The name for this newsletter comes from my obsession with pneumatic tubes, pipes that historically (and to this day!) move objects from one place to another using compressed air. In the early 19th century, they were considered a halcyon of the future. Their dominance didn’t come to pass: Today if people know of them, they think of retrofuture references in shows like Futurama, Loki, and Lost, or the tubes that sprouted above bank drive-thru lanes, bringing your mom cash and — if it was a good day — you a lollipop.

People attempted to use these tubes for various purposes. I’m digging into them all (transport, trash, restaurants, and more!). But the first area I researched was the pneumatic mail systems that once ran underneath cities like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City.

I went deep on New York City, and this post will lay the groundwork (see what I did there?) of NYC’s 56-year pneumatic mail run. This history is interesting in and of itself — the technology continues to capture our imaginations (or at least my imagination). But following the ups and downs that came with New York’s mail tubes also gives us a glimpse of larger sociopolitical trends, from the threat of McCarthyism to the perennial question of whether and how the government should outsource certain services to the private sector.

How, you wonder? This article will talk about the rise of NYC’s pneumatic mail. And it all began with an angry feline.

October 7, 1897, was a celebratory day in New York City, unless you happened to be one unfortunate tomcat. On that date, the U.S. Post Office Department completed the first test of the city’s pneumatic tube mail system. The first mail tube took three minutes to cover the 7,500-foot round-trip journey from the main postal building to the New York Produce Exchange; inside, it held a Bible wrapped in an American flag, as well as copies of the U.S. Constitution and President William McKinley’s inaugural address. But other test shipments on that initial day were more creative.

“The carriers were not only a complete success for the transportation of first class matter, such as letters, but equally satisfactory for the carriage of packages of every description, including a full suit of clothes, a package of books, a live cat in a cotton sack and [a] dozen … eggs, etc.,” wrote Second Assistant Postmaster General W.S. Shallenberger in a report. Shallenberger was rather liberal with his “etc.”: The other items included two magnum bottles of champagne and a large artificial peach in a basket for New York Senator Chauncey Depew, who was serving as master of ceremonies.

Animal abuse aside (the cat was reportedly fine — Shallenberger said “it seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket for that purpose”), the pomp and circumstance of this opening ceremony marked the beginning of the mail system’s five-decade run in New York City. In 1897, after the privately owned Tubular Dispatch Company turned that one line over to the government, the city’s pneumatic mail network grew to contain approximately 27 miles of tubes, which shuttled millions of letters across Manhattan and Brooklyn every day.

But on December 31, 1953, the Post Office suspended the service, suggesting in a statement that it was “obsolete, unnecessary and excessively expensive.” The tubes have lain dormant ever since.

New York wasn’t the first city to embrace pneumatic mail. London opened its first mail system in 1863, and Paris established their own system in the late 1860s. Postmaster General John Wanamaker — best known as the founder of the department store Wanamaker’s — started pushing for the technology in his 1890 report to Congress.

Wanamaker was known for embracing new ways to move the mail — he, among other things, pushed rural free delivery. Urban areas were also ripe for innovation. “Cities were always a separate problem for the Postal Service,” Diane DeBlois, an independent historian specializing in philately, or the study and collection of postage stamps, told me. “They tended, of course, to be the nodes, and have a huge amount of mail … if you start the U.S. Postal history in 1792, let’s say, they were always looking for a way to streamline the delivery of mail but also the handling of mail in the city centers.”

Wanamaker was no longer postmaster general by the time pneumatic mail arrived in Manhattan, but he played a key role in getting the system off (or under, in this case) the ground. In 1893 — the year that Wanamaker left office — Philadelphia’s postal service became the first in the U.S. to adopt the pneumatic tube service. New York City soon followed suit, with the Tubular Dispatch Company breaking ground on August 2, 1897, to great fanfare. The first circuit trip — tested via fake fruit and a flesh-and-blood feline — took place two months later and cost $184,000, or roughly $7.2 million today.

