David D'Onofrio:
I am Dave D'Onofrio, manager of the NYSC Archives. Joining me today is the curator of historical archives and interactive experiences here at the New York Stock Exchange, Anna Melo, and our guest author, founder of Untapped New York, Michelle Young. Michelle, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Michelle Young:
Thanks for having me here.
David D'Onofrio:
So this is going to be a slightly different conversation probably than what most of our listeners and viewers have come to expect from this podcast. So I'm going to start out doing something we don't often do, which is a little bit of an introduction to really maybe set the scene.
So imagine for a moment you're a teenager out in the suburbs, you're in your parents' station wagon. If you don't know what that is, ask your parents. And you pull up to the drive-through window at your local CVS. That's NYSC ticker symbol CVS. You press a button, you hear what sounds like a ragingly loud vacuum cleaner, and out pops a little canister with your prescription in it.
And that system is known as pneumatics. And in its day, going back to the Victorian era, that was essentially the data network, the fiber optics of its day. Instead of just sending information, you could send anything from data all the way up to a human being. So that's in part what we're going to be talking about today. And so as our guest, when we first met, and I can't even remember how the heck this came up as a topic, it came up that pneumatic tubes and pneumatics were a special interest of yours. So how does someone end up with that as one of their special interests?
Michelle Young:
Yeah, but I also discovered that it's one of your obsessions, so that's what we bonded over. We did that.
David D'Onofrio:
Well, I have a reason for that. I mean, I work in a place that used to be crisscrossed with these things, so I could always just pass it off as not just being a nerdy obsession of mine, but as a part of my job duties.
Michelle Young:
Well before I was writing about New York and teaching about New York, I was working in fashion. And when I left that, I went and took some classes at NYU in Columbia in urban planning, which where I eventually got my degree. And a teacher named Kate Ascher wrote a book called The Works. It's about how New York City works. And she used that as the basis of her class.
And lo and behold, one of the secrets in her book was that mail used to be moved underground in New York City by pneumatic tube. And this blew me away. I'm not born in New York City, but I started coming here and living here when I was a young teenager. So I really thought I knew a lot about New York City. And turns out I did not know about the pneumatic tube mail system. And that's really what got me started creating Untapped New York. It was like if I didn't know about this wacky historical fact, other people don't know about it. And I kind of became this weird expert on specifically pneumatic tube mail.
David D'Onofrio:
Fantastic. I had no idea that that was actually really the genesis of that whole project. So that's, first of all, fantastic. But to me, what got me into them at first was first more generally just as an archivist. I deal with paper, I deal with the analog world as really my thing. There are plenty of archivists who deal in digital. That's not my deal. I deal in the analog.
And so I just have a general appreciation for how the analog world used to deal with what are still modern-day problems, things like paging systems. We're in a room here surrounded by parts of our old paging system. You put me in a train station that still has a mechanical flipboard, and I'm a much happier traveler. So if you ever find yourself going through Secaucus Junction, they still have one.
Michelle Young:
Yeah, I know.
David D'Onofrio:
Or through even Newark Penn, at least their digital one sounds like a physical one.
Michelle Young:
I know. That was a real tragedy for New York nerds when they replaced that.
David D'Onofrio:
Right. To have that just go away.
Michelle Young:
I think we sat there all day and photographed it. The removal.
Anna Melo:
The history of New York nerds is a history of tragedies.
Michelle Young:
It's true.
David D'Onofrio:
I like to think that the history of almost any nerd can certainly be that way, but especially if you're dealing in the built world. And New York City sadly has torn down a lot of things that we probably wish we hadn't torn down. But that's the subject of a completely different podcast.
So coming here to the Exchange, of course, I learned that the way that information was moved around this building was, for decades, for really almost the better part of a century, was pneumatics, which to me absolutely blew my mind. To me, it was the thing that, and I had known about the mail system because I had learned about that. Who knows, I was probably watching something on Modern Marvels back in the day or something on the History Channel.
