The modern supply chain is able to distribute significant amounts of goods remarkably quickly and securely, and one of the reasons for this is the cardboard boxes in which goods are shipped.

Part of the reason is that they are high quality, designed to carry far more than they weigh and with custom segments and designs to ensure products reach their destination safely, but another reason is that they are designed around the hub-and-spoke delivery system that has become a standard part of logistics.

It is the most efficient system for transporting parcels, but it is not the fastest ever designed.

Outside of profoundly ambitious non-starters such as rocket post, one of the fastest services for transporting letters, parcels and even perishable goods astonishingly never saw wide use outside of a few limited but highly important use cases.

The reasons for the downfall of pneumatic post are simultaneously simple and complex, as had the system been able to work as intended, it would not only have allowed for rapid transit of letters without the need for large vans but could have potentially changed how cities were built.

The Underground Postal Network

The concept of pneumatic transport was invented in 1799 by William Murdoch, who found that compressed air in a sealed or semi-sealed tube could fire a message extremely quickly to its intended destination.

This system was commercialised in the 1850s thanks to Josiah Clark, and the first system was employed between the London Stock Exchange and the Electric Telegraph Company, so stock prices could be rapidly acquired and disseminated.

The distance was relatively short; Threadneedle Street and Lothbury were about 300 metres apart. However, it meant that stock information could be provided and disseminated via telegraph in a matter of seconds rather than minutes, an advance that proved to be crucial for the LSE’s success.

This successful initial run led to the establishment of the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, the proposed designer, builder and operator of a London-wide postal system.

At first, the goals were rather more modest; by 1863, there was a two-foot-wide miniature vacuum train that could fire capsules carrying up to 35 post bags from London Euston railway station a third of a mile to the nearest post office on Eversholt Street in a single minute.

The initial goal was to add efficiency to the existing railway post network, and it appeared to be enough of a success for additional lines to be proposed at a time when traffic around London was becoming such an issue that overground transport was less viable.

However, just as the system was beginning to show promise and present itself as a viable future of parcel post, the system began to collapse quickly.

Shrinking Of A Dream

There were a lot of ambitions for the pneumatic tube system in London, and other major cities such as Paris, Barcelona and New York had adopted the system and started to test its capabilities in ways that were unimaginable.

Rather infamously, a section of North Philadelphia saw a sick cat be taken to the vets in a pneumatic tube, where it emerged unharmed but spooked enough to jump out of the canister and away from the waiting arms of the pet doctor.

In London, an additional line from Euston to Holborn was constructed in 1865, and the chairman of the London Pneumatic Despatch Company even travelled in one of the capsules back to the train station.

However, the next great extension of the system to Gresham Street and incorporating the General Post Office along the way was thwarted by the collapse of the discount house Overend, Gurney and Company in 1866.

As Overland Gurney was one of the biggest wholesale banks in London, its collapse triggered a banking crisis, a run on the banks and a collapse in railway stocks and general stock prices.

This really hurt the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, and whilst the extension would eventually reach the General Post Office and allow parcels to be sent from there to Newgate Street in just 17 minutes, it would ultimately be the last major extension to London’s pneumatic post network.

The Post Office found that despite the major expenditure, it did not save nearly as much time in practice as they expected, and when they stopped using the system in 1874, LPDC was liquidated a year later.

A later report by the Edinburgh Evening News noted that there was a problem with capsules continually getting stuck in the tunnels and causing delays.

This did not stop the use of pneumatic tubes, but they would be far smaller and far more limited in scope, often only being used to send letters, telegrams and small parcels around a single building.