Speculations

I have now moved on from Atkinson and his Maigret to the second reading of  'La Première enquête de Maigret', from Volume XIII of the collected edition. To which I should add, in all modesty, that a proportion of the preceding 12 volumes are missing and another proportion are not Maigret at all, rather miscellaneous police yarns brigaded with Maigret (as explained in various notes de l'éditeur), yarns which I have mostly skipped over, at least for the present.

But in this Maigret yarn, there is mention from time to time of pneumatiques which Larousse tells me are, or more probably were, a form of air powered telegram in some large towns and cities in France. Presumably a spin-off from systems in department stores which survived, at least in this country, until my childhood, and which still exist in a vestigal form in certain large Sainsbury's to move cash from the tobacco kiosks to the accounts departments.

However, the subject of this morning's before-rising speculation was how a town might organise its pneumatic delivery service.

According to Larousse, the messages were written on standardised message forms, so presumably they were rolled up and put inside a small tube, something like a small torpedo with a hatch.

The tubes in which the torpedoes ran presumably connected up the larger post offices, with the idea being that you delivered your message to the office at your end and that a delivery boy took it from the office at the other end to its destination on the street, much in the way of telegrams, which system also lasted.at least until the late 1950's. So roughly contemporary. Perhaps the advantage of the pneumatique was that you sent your own handwritten message, paid for by the page rather than by the word, whereas that of the telegram was the much larger network.

Was it just one message to the tube, sent on demand, or was there a schedule with tubes going on the hour, every hour?

I then speculated about how the pipes were organised.

Was it a simple star system with there being two pipes connecting every post office to a distribution hub, with a small army of torpedo handlers at the hub moving the torpedoes from the source pipe to the destination pipe?

Were the pipes hung off buildings and telegraph poles or did they go underground?

Was there a more complicated topology with several distribution centres?

Rather improbably, was there some form of routing? With some kind of destination code on the outside of the torpedo which could control in some tricky way the passage of the torpedo through the network of pipes? Was there some equivalent of points on a railway?

Was a time of day angle, with the nine o'clock tube taking a different route from that at half past? With a small army of pointsmen working all the points. Much less tricky than destination codes.

Maybe in some idle moment later today, I shall ask wikipedia all about it. Perhaps it will turn out that such things existed in this country too.

Maybe also some enterprising systems teacher in some secondary school will make it an examination question: write a short illustrated essay on how such a thing might be organised. Do not use more than five sides and do not take more than ten minutes.

PS: after breakfast: I felt sure that I had noticed the tubes at Sainsbury's at some point and have now got around to checking the archive, rather quicker than checking the three blogs one at a time and helped along by the Word search facility, quite good for this sort of thing. Pneumatic turned out to be the necessary search term, with atmospheric a poor second. See references 1 and 2, respectively.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=The+Turin+of+Garrett+Lane.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/a-different-kind-of-heritage-operation.html.