But to learn that that was what powered essentially all the data for from 1903 all the way until about 1979 here at the Exchange, if you need to move information, that's how you did it, which was just mind-blowing that we had a system that complex. But what I've loved to learn is just how much we're woven into this much greater story here in New York. Which is I know a lot about our system, and I know of course that we had a mail system here, but when it comes to the rest of the oeuvre of pneumatic tubes in New York City, there's actually a lot that I don't know about, which is actually why I love having these conversations because there's a lot I need to learn. Because I know that there was a much, much larger landscape here than just us here at the Exchange and just mail. So I would love to pick your brain just on where else that technology got used here.
Michelle Young:
Well, pneumatics was really all the rage at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. And we first had a pneumatic subway that ran for one block, basically around the Woolworth building. And it was a private entrepreneur who had the idea and built it at his own cost, kind of digging overnight. And there was even a piano in there, there was a chandelier. So I think we can all dream about a New York City subway of that ilk. Of course, it didn't last. And then the mail system was opened in 1897. New York was not the first city, but-
David D'Onofrio:
No, sadly, I think our friends down the road, down 95 in Philadelphia-
Michelle Young:
Yes, exactly.
David D'Onofrio:
... beat us out. Sadly, they also beat us out at having a stock exchange, but we try not to mention that too often here.
Michelle Young:
Yeah, I didn't know that.
David D'Onofrio:
On the other hand, I do know this, I do that New York's pneumatic system lasted a lot longer than Philadelphia's stock exchange. And we're here at the New York Stock Exchange, and last I checked, not too many people are visiting the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. That's out of stock.
Michelle Young:
So eventually the system ran about 27 miles. And each canister could hold 400 to 600 pieces of mail. That to me is a crazy, crazy number. You think of, I feel like canisters that are small, but they range from very small to massive, and went 30 to 40 miles per hour. I just love that vision of things just being whisked and shot underground. And then that sound that you mentioned when it comes up is like the whoom sound.
David D'Onofrio:
And what I love is just that differentiation. I said just at the outset that you didn't just necessarily move data with pneumatics, you moved anything in any size, really. There was really very little bounds to it other than the size of the blowers you had and the size of the pipe you can build. So the New York canisters were 27 pounds, and I can't remember if they were 16 or 18 inches.
Michelle Young:
They're so big. I saw one in the Postal Museum in DC. And I saw the photo before I went and I thought it was a little thing, and it's like...
David D'Onofrio:
Absolutely almost the size of, I used to work for the Navy, they're almost the size, literally of either a depth charge, not that most of our listeners know what that is, but either a depth charge or the kind of shell you would launch out of a World War II ship.
Michelle Young:
Yeah, and I think what was telling was what they used to test that system. So in one instance, they put a black cat through it. So it has to be big enough to fit a cat. They also put a Bible, and they also put a peach in. Those were like the three first things sent through the New York system.
David D'Onofrio:
And if I'm correct, I mean the cat got there just fine.
Michelle Young:
Yes.
David D'Onofrio:
I think I've read one report from a post worker that it looked a little dizzy when it got out, but it was just fine. But of course that may sound, I mean, some people may hear that and think it sounds like animal torture.
Michelle Young:
It is 1897.
David D'Onofrio:
It was 1897. There weren't quite the rules, the laws on the books we have today. But when you remember the fact that we had Beach dealing with his subway at that point 27 years earlier, clearly the point, the idea of putting a living being inside one of these things had already been tried-
Michelle Young:
And thought of. Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
And last I checked, no one had any ill effects from Beach's subway.
Michelle Young:
No, I haven't seen anything along those lines.
David D'Onofrio:
Now I know the Brits had their own experiments with that. Of course, we like to think of ourselves as the economic and innovation powerhouse here in the US. But we forget that back during the Industrial Revolution, the Brits beat us out on a lot of things. And I think it was Isambard Kingdom Brunel created his own pneumatic subway. Which I think that one, not quite as ritzy as, because that was pre-Victorian era. I think that was the 1840s. So no chandeliers. No pianos. I think you laid down in it like a coffin, and then you got sealed inside of it. So really much more like what that cat experienced.
