when it helps the logistics of my day or if I know exactly what I need and maybe I know it's heavy and want to be lazy.
Are you sure those aren't introductory offers?
> I've never seen what I'd call hefty fees for this service. It's usually in the $1-10 range
Is it being fulfilled by the store or Instacart? I'm referencing Costco which can charge $1 to $3 _per item_ for delivery, unless you order more than $75 in total. Those orders are fulfilled by the warehouse and not a third party.
> They really compete for customers with this option
They might just be outsourcing it and your subsidy is actually the third party investors.
> Also, they push curbside pickup really hard now
What does that look like? It's free, as you say, so what is the incentive, exactly?
> They each have their place and each customer has their preferences.
Which works as long as the cost of each preference is equal. Typically, it is not, which is my point. So you can set your expectations for the "future of grocery" around that, at least, until it changes.
I'm sure the free offers will go away at some point, but it's been available since the pandemic shook things up and is available to all. It's not like a Prime program type thing or a first delivery free promo. I have friends/family that have been using it for years now and never paid a cent (directly to delivery). Most retailers around me have their own pickers. Most employ drivers too, but some use the gig services on the backend as an outsourced delivery (customer wouldn't know at time of order). Pretty much all of them have gotten away from Instcart services although customers can still utilize it if they want to directly. It tends to be expensive so most people I know only use it if they need something from store that doesn't offer delivery. It's pretty rare now I think, but was pretty common pre-pandemic.
Curbside incentive is for customer is convenience. I live in a car dominant city. I think a common scenario I hear of is; can shop on device from anywhere, while taking kids to soccer or whatever, then you just quickly pick it up on the way home (it takes usually less than 5 minutes for them to bring it out). Incentive for business is that this is just expected at this point so they don't want you to shop at the competitor because they do this.
I don't think the cost has to be equal. I do like transparency though and would rather know how much I am paying above in store pricing if they are charging differently across the various channels. I don't always feel like paying extra for what I perceive as minor conveniences, and sometimes the same minor convenience could turn into a major convenience depending on many other factors (if I'm running late to something, can't find the time to go into a store for 30 minutes, kids are being fussy, etc)
Unfortunately argos isn't very fast, so the customer experience is not necessarily better than a normal retailer. They seem to focus on lowest cost, which means that they skimp on operatives and waiting times can be long. And of course, it isn't automated!
Here's the entire (customer-accessible) part of one such store:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2H6TX48/interior-of-an-argos-store...
Beer stores in Ontario used to be like that, too. You'd place your order and pay for it, and shortly thereafter, it would come rolling out of the back of the store on a rolling conveyor.
One of the engineers suggested adding a transparent loop the loop passing through the public atrium for a bit of fun but predictably this was denied.
The gold record will last way, way longer, as it's low density data, thus fairly redundant, and you could work around any micrometeorite holes.
A 12TB (uncompressed) Q2078A LTO-8 tape weighs 285.8g Depth: 111mm Height: 45.7mm Width: 113mm
An SSD has better data density. For example Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD: DIMENSION (WxHxD) 80 x 22 x 2.3 mm with WEIGHT Max 9.0g Weight
Highest density would be raw NAND flash chips: ICs would be ideal.
Maybe 12 inch wafers would be feasible but likely lower data density because flash chips are densely stacked within an IC.
https://untappedcities.com/2023/10/17/pneumatic-tube-mail-ne...
A lot of the material was also incorporated in their podcast about the same subject:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pneumatic-tube-mail-in...
These tubes were large, 24"L x 8" diameter. You could fit all sorts of stuff in there. It's so interesting to think that food, mail, and small package delivery in NYC could have peaked way back when pneumatic tubes were used (of course only in the optimal case with start/end near one of the 23 tube stations). Also really cool that there was a tube that ran over the Brooklyn bridge for sending mail or burritos between boroughs.
For further reading on unique NYC infrastructure, the New York City steam system is also very interesting and still in operation.
There's interesting non-pneumatic work from the Swiss company Cargo Sous Terrain, with self-poweres robot carriers shuttling materials around a city. Haven't heard or seen much in specifics, but their design material looks flashy & cool, and they supposedly are doing a tunnel. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cargo-sous-terrain
Outside of Atlanta GA, there's Pipedream, which launched a modest-sized intra-city auto omous robot delivery system at the end of 2023, which is cool. https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-fir...
It probably isn't worth the trouble nor a real efficiency gain but the idea of evacuated tubes with low air resistance or maybe even using real pneumatic pressure sounds cool. Especially for longer distances, higher capacities, the idea of some kind of hyperloop like system but a bit smaller & not human rated would be neat, could eliminate a colossal amount of CO2 & effort.
They've been "studying" and issuing PR since 2013, but so far, zero deployment. They are doing worse than The Boring Company.
Edit: and before that the Chicago tunnels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
Tiny elevated rails seems like it avoids a lot of the problems of both surface-level and flying delivery robots. I'm imagining that they either terminate inside businesses or form up in some kind of stacker that resembles those delivery lockers when full.
(Of course, I know the real reason: It's because humans on mopeds are cheaper, but they're not more efficient.)
