Berlin had one of the largest pneumatic mail systems in the world. A (highly recommended) Berlin Unterwelten tour covers it. There is still a big, beautiful Rohrpost building in Mitte close to the big Synagogue.
The Real store at Leopoldplatz has a pneumatic tube system that reaches every cash register. You can see the tubes go up and along the ceiling. I believe that it's one of the failed Walmart stores from their disastrous attempts to conquer the German market.
> The Real store at Leopoldplatz has a pneumatic tube system that reaches every cash register.
Isn’t this pretty common in hypermarkets? I’ve seen systems of pneumatic tubes running from the registers at Auchans or Carrefours in multiple European countries. I imagine that people don’t notice them just because pneumatic tubes are now so little a part of everyday life that one doesn’t even expect to see them.
I've seen them in DIY stores in the Netherlands as well, mainly used to send larger cash sums to the safe... safely.
Most stores will have a lockbox at cash registers where any cash amount over a certain amount is stored in. I'm not sure if these lockboxes have a plain lock or a time lock and are only moved to the safe after closing time though. But most stores also discourage the use of cash, because it puts them at risk of robberies and counterfeits.
Paying with cash is still attractive though, because cash is tax free. That is, no paper trail if you pay for a job by cash and the person doing it doesn't log anything. Very popular with tradespeople.
"Paying with cash is still attractive though, because cash is tax free. That is, no paper trail if you pay for a job by cash and the person doing it doesn't log anything. Very popular with tradespeople."
I haven’t been paying much attention recently, and we tend to use bugger all cash here these days, and there are still companies servicing vacuum cash transfer systems here in Australia.
I recall seeing such systems in supermarkets and bottle shops, fairly certain the closest supermarket still has a system.
Department stores in the past had this in Canada. Afaik they were used to send money from tills to the backoffice periodically after a certain level of cash in the drawer was reached.
(Mainly usa context) Most of what people commonly call "us supermarkets" are also "hypermarkets". But basically it's combining not only department stores but also with grocery stores.
For example Target used to not include groceries until recently. For Walmart it's the difference between their 'regular' Walmart and the Walmart Supercenters. (Target also has their SuperTarget variant)
Most of Fred Meyer's are 'hypermarkets' including fuel, groceries and more.
Though, the trend isn't always to ever larger stores. There's Walmart Neighborhood Market and even say small Ikea stores nowadays.
> For example Target used to not include groceries until recently.
There was a span of time where many of them didn't, but I was surprised to learn recently that the first ever Target store included groceries. See this 1962-05-03 advertisement[0] for the grand opening.
As a Pole, I don't think I've heard the term "hypermarket" in like 10 years. There was a boom for all that exaggerated Western-style consumerism, but this kinda died down as medium-sized discount stores took over the majority of the market. Family trips to a shopping center might be a thing of the past - but also I'm not a kid anymore.
Depends a bit on where you are. In France it's definitely a thing if you live outside of the major cities. In the Netherlands, active government intervention stopped these car-only hypermarkets ("weidemarkten").
Gotta say though, Poland has both, but indeed has a full range from small Zabkas to Auchans at the edge of town (probably not a coincidence it's French brands operating the hypermarkets).
Polish hypermarkets, at least in my experience, were never car-only. They were always within the city enough that one could easily use public transportation to shop there. What is car-only in Poland are wholesaler shops like Makro, which are often located well outside cities, but those are not meant for ordinary consumers.
> As a Pole, I don't think I've heard the term "hypermarket" in like 10 years.
Carrefour Poland and Auchan Poland commonly use the term in to describe their own huge shops, like the one in Warsaw’s Arkadia shopping mall. Just do a Google search for the phrase “w naszym hipermarkecie”.
Yeah. 15 years ago going to Auchan, Carrefour, Tesco or Real was all the rage. Right now Tesco and Real are dead, and everyone just walks to the nearest Lidl/Aldi/Biedronka
The largest still in use system is allegedly in a hospital in Munich (Großhadern Clinic).