Michelle Young:
Yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
That didn't last very long though. I can't imagine why someone didn't want to travel that way.
Anna Melo:
Beach's subway also didn't last very long.
David D'Onofrio:
Well, no. Sometimes you try something by using your own startup money, and you get to launch it into a massive global brand, like one of the world's leading electric cars. And sometimes you use your own money to launch a brand, and it just becomes a spectacle that people paid 25 cents to ride and then never goes anywhere.
Anna Melo:
But I think it's a real testament that we have the plans or idea for the Superloop and everything, that this idea of this technology persists. Unlike a lot of other technologies that get surpassed and forgotten.
David D'Onofrio:
Somehow, there must be something to it if we keep coming back to it decade after decade, generation after-
Michelle Young:
Maybe the simplicity of it, that it's like powered by air.
David D'Onofrio:
I mean, they can realize that there's something inherently simple in just that system. Everyone's picked up, unless they're not a troublemaker of any sort, which I find suspect if someone claims they aren't, but anyone who's picked up a straw and its wrapper and wet it down and fired something at a classmate across the cafeteria knows pneumatics. And you know that works.
Michelle Young:
And I hope our listeners will be jogged in their memories of having actually interacted maybe in their past with pneumatics. New York Public Library used it until about maybe a decade ago.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah, I think it was about 2016 that they-
Michelle Young:
When you requested a book, it gets sent down, and then that little piece of paper that requested the book. But even the, what is that camera shop, B&H, they still use it.
David D'Onofrio:
Oh, I had no idea.
Michelle Young:
And so you go and you buy a thing and you pay for it, or I think you order it, they send that thing down, and it actually comes back up to you, the actual object. They tell you to check it out. Is it okay? Is this what you wanted? And then goes back in the system and goes to the registers where you go and then pay for it.
Anna Melo:
That's so cool. Where's our invite? Let's go.
Michelle Young:
I know.
David D'Onofrio:
Well, things are open to the public. You can just walk into B&H. I think it actually says that right in their commercials.
Michelle Young:
You can just walk right in?
David D'Onofrio:
You just go to B&H.
Anna Melo:
Please come in person. Well, pneumatics are actually even alive and well today, but not used in the same way that they were historically. Of course, they were the powerhouse of moving information around, and they still move information around. But also stuff. And the application, I think probably the largest application still utilized today is in hospitals. Because in almost every hospital in the nation, there is a fully equipped pneumatic tube system because it is so much more efficient than hand carrying.
It is much more efficient to be able to bring blood samples, medications, even documentation around a hospital system. And you don't have to worry about stairs, you don't have to worry about elevators. They have run tests, and they found that even the slight jostling that occurs when something moves pneumatically isn't going to really impact any kind of sample, isn't going to really impact any kind of medication. So I actually learned this because I worked in a hospital back in high school, and I was allowed to use the pneumatic tube system one time. And it was the greatest day of my high school career. But it was extremely complicated, and I understand why they only let me do it once.
Michelle Young:
And that reminds me, when I first started writing about the pneumatic tubes, my dad said, "You know we have it in the hospital." He's a former cardiologist now. Now he's retired. And I was like, "Oh, I thought this looks like this amazing discovery. And apparently it's just been here the whole time with you."
David D'Onofrio:
And I had no idea. And it's not like I have not been in hospitals. I've gotten sick. And I've never interacted with them. I know people who are nurses, never mentioned it in their lives. I guess-
Anna Melo:
Well, it's a back of the house kind of thing. Back of the house.
David D'Onofrio:
... I was asking the wrong questions. But in short, that's the reason we had them here at the Exchange was that efficiency. You could run your specimen or a tissue sample down 10 stories, depending on how big your hospital is, and you would get it there, but how long is that going to take you?
And it was the same thing here. I think what most people don't realize when they look at the floor of the Stock Exchange now is that if you rewind to when this system, and we've talked about the size of the New York ones, here's what one of the original ones actually would've looked like. It was actually made out of wood before they even moved to plastic. So compare this to the, what, 20 something pound tube that the post office would've used, ours weighed barely even an ounce.
