Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals 350
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "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."
Rollofle, you can't download a pizza either (Score:4, Insightful)
So the point of this article is that physical tasks, like plumbing or carrying infected blood, can't be done electronically ?!?!
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The reason why they do this is NOT about cost cutting.
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Actually - it is. Imagine the amount of time and work needed to deliver all those small items like tissue samples, paper documents and X-rays around the hospital by hand.
Sometimes time is of an issue, and a pneumatic tube is a simple and beautiful solution to a problem.
Anyway - that delivery system is used in many other places than hospitals too. Like in supermarkets where the tellers can send excess cash to the vault without leaving their station.
Even heavy industry uses it for transport of samples from th
Used in other places, too (Score:5, Insightful)
Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Informative)
Heck, the first New York City subway was pneumatic. (It was also very short, and short-lived.)
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wow, I wanna go and put my junk in those!
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Funny)
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Somewhere in here, there's a joke about Java's garbage collection.
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Of course there is. Java's GC sucks too.
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It was initially supposed to handle grocery delivery as well, but... routing problems.
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I wasn't aware that Freud wore a slip. That really clarifies a lot of other questions I had about him. God, I'm glad other bits never made it into the mainstream. Just imagine the Freudian corset, stockings, etc. I guess he took his Oedipus Complex a step beyond, eh?
That's one mighty nice Freudian Chastity Belt(tm) you have there.
I'm going to have nightmares for weeks. ick.
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Funny)
So what you're saying is that mail in NYC is a truck you put things on, not a series of tubes?
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Funny)
Heck, the first New York City subway was pneumatic. (It was also very short, and short-lived.)
Could that be because it sucked?
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, it was because the propulsion system blew.
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Funny)
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Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
And I'm amazed no one's mentioned the drive-up teller stations at the bank. All the ones except the one right at the building are pneumatic with those thermos-looking tubes you stuff your checks etc into and send into the bank.
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Used in other places, too (Score:5, Interesting)
That is not unlike what I remember as a kid at a local department store. They didn't have cash registers, they had a table/desk with a tube endpoint on it. The clerk would take your check/money and a hand written bill and put it in the tube pod. It would shoot up to the 5 floor where the ladies handled the cash. After a short wait, a tube pod would come down with your receipt and any change you were due. It fascinated me and was always a treat to go there. It was also a treat because they had an elevator with dual doors and a guy that ran it.
Now get off my lawn!
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It would be interesting to see it the other way around though - pneumatic computation.
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You may find the density a little lacking; but I suspect that they don't even notice EMP.
More broadly, a lot of the early analog computers were hydraulic(presumably this was easier than pneumatic, since water is more or less incompressible under standard conditions); but there would be nothing stopping the suitably enthusiastic individual from building pneumatic analog computers. Or, for that matter, digital ones. The cool kids in microfluidics have done some poking at the idea. pne [rsc.org]
Re:Rollofle, you can't download a pizza either (Score:5, Informative)
3 - 15 psi to represent 0 - 100 %
when I did my Industrial Instrumentation Apprenticeship , pneumatics was a large part , and in some explosive enviroments it is still a preferred way to go.
Re:Rollofle, you can't download a pizza either (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dang... and here I thought you were going to use it to deliver beer!!
Re:Rollofle, you can't download a pizza either (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA, dude. By using adding high-tech sensors and computer controlled routing to the pneumatic tubing system, they are shipping things around way faster than people could carry them ... things that we could NOT ship in the 1980s.
Being able to have a straight tube delivering bags of blood between OR and blood bank is an amazing time saver for staff.
Re:Rollofle, you can't download a pizza either (Score:5, Funny)
Pizza hut is now suing customers that use the pizzamaker 3000 to download unauthorized copies of their pizzas through PneumaticPizzatorrents. papa johns and domino's are considering following suite. It is being shown that only 3% of all pizzas downloaded are legal public domain or open source pizzas.
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You may have thought you were making a joke, but that's the #1 reason that we do not have replicators yet. Sure, we *could* have the technology by now. There can't ever be any money in it. Make a device that can scan an object, and make a molecular clone of it? What would it's first task be? Make another one.
Anything, absolutely anything, you can get your hands on, you could reproduce at any other station. All you would need is raw material, which would simply be somethi
Re:Rollofle, you can't download a pizza either (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as we live in a capitalist world (ya, even the communists are capitalists these days), and money changes hands for goods, we will never have such a device.
Capitalism is not just about exchanging goods. It's also about exchange of services. The relative value of goods and services are already reversed from what they used to be. Replicator technology will just push that to an extreme. Hell, open-source software is sort of like that, where you don't pay for the software, but for related services.
Want to:
* Hire a live band for your daughter's wedding?
* Commission a painting?
* Get a professional's advice (on just about anything)?
* Research new technology?
* Write new software?
* Read an author's new book?
* Go watch a play at the theater?
* Go to Disneyland?
Extremely low-cost goods will still allow capitalism to work just fine. Frankly, I think it's rather inevitable anyhow, barring any natural or self-inflicted apocalypse.
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You may have thought you were making a joke, but that's the #1 reason that we do not have replicators yet. Sure, we *could* have the technology by now. There can't ever be any money in it.
That's also the #1 reason why we don't have open source software yet. There will never be any money in it, that's why it doesn't exist.
Anything, absolutely anything, you can get your hands on, you could reproduce at any other station. All you would need is raw material, which would simply be something with atoms. (i.e., d
Biggest problem with pneumatic tube communication (Score:5, Funny)
The bandwidth sucks.