In New York, workers placed cast iron mail tubes 4 to 18 feet below the street (Grand Central Station boasted the tubes with the lowest depths, though the Chrysler building had its tubes placed 12 feet below ground), running the tracks on top of the subway in some spots and beneath it in others. The mail containers, meanwhile, were steel cylinders or canisters measuring 2 feet long and 8 inches in diameter. They weighed 21 pounds when empty and could hold around 400 letters as they traveled through the system at a speed of 30 miles an hour. The tubes themselves were kept slick by workers who periodically sent decoy projectiles full of lubricating oil through the lines. At peak times, operators could send a mail carrier out every 6 to 15 seconds, moving roughly 360,000 letters an hour in each direction. By the mid-1920s, approximately 55% of the mail passed underneath the city through the tubes rather than via truck or wagon on New York City’s congested streets. 

The engineer behind both Philadelphia and New York’s postal tube systems was B.C. Batcheller, whose patented process eventually became the main pneumatic mail method in the U.S.

Batcheller had his own business entity, appropriately called the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Company, but in essence used it to make deals with the American Pneumatic Service Company, the conglomerate that came to own almost all of the United States’ pneumatic mail assets, including the totally Tubular Dispatch Company mentioned earlier.

The tubes continued to stretch across the city, with Tubular Dispatch opening additional lines in Manhattan and another contractor, the New York Newspaper Mail and Transportation Company, opening a circuit over the Brooklyn Bridge that connected the two boroughs on August 1, 1898.

But lawmakers in Washington, D.C. were skeptical. Congress halted all tube mail service from July 1, 1901, to June 30, 1902, by not appropriating funds for that fiscal year. “I am more sorry than I can express to see this system abandoned,” New York City Postmaster Van Cott told the New York Times. And while Van Cott admitted that moving mail via wagons would be cheaper, he called this comparison a “false economy,” explaining that the existing tube service was “much quicker” than the wagon system.

Van Cott was optimistic the system would be reinstated, and he was right. Based on the recommendations from a report from the Postmaster General, postal tube service resumed on July 1, 1902. The pneumatic mail service continued to expand. The companies that owned and ran the tubes consolidated under one entity, the American Pneumatic Service, which owned all the tube systems in the U.S. except for Philadelphia’s.

“[Having a monopoly provider] is really normal when it comes to the various kinds of private contractors that do business with the United States Postal Service — did then and do now,” says DeBlois. As such, the American Pneumatic Service Company boasted about their position rather than shied away from it. The company was also more than happy for the government to buy them out, making the surprising claim in a 1918 Congressional report that the postal service would be able to run the system more efficiently.

Ultimately, the report recommended that the U.S. buy out American Pneumatic Service Company, even though they acknowledged it would cost  an additional $312 a day, a decision mirrored a few years earlier in 1912 when a joint commission between the Senate and House of Representatives recommended the government take full control of the tubes.

Postmaster General Albert Burleson had other ideas. He minced no words when describing his dislike of the service. In his 1917 annual report to Congress, he declared that “the rental paid for the pneumatic tubes is exorbitant, unjustified, and an extravagant waste of public funds.”

Burleson added, “All ... reports with one exception show an inevitable drift toward the abandonment of the tubes because of the advent of the automobile. While all other kinds of transportation facilities have been greatly improved during the past 15 years, the pneumatic tubes have been at a standstill.”

The postmaster general was almost evangelical in his critique; he called the tube system an “incubus” and reportedly sent a copy of his annual report to every member of Congress, attaching a personal letter asking for their “careful consideration.”

Burleson’s move was not a popular one, and was attacked by Congress, the public, the press and —  unsurprisingly — the American Pneumatic Service Company.  The Postmaster General, however, was known for his political fervor (and is marked in history for pushing segregation into government as well as his censorship of the mail during World War I). He ultimately won: Congress didn’t appropriate funding for pneumatic mail, defying the recommendations of the 484-page congressional report and shuttering all mail tube systems in the U.S. on July 1, 1919. Service was restored in New York in 1922 and in Boston in 1926, partly due to public complaints about the number of mail vehicles clogging the streets.

Their reopening was again, controversial in Washington. Senator McKellar, a Democrat from Tennessee called it “dangerously near a brazen steal of Federal funds,” and that New York along with other tube cities would “push the camel’s body under the tent” to get them working again, suggesting that putting these systems back in place would have larger, undesirable consequences.

Those consequences did, indeed, eventually come to a head. But that’s a story for next week.

Parts of this post originally appeared in my article for smithsonianmag.com, published on December 22, 2023.

Thanks for reading! Next week will be about the mail system’s fall. If you have a question related to this article you’d love to see answered, please let me know!