But you had that similar calculus was that we had 5,000 people on our trading floors, compared to the 200 plus we have now. And so if you needed to move information, you had a few options. And none of the other options were that really plausible, or plausible, but just not appealing. You could have your clerk run through a crowd of 5,000 people. And our trading floor is a huge room, but it gets crowded with just a few hundred. So if you imagine that room absolutely shoulder to shoulder, obviously having your clerk run is not the best thing to do.
You could try using a telephone, which we had plenty of. But then you have 5,000 people screaming all day because that's how business was done here. People just yelled at each other all day. And so the phone maybe not the best thing either. And so, lo and behold, efficiency won the day. We're just going to crisscross this building with tiny little pipes. Again, nothing in size compared to the kinds you would use in the postal service. Nothing like you would find over on Roosevelt Island today. Only a inch and a quarter diameter. So really, really tiny when you think about it.
And using an exceptionally small amount of pressure, you think that this thing that's going, this system would go end to end in 15 seconds. You think about the mail system going at 30 miles an hour, upwards of 60, if they really let it go. And you think, man, that must take some incredible amount of pressure. And I can't remember what the numbers for the New York Postal Service system were, but ours, it took one and a half pounds per square inch of pressure. And your bike tire has 60 pounds. Your car tire has 30. And this was just really barely a puff of air sending this flying on-
Michelle Young:
So efficient.
David D'Onofrio:
... its way. So efficient. It was truly, truly mind boggling, I think for the people who first experienced it. And sadly for me, my only experience is at the drive-through.
Anna Melo:
You got to come to the hospital.
Michelle Young:
The first time I met you, you literally pulled one out of your pocket. And I was like this guy. But can you explain to me where it would go? So it would start on the trading floor.
David D'Onofrio:
So most of these messages would start on the trading floor. There were few uses, but most of what happened was this was the way you reported that a transaction had occurred. So you have those 5,000 people downstairs screaming at each other. Once they come to an actual equitable sale of a stock or a bond, they need to let the rest of the world know that. And so that information has to go out to the ticker, has to go back to the phone clerks for the various brokerage houses. And so literally our trading floor at every one of what we call trading posts. So if you look at our trading floor, you see these massive figure eight structures. Back when the system was first introduced, they looked not much bigger than a street sign, but each one of them would've had an array of two entry points. You would have maybe 20 all lines [inaudible 00:16:20] depending on where you were sending it.
And then you would pop that off. It would go to a junction station where it would get rerouted. Because unlike say the postal service where it was just going on a straight line, this actually had to go someplace almost like a telephone operator, and get rerouted someplace else. And then mostly end up on the ticker tape. So the way the rest of the world knew what was happening inside this building started its life in one of these tubes.
Michelle Young:
That's so cool.
David D'Onofrio:
But sadly, today, now of course, everything happens much, much faster. If you told someone they had to wait 15 seconds for that final execution order, they would say that was an absolute nightmare of a time to wait. Now things happen in a microsecond. But back in 1903, 15 seconds was lightning fast.
Anna Melo:
Well, and at those tube relay, the switching stations that you mentioned, the people that worked on them were called tube men because of course they were all men at that point. And these clerks were, and I heard this from somebody who was actually working on the floor during this time as a tube man, tube men could only work in two hour shifts at any given time because it was so precise and detail oriented to catch the falling tubes and to send them off to their destinations in real time that any more than two hours, then somebody would start to lose focus and go a little bit crazy. So they would've to switch out the tube men on the switching stations every two hours.
Michelle Young:
Oh wow.
David D'Onofrio:
Because the volume of this was truly earth shattering. Compared to the New York Postal System, this could send, I think 40,000 carriers an hour. So if you multiply that out across the entire trading day, that's about a quarter of a million carriers going through the system every single day across 30 miles of pipe. So you could easily see how, if you start getting a little cross-eyed or a little bleary-eyed at the end of your shift, that all of a sudden you were sending executions to the wrong place-
Anna Melo:
We can't have that.