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i'm fairly sure it doesn't: it would most probaby be possible to feed 3.5" or at least 2.5" HDs down these tube. Every few seconds.
the latency certainly, though.
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And the more it sucks the better it is.
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On the contrary, it blows.
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Particularly relevant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Biggest problem with pneumatic tube communicati (Score:4, Interesting)
You have a last mile (or last metre) problem there though. Getting the data through the tube will take seconds. Minutes at most. 16GB through USB2 will take a few minutes even if you actually do get the maximum theoretical throughput.
Re:Biggest problem with pneumatic tube communicati (Score:5, Funny)
There has never been a more appropriate time for this response: WHOOSH! (as the parcel goes by in the tube)
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Shaken not stirred (Score:4, Funny)
James-Bond those urine samples.
Ding Ding (Score:3, Interesting)
To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.
I wonder which engineer thought that would be a good idea.
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Probably the engineer who played in a rock band in his/her spare time and realized that a one bad note in a tune would be more discernible to somebody working late shift, than something like "The appendectomy/tonsillectomy/lumpectomy biopsy results have just arrived." . Those tunes would probably be as memorable to staff as the chord played in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Re:Ding Ding (Score:5, Informative)
When I was in high school, I quite stereotypically worked at McDonald's. To this day, whenever I eat there, I can tell you EXACTLY what is happening in the kitchen. Someone really paid attention to make sure no function requiring human attention in that kitchen had the same sound.
Sometimes, if some jerkoff called off and you were stuck back in the kitchen alone, it was MADDENING. You absolutely are more aware of a loud, high pitched beep than a voice telling you to do something
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Re:Ding Ding (Score:5, Funny)
To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.
bing bing bong bong
bing bing bong bong
"Well, Theresa, aren't you going to get that?"
"Hell no! That's Marty from accounting! He's been trying to contact me ever since he thought I was coming on to him at the Christmas party. As if!"
"No, that's not Marty. Marty is bing bing bing bong and not bing bing bong bong. That's Bill in IT."
"Are you sure? I thought Bill's was bing bong bong bing."
"Nope. You might be confusing that with Jerry which is bong bing bong bingybong."
"Okay, but only if you're sure."
This must have had the endorsement of.... (Score:5, Funny)
... Sen. Ted Stevens.
Re:This must have had the endorsement of.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing to me is why people make fun of him at all. He is not an IT guy. In layman's terms a series of tubes is actually appropriate.
You can look at a CAT5 cable and a fiber optic cable as being a tube, and information being droplets of water. All of the fiber running across the world is essentially a series of tubes and used to transport these droplets of information from one place to another.
It is a little more complex than that of course. We have routers and switches which inspect those droplets of information and route them through other tubes, modify them, or just discard them which occurs at layers 2 and 3.
I don't think it is unreasonable or stupid to liken layer 1 infrastructure to a series of tubes. It's a pretty easy abstraction to construct if you don't have an in-depth understanding of the technology.
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The "not an IT guy" is the point. He was the chairman of the senate committee on commerce, science and transportation. He should have an appropriate grasp of the subjects he is in charge of, which he does not as you can tell from the rest of the speech.
Re:This must have had the endorsement of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares about the rest of the speech? I am only talking about the series of tubes comment. It's not the whole speech people make fun of, but just that comment.
Appropriate grasp? Really? Series of tubes seems to me to be an appropriate grasp for a Senator. Unless you are saying that any Senator appointed to that subcommittee has to be an IT person.
In fact, I would bet that an IT guy might even explain it that way to a Senator if they had asked.
Instead of saying, "welll.. he is in a position of authority and you know he should like know all this stuff.." you might want to justify how series of tubes is an inappropriate and/or stupid abstraction of layer 1 communications worthy of ridicule.
If you disagreed with the rest of his speech, just say you don't like the man's politics. Just don't try making fun of him for something that is really not able to made fun of in the first place.
Re:This must have had the endorsement of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, why people make fun of him is when he said in a speech condemning Net Neutrality: "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially."
Assuming he meant email, is network congestion so bad that it takes a weekend to send an email? More likely he doesn't know how to use a computer properly
Big supermarkets have them here. (Score:3, Interesting)
When the register has too much cash or needs change they just tube it over. There's also at least one pharmacy which has people processing prescriptions at terminals, and storage below from where the drugs are tubed over. If it works, don't fix it I say.
Oh, and here = Helsinki, Finland.
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If it works, don't fix it I say.
Oh, and here = Helsinki, Finland.
Fix it until it breaks.
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But what if someone hacks the system, do something like a man-in-the-middle attack and starts intercepting money transactions?
Re:Big supermarkets have them here. (Score:4, Funny)
You stop letting them spend all day in the basement.
Re:Big supermarkets have them here. (Score:5, Informative)
Nearly all the department stores did that back in the 1950's/1960's . There were no electronic cash registers, and checkout staff weren't allowed to handle money. So the customer would place their payment along with a receipt signed by the checkout clerk into a capsule. This would be sent upstairs to be processed by an accountant who would send the change back down to the checkout clerk. Just like in the movie "Brazil".
Re:Big supermarkets have them here. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah they use them here in Melbourne, Australia. Makes be wonder if you could knock one up with bits from the hardware store. The pipes are easy 90mm stormwater and 100mm sewage are both available. If we go with the cheap 90mm pipe then 70mm