Pneumatic tube canister

Used in the late 1940s and early 1950s to transport mail through New York City's pneumatic tube system, this canister could carry as many as six hundred letters and travel at about thirty-five miles per hour.

New York City began using pneumatic tubes in 1897. The original underground New York City tube system ran between the main post office building and station P, located in the Produce Exchange building. The Tubular Dispatch Company manufactured the pneumatic tubes and rented them to the Post Office Department for an annual fee of $148,500. An above-ground pneumatic system, attached to the Brooklyn Bridge, operated between New York City's post offices and Brooklyn, New York.

By 1898 the system connected twenty-one local post offices in Manhattan to the main post office. As late as 1914, 30 percent of first-class letters sent through the city's main post office were transmitted by pneumatic tube. By 1918 the Post Office Department began replacing its horse-drawn wagons with automobiles, which carried mail between railway stations and post offices even more rapidly than the pneumatic tube system.

During World War I, the Post Office Department suspended the service to conserve funding for the war effort. After the war, it restored the service, but while post offices and business centers moved with relative ease, the underground pneumatic system did not. New York City continued using a portion of the pneumatic tube service into the 1950s, but by then it was basically obsolete. The Post Office Department suspended it in 1953, pending review, but never reinstated it.

Museum ID: 0.269514.1