Michelle Young:
No.
David D'Onofrio:
And of course, it was used incidentally for other purposes. We have one tube station still in existence today. We have a little bit of the piping in storage. We obviously have some of the widgets, the carriers. But we have one tube station left. And it used to be actually in the restaurant on the seventh floor because the other use for it was that if someone needed to place their order for lunch and didn't want to go upstairs to the luncheon club, they would send their order upstairs. And so just imagine if you're waiting to put something on the ticker, and all of a sudden you get something that just says turkey on rye, that would absolutely not fly.
Michelle Young:
That was one of my-
Anna Melo:
Just time to switch out the tube clerk.
Michelle Young:
That was one of my fun stories that I covered through the mail system, was that people would send sandwich orders allegedly to a spot in the Bronx. And then the sandwich would then come back down through the tubes and be delivered downtown. Not sure if it's true, but I love it.
David D'Onofrio:
That would've saved a lot of time of some of the hazing that happened with our clerks on the floor. One of the things I know a lot of young clerks, when we still had clerks, would complain about is being told, go up to Little Italy and get 50 meatball for everyone on the trading floor. If they could have-
Michelle Young:
Yeah, and you already had the system.
David D'Onofrio:
Right. If they could have, although I mean-
Michelle Young:
Just extend it to Little Italy.
David D'Onofrio:
I can't imagine that-
Michelle Young:
It's true. I guess you have different size pipes.
David D'Onofrio:
You can't even get a Lifesaver in here.
Anna Melo:
You can roll up a salami.
David D'Onofrio:
Right.
Michelle Young:
One of the questions that I often get is, are there pneumatic tubes still left in the city? I know you said there's one station left in here. And there aren't a lot. A lot of it got dug up, as New York is always getting dug up and refilled. But the entry point into the post office in Chelsea, it's still there. And there's a hallway and they use it for storage. And when I was asked to be on the Smithsonian documentary about pneumatic tubes, they actually let us in there. And so the tubes are very big, and there's maybe six or eight that come out of the wall. So you can imagine the people there catching them.
David D'Onofrio:
So is being asked in by the Smithsonian, the only way to actually get in to see that?
Michelle Young:
Yeah, I tried before. And USP has finally said yes.
David D'Onofrio:
So the answer is persistence.
Michelle Young:
Yes. And then I also asked to go inside the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system for their trash. They said yes right away. They were equally excited and nerding out that people were interested in it.
David D'Onofrio:
So that's an interesting topic to maybe wrap up on because one thing, we're talking about a essentially Victorian technology, so what I always love to do is, we've mentioned Hyperloop a couple of times, we talked about how this is still being used in Roosevelt Island. What do you think the future holds? Is there a future, at least in the US, because I know in Europe, they're still actually pretty widely used for pneumatic systems.
Michelle Young:
I think if you have a geographically closed area. So Roosevelt Island, Disney World uses it as well, then it's an extremely efficient system. The problem sometimes is people. And so Roosevelt Island system told me that they have issues because people just throw in their vacuum cleaner, the Christmas tree. And then they have to bring in a huge magnet to actually pull it out of the system, or open it up down there and open up the tube. So it definitely requires some education. But I think for those areas, it does keep trucks off the road, for example, on Roosevelt Island, where their main road is just like one lane each direction. So it really helps.
David D'Onofrio:
Certainly has its benefits. And if there's one thing I guess I've learned from this, it's that, above all Christmas tree, not very aerodynamic despite its shape.
Michelle Young:
No.
David D'Onofrio:
Well, thank you so much. I mean, this has actually been, I love knowing where the exchange fits in in the rest of the story of New York City. Because sometimes we sit here within these walls and we just look inside. And so it's great to see just how we fit into the rest of that story. So thank you so much-
Michelle Young:
Thank you.
David D'Onofrio:
... for sharing with me today.
Michelle Young:
Pneumatics are all around us.
Anna Melo:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week, Inside the ICE House.
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