Pneumatic tube systems have been around for approximately 200 years. If you have seen one of these systems at all, it’s probably been at the drive-though window at a bank. You put your money, checks, receipts, etc. in a plastic carrier (aka a capsule) and load it into the tube. Air pressure moves it through the tube to the teller.

It turns out that these pneumatic systems can be incredible time-savers in hospitals, as described in this article:

Gone with the wind: Tubes are whisking samples across hospital

Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can’t match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye.

In four miles of tubing laced behind walls from basement to rooftop, the pneumatic tube system shuttles foot-long containers carrying everything from blood to medication. In a hospital the size of Stanford, where a quarter-mile’s distance might separate a tissue specimen from its destination lab, making good time means better medicine.

This video demonstrates how much pneumatic tubes help in a medical setting, delivering lab samples, drugs, x-rays, etc.:

This page demonstrates how a simple pneumatic tube system works:

Pneumatic Networks

It is basically a clever plumbing system for the flow of air through the tubes.

You can see a proposed transportation system using pneumatics on this page:

The Inteli-Tube Pneumatic Transportation System

Imagine a city uncluttered with paved roads, where vegetation grows between the buildings, cooling and taming the urban environment. Parkways and parking lots become just parks. Imagine animals never having to risk their lives crossing a busy freeway or interstate, the sight of road kill as unexpected as the sight of horse manure is today. Imagine goods being delivered to businesses quickly and efficiently — even automatically when needed. Imagine never having to deal with traffic, or getting lost, or refueling your vehicle, or wasting time driving when you could be putting the finishing touches on your report that is due. Imagine every home with a tube-port instead of a garage, every apartment building with a tube-shaft instead of an elevator, allowing people to get into a pod in their home and travel to anywhere that is hooked into the tube network. Imagine the entire world networked together with pneumatic tubing.

It seems more likely that personal transportation systems like these are going to fill that niche, but it does show how far pneumatic systems can go.

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