Pneumatic tubes! They’re all around us! Well, not really anymore, but if you go back a hundred years or so, you’d see them in pretty much any decent-sized retail store, bank, or hotel. (And also, of course, your mail might have been delivered by them if you happened to live in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, or St. Louis.)
Today I’m going to talk about how those tubes, which moved things (like money!) through them via compressed air, were in 95% of retail stores at the turn of the 20th century. Their prevalence is all thanks to one dude: William Stickney Lamson, who saw the future in a sliced croquet ball.
Sketch of the first carrier for Lamson’s “cash railway.” Croquet balls rolled so pneumatic tubes could suck (or blow).
Source: The Story of a Service Idea (1912)
From croquet balls & wires, to canisters & tubes
In 1879, Lamson had a small dry goods shop in Boston where he came up with the idea of moving money via a “cash railway.” The original system involved wires and the sliced croquet ball shown above.
What was the cash railway used for? Why, for carrying cash, of course! In large department stores, there were centralized locations where women (yes, this was seen as a “woman’s” job) would collect money and make change for purchases.
The wire/croquet ball system soon evolved into a more robust one using pneumatic tubes. Earlier versions of the tubes were powered by feet! Someone would pump up and down on a pedal that would shuttle the canister to the central change-making location. A less-fun motor version was introduced later on, but tubes using the power of feet will always hold a special place in my heart. I mean, look at this beauty:
Note the pedal at the bottom. How fun would it be to jump up and down on it and watch the canister shoot away?
Source: The Story of a Service Idea (1912)
Foot-powered or otherwise, a 1924 article in The Pomona Progress describes the system better than I could:
The two salespeople who will so readily serve you are the clerk behind the counter and the cashier at the "home station" — The heart of the Lamson system...
You enter the Bowen store with the desire to purchase. You make your selection. Hand a bill of a large denomination to the sales woman and she makes out a sales slip, reaches in a basket at her elbow, takes a small metal cylinder of approximately the same size as a small baking powder can, opens a cap at one end of it with a quick part turn and therein deposits your money and the record of the sale. She then inserts the cylinder in the throat of a suction tube bending its head over the carrier basket and whisk: — it is gone.
That has taken much less time than it takes you to read those lines. The saleswoman, who all this while has been engaging you in pleasant and interesting conversation about this, that, or the other — really no matter what — starts to wrap up your package.
Just as she is about to break the string after deftly twisting the knot there is a whisper of rushing air, a slight click, and the buffered canister drops in the basket at her side.
Your package, your change, a receipt and a smiling “thank you” are delivered to you simultaneously and you are on your way carrying a vivid impression of efficient, certain satisfaction.
The efficiencies brought by the tubes especially appealed to retail stores: “Besides this saving of time to the customer the store is relieved of all the annoying bustle and confusion of boys running for cash on the various retail floors,” one 1882 article in The Boston Globe reported. The benefit to the owner, of course, was reduced labor costs, with tube manufacturers claiming stores would see a return on their investment within a year.
The “home station”; making change all day, every day.
Source: The Story of a Service Idea (1912)
Lamson tubes everywhere
Lamson tubes spread out across industries. By 1912, the company had over 60,000 customers globally in several sectors including retail, banks, insurance offices, court rooms, libraries, hotels, and industrial plants. Some saw the tubes as proof that machines are meant to replace human work.
“The motto of the company is to substitute machines for men and for children as carriers, in every possible way,” a 1914 Boston Globe article said about the corporation that owned Lamson, before including a quote that resonates across time: “[President] Emeritus Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard says: ‘No man should be employed at a task which a machine can perform,’ and the Lamson Company supplements that statement by this: ‘Because it doesn’t pay.’”
In the early and mid-20th century, having a Lamson system was something stores and hotels boasted about; a sign that their establishments were sophisticated and modern. Many of those systems lasted until the 1980s, when electronic tills took over. Working ones are hard to find in retail today, though some still exist in warehouse stores like Home Depot and Costco, where they’re used to shuttle cash to a secure vault on-site. If you see one working in the wild, let me know!
Want weird stories like this delivered to your inbox every week? Subscribe below!