It will make you feel a little woozy.

In my research into world's fairs my journey took me to some surprising places. There were those worrisome electrical "medical" devices, but this takes the cake. It's so out there it's beyond odd.

Short aside time: I actually worked in the old Eatons in Montreal where a device very similar to the one below was used.

So here we go. Sometimes around the beginning of the 1800's a British inventor, George Medhurst, came up with the idea to send letters and packages through pneumatic tubes. Shortly after that he expanded his idea to include people in what can only be described as a container pushed through a huge rubber tube by air pressure, essentially the same damn thing as the smaller packets.

Skip ahead 20 odd years and we find another British inventor, John Vallance, toying with the same idea. What are the odds about this going on anyways? Two British guys messing with huge black rubber tubes? Vallance actually built a full sized version, some 8 feet in diameter and running for 150 feet. Cooler heads prevailed and no one was forced to ride INSIDE the thing. In fact Medhurst pretty much knew for sure that it would be a crappy customer service experience and said so early on.

In 1827 he proposed a much more comfortable alternative with his "atmospheric railway". He kept the tube small and ran it along a standard rail line, using the air pressure to pull the train along the track.

All told, 4 atmospheric railways were built in England, France and Ireland. The latter two just used air power to pull the train up a hill, it was on it's own going down. The most successful of these railways, the London and Croydon Railway ran over 7 miles. The darn thing propelled a train to 70 miles an hour in 1845! That's moving by any standard. A small tube was layed between the rails with a slit in the top for a hook to protrude from. It was sealed with rubber and leather flaps to keep the pressure up. A piston in the tube was pushed by the air pressure. The railway folded in 1847.

Another railway, the South Devon Railway ran for about 15 miles and was seriously considered for a total run of over 50 miles. The railway's chief engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel thought this was the way to go. Because of the hilly terrain a larger tube was used and this system pushed trains along at 60 mph.

Other British inventors kept at the shooting a person through a tube idea. The Electric and International Telegraph Company, in 1853 used the idea to propel cartridges with paper messages in them, mainly telegrams, from the receiving telegraph office to their customer's desk. This was exactly what was used when I worked at Eaton's. In 1860, Josiah Latimer Clark, inventor of the above device joined up with Thomas Webster Rammell to form the London Pneumatic Dispatch Company and came up with a 30 inch tube into which a lozenge shaped craft was inserted and squirted through to it's destination.

Intended to carry cargo only this gizmo was demonstrated in 1861 at Battersea. A larger 4 foot diameter one came out shortly after and then an almost locomotive sized one was shown at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1864 and could carry people. Hmmm. Basically the huge tube 8x9 feet had a rail type car inserted into it that had a flared skirt of bristles to keep the pressure in, kind of like a spitball in a pen shaft.