Also the largest German electronics store (think German version of Radio Shack) had such a system in their main store in Hirschau. I was endlessly fascinated about this as kid when the containers with my BC547s, 1N4001s and NE555s where popping out of the tubes.
Prague has/had over 50 km. Was used up until early 00s. Loads of it still exists, it's the last surviving municipal tube system, though not functional at the moment.
Interesting you mention this. I remember that the old Kaufland and Real where I usually went to, when I was still living at my mom's place, had them for a very long time.
But both stores have been rebuilt, so I guess they got rid of it.
I wish the postal system were replaced with a request-only series of pneumatic tubes. Then I would simply never request mail, and life would be slightly more convenient!
Chaos Communication Congress often features the “Silk Road” network of pneumatic tubes, powered by regular vacuum cleaners. People obviously send a lot of viagra spam, but I’ve even seen vodka shots delivered through it.
You build your own tube capsule that first needs to be “certified” by running through a test track.
A hacker conference (organized by the Chaos Computer Club I'd guess, a famous hacking club of many decades),
runs, during the conference (and surely just for fun)
their own "silk road" (a clandestine marketplace, named after the namesake "dark web" online marketplace, where people bought drugs and other illegal services)
on top of a pneumatic tube network - a network of connected physical pipes used to send messages pushing them using air (e.g. some paper note inside a container). Pneumatic tubes were a physical "instant messaging" system used in early 20th century offices and large organizational buildings.
This "for fun" pneumatic tube network is powered via regular vacuum cleaner motors (as opposed to the air pressure being produced by some dedicated motor).
In this network, inside the conference area, people send lots of BS spam messages for fun, and sometimes even vodca shots (inside some container) from one point to another.
People attending the conference can build their own tube capsule (their own message/small item container to be transmitted through the tubes), but they first have to show that they can run through a test track (a smaller test pneumatic pipe line), so that they don't stuck/create issues when they put them into the main network.
> "silk road" (a clandestine marketplace, named after the namesake "dark web" online marketplace...)
The dark web marketplace itself was jokingly named after the original "Silk Road", a "network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century.[2] Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles)" [1]
If the top-level comment was edited after yours, disregard, but if not... did you put in any effort before you come in with such entitled incredulity? I spent like 30 seconds and it was understood without knowing anything about Chaos etc, it's very on topic with TFA, can the bar be any lower? How are you able to read say any technical documentation?
I read it as good-humoured incredulity, something like: "This comment is so intriguingly bizarre, I don't where to begin making sense of it – can anyone explain?"
Sounds like you read it as something like: "I am angry that I don't understand this comment and I demand others stop what they are doing and explain it to me immediately."
Either of us could be right, but it doesn't matter, and I'm happier!
No worries. I was going for the first one. Such an outlandish series of sentences describing some kind of hacker conference wonderland. I wanted more explanation and to express my wonderment.
Someone asks a good natured question and so you go on a rant that questions everything, including their ability to stay employed? That must make you feel very superior. Good for you.
The early Blue Man Group [0] shows off-Broadway (before they were the Intel guys) were billed as "Blue Man/Tubes"
They'd run corrugated pipe from each seat in the theater to the waiting hall.
Which meant that while you were waiting for the next show, you could talk to someone who was watching the current show.
Was pretty neat.
PS: Also walked out of the show with a nice black eye, after my pre-teen self went down in the final toilet paper wave and caught the heel of the guy in front of me. Still worth it!
Reminds me, there was a nightclub in Newcastle-upon-Tyne way back in the 1980s which had a telephone on each table. If you fancied someone on another table you'd dial their table phone and strike up a chat. Can't remember the name of the club but it was on Market Street somewhere. Good times!
When I lived in the student dorms at uni, each room had it's own telephone, and the numbers were somewhat consecutive in some kind of order. So drunk students were playing tic-tac-toe in the middle of the night by calling the rooms on the other side of the street trying to get a row/column of lit windows. ;)
For RPGers, this is one of the many elements from that time that show up in "Berlin: The Wicked City" for Call of Cthulhu. It doesn't get the attention that it deserves as a module and setting. Weimar Berlin is practically mythos-tastic in and of itself.
RPG setting books can be a ton of fun even if you're not into roleplaying per se. I picked up one of the AD&D Lankhmar books as a kid, and while I love Fritz Leiber, reading those books can immerse you in a richly detailed world in a way that Leiber's original work doesn't quite do.
That probably applies even more to Lovecraft, who's one of my favorite writers, but I know plenty of people who don't like his writing but are really into Call of Cthulhu and other Mythos stuff.
Germany, up until the rise of the Nazis, was a popular destination for Eastern Jews fleeing pogroms, a centre of sexuality research, cutting-edge culture for music and film.
We should do a better job of remembering that, because the reason none of that survives is "the Nazis murdered everyone". Particularly given the direct adoption of Nazi-era phraseology in modern political movements.
Yes, it's sad how little attention that period of German history gets especially abroad. Babylon Berlin is a fantastic German TV production that captures the cultural side of the late Weimar period very well.
Of course, the musical Cabaret as well. Based on Christopher Isherwood's writings.
Unsurprisingly, the film sanitizes things a little bit and makes it into a Liza Minnelli star vehicle--which actually improves on some book problems with the stage version but sort of makes it less interesting overall. Still worth a watch though. The stage version is still playing in London.
The play uses the idea of being able to phone another table as well.
I just watched this for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Enjoyable film, though I actually cried at the end, knowing what was about to happen there.
To get an insight into the time, I can highly recommend reading the diaries of Harry Graf Kessler.[1] Extensive excerpts are available in English translation under the title: "Berlin in Lights".
The other reply is correct, I'm referencing the Nazi's brand of rhetoric.
Today's rhetoric has the charming variety of "exactly the same" to "distinctly similar". Blood libel, for example being exactly the same as what Qanon believer espouse, and reactionary rhetoric about drag performers being distinctly similar to "degenerate art". A 1500 person poll had 50% of Republicans believing in a pedophile cult among democrat Elites[1]. 25% identify as believing in Qanon, which is literally blood libel [2].
I.. don't think that's what they're doing at all. "Sexual Bolshevism" was used in a derogatory sense by the Nazis, criticizing more liberal sexual views and practices by implying it was related to the Russian Bolsheviks. I think what the above poster is doing is comparing similar critique heard today, to what the Nazis were saying back then.
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make – things don't only exist within a spectrum of good and bad.
The context of the thread was that, like modern western culture, early 20th century German culture was highly stratified, and as such, increasingly polarizing. So far I think your comments support this comparison.
The cutthroats who ran the revolution won't cede power to anyone, they didn't risk their lives for that. Every revolution is followed by the spider can where the most ruthless kill the rest.
They didn't attract voters by peddling Holocaust, they came to power on the promise of tackling the perceived immorality of drugged-up parties, child prostitution and its contrast with poverty. Yes, "stolen victory" too, but who would care about that if the country wasn't in disarray?
> It doesn't get the attention that it deserves as a module and setting. Weimar Berlin is practically mythos-tastic in and of itself.
I suspect weimar berlin is just pretty difficult setting to utilize; in particular you would be trying to draw inspiration from and evoke art/media of the time, which in this case would be stuff like German expressionist cinema and modernist literature which do not have exactly mass-market appral, compared to e.g. victorian era works.
This is a titillating combination of remote (don’t know the person) and in-person (you can see them right there across the room. Something that’s impossible to recreate with Tender, etc.
There are two fatal flaws to the system that’s described in the article and the more recent examples mentioned the comments, though: (1) first call takes all, you wouldn’t know how many people would be interested in you; and (2) denial of date, where your first caller can keep you on the call indefinitely, ruining your chances with others.
And what if you receive no calls in a reasonable amount of time, e.g., 10 minutes? In a modern implementation one of these call-less people can be chosen at random and displayed on a big screen, to increase their chances.
I would totally go to a club like this, both the 20s Charleston version or a 80s version.
Regarding the "fatal flaws" in such a system, the same could be said if someone were to strike up a conversation in-person.
If others see that a person is engaged in conversation, they might not be so quick to interrupt (that could come off as rude, and lessen your chances of success).
On the other hand, perhaps you are daring, and when you notice the person who is being DoS'ed frown when they answer the phone, you decide to stand up and actually say hello (effectively rescuing them from their attacker).
Perhaps the continue (unfairly) occupation of the phone line would encourage someone to be brave and walk the distance to make a face-to-face conversation? :) Not too bad at all, isn’t it?
Oh yea this is a lot of fun imagine a club where there’s color coded phones on the wall based on what you’re looking for and when you pick one up you are connected to someone else on the other end and you can talk and maybe meet up with them if you like what you hear.
Just happened to read about pneumatic tubes around the world in The Victorian Internet. Even though pneumatic tubes were invented after the telegraph, they didn't suffer the same congestion issues as the telegraph (because you could send messages in bulk, I guess?). And unlike how telegram were charged by-the-word, pneumatic tube messages were charged a fixed price. The book focused more on the Paris pneumatic tube network than the Berlin one.
I had an office job ca. 1985-1988 during which my manager asked me for my thoughts on installing a pneumatic tube system. The office was located on 2 floors, ie, the 18th and the 39th. I don't quite recall her motivation and reasoning, other than to speed up the transfer of paper docs. Up until then, this was mainly the domain of the mail clerk. I think my manager intended for the tubes to transit between the 2 mailrooms on both floors, so the onus would be put on each employee check the tube room for anything that was due to them. At least the mail clerk delivered straight to everyone's desks.
I was less enthusiastic about it, and told her so. Ultimately, no tube system was installed.
One might romanticize how nice it would be to meet dates outside an app again.
In Tokyo, there are bars specifically tailored for people who are seeking dates. The bar even has displays outside showing the number of men and women currently in the venue. When you get inside, you get to chat to cohorts of the opposite gender for a given amount of time (e.g. 15 min) before you move to the next round.
How do these bars get women to come? The men have to pay for all their drinks. In my only experience (dragged by my friends), the women kept ordering more drinks while chatting amongst themselves. I saw the tab and never went back in again.
One thing not mentioned in the article is whether the semi-anonymous nature of the tubes allowed for safer same-sex flirtation. I must imagine that it did, especially given what I've heard of 1920s Berlin.
Thank you! I was wracking my brain, trying to remember the name of the place.
Remote Lounge could have been cooler, but it played up more of the voyeur angle instead of the communication angle, I felt. (Or maybe that was just me, I dunno.)
Every booth had a cam and a TV, and you used controls to select other booths' cams, pan them around, and watch other people.
Amazon is announcing the new Pneumail Prime Cannon, it fires your orders directly from the van mounted turret, across your fence and into your living room through your window.
Delivero have these super unrealistic estimates sometimes. The food is still being cooked at the other side of town but they estimate it might be delivered in a minute.
Always makes me think of cannon or ballistic missile based burito delivery. Because even with that the estimate is probably overly optimistic.
My grandpa lived in Berlin in the 20s but I'm sure he was too square to participate in something cool like this. When he was in his 80s, though, he was a early adopter of "Bildschirmtext".
I mean, can’t we? If a place wants to they can just add a wifi network with a captive portal which leads patrons to a table-to-table chat system. Or a QR code per table with a flashing light next to it so you know your table have a message even if you haven’t got your phone out.
I bet it will be cheaper and easier to maintain than installing pneumatic tubes to every table too.
>captive portal which leads patrons to a table-to-table chat system
The unreliability of captive portals across devices aside, they'll make you download some app you'll never use again, or they'll take your email and spam you later.
That is not a “we can’t do it” problem. That is a “they don’t want to do it” problem.
If you want it and you think it is cool you can have prototypes in a day max. Making it usable enough so even drunk people won’t need help using it will take longer, but it is certainly more manageable than the vacuum tubes as a hobby project.
The Real store at Leopoldplatz has a pneumatic tube system that reaches every cash register. You can see the tubes go up and along the ceiling. I believe that it's one of the failed Walmart stores from their disastrous attempts to conquer the German market.