The lane closest to the bank had a teller, but the other lanes all used pneumantic tubes to send paperwork and money back and forth.
That said, I wonder if pneumatic tubes have been going the way of railroads - extremely useful for their "right-of-ways" to run fiber.
From my midwestern US perspective, banks downtown tend not to have drive-throughs, and banks that are in lower-density areas always have drive-throughs.
But then, my perception is clouded by my own bias, wherein: I've spent most of my life in areas with zero public transportation and that generally despise pedestrians.
In areas where people tend to walk, bike, or use public transit instead of owning and driving a car, I can imagine that building a drive-through for a bank has very little utility to the bank or the bank's customers.
Whereas drive through bottle shops (liquor stores) are very common here which seems to sometimes surprise Americans.
Ours are basically just normal booze shops. Most people would be buying slabs of beer, bottles of wine, etc. Definitely convenient when you just need to grab something on the way to a party or a dinner or something.
Whats the use for those? Creating an account takes long, checkout out monye likewise.
I have trouble understanding what might customer do there. Banks are not fast at doing anything.
It’s a top notch sandwich delivery system.
Not the same but in a similar vein, I was in a big library once and it was having work done. Inside the ceiling were masses of conveyer belts shipping books to various floors and departments.
Now I wonder if an electromagnetic carriage system in such a tube would work, and if so just how expensive would it be?
Thinking about packet switching in 1 metre tubes is fun too. Almost like designing belts in Factorio. Every house would need an end point, and would you use star network topology?
Beyond pizza, Amazon type deliveries via tube would be great. "Delivered within an hour!"
The main issue with it — aside from the limited market; how many houses are big enough to justify the cost, and how many of those are new construction or to-the-studs remodeled in any given year? — will be reliability over time. Central vac systems eventually fail and generally homeowners find it simpler to buy a normal vacuum than to fix the system.
Now this seems like a job for semi-autonomous robots.
Theirs is a “Beam” system.
Each outlet has a copper pair of wires running to it, connected to two contact pins on the inside of the outlet, and the vacuum hose has a metal ring on it so that as it’s inserted, it completes an electrical circuit between the two contact pins, signalling the vacuum cleaner turn on, once the circuit is broken, it would turn off.
Perhaps the system you had actually worked like this.
Naturally 'lifetime' meant for the homeowner who purchased the unit, so the company often didn't have to honor the warranty as failures were uncommon until the 3rd, 4th or 5th owner. The tech was bemused when he came out to work on it since it was his first warranty call.
Maybe the math of it will end up on something like https://efficiencyiseverything.com/
I still remember when as a child a "situation" arose and I managed to block it with my clothes and my parents had to clear the blockage.
Around 2018, there were companies selling home-sized laundry folding machines for rather high prices. Those seem to have disappeared.
Basically, by the time anyone notices anything, you have about 5-7 minutes until the roof is involved and the building is a total loss. Unmodified balloon frame buildings are similar.
[321 points | 11 months ago | 125 comments]
It’s not the overall speed that destroys the blood cells, it is the acceleration and deceleration at either end which does it. These tube systems just don’t have the ability to include extensive gradual-acceleration and gradual-deceleration systems at either end.
It sounds to me like building logistics pipelines between hospitals (even partnering with the healthcare pneumatic logistics companies to do this) would be an ideal way to get started. Then expand the network from there with QoS packet prioritization schemes. Similar to how large Fiber Optic networks are done in some regions, or how arpanet started.
I would love a smaller version for my home office. Not sure what I would use it for. Maybe some app monitoring info.
And ear.
These things are loud. It is actually a feature in airports and train stations, as it signals that the board is updating and it is worth taking a look, in case there is a delay or something.
But if you don't want a loud notification, these things may get old very quickly.
TIL what those are called! I've only ever seen them in movies and when going through Frankfurt airport.
- ferry building, listing the next ferry and destination etc
- a certain restaurant cum wine bar, listing bottles avail and a count. when you order a bottle the count decrements. so cool.
Yeah now that you mentioned having one in your house I have the wildest dreams. Like one in my pantry with my shopping list on it so I can check it before going out the door....
- At my bank, it lets them operate multiple lanes of drive-through without a teller directly at each lane.
- The failure case of handing valuable, loose slips of paper back and forth from a car window to a building is a whole lot worse than for a bag of fast food.
Hey, come to think of it, dystopian pneumatic tube world is the movie Brazil https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
https://www.aerocom.co.uk/blog/how-much-does-a-pneumatic-tub...
I don’t know if this takes into consideration facilities remodeling.
A robot has to share space with everything else in its path. Mount rails on the ceiling and have carriages hanging off of them that can transport a variety of loads.
The major issue with these though is fire safety (you need to install appropriately sized doors that close in the event of a fire) and getting something certified to allow carrying of stuff directly overhead of people. And if it's really heavy loads, you'll need some sort of reinforcements to support the rails, which may not be doable in some settings, e.g. large long warehouses where the ceiling doubles as roof and is only spec'd to hold the weight of itself and a 50-year-record snowfall.
I haven't seen them anywhere except in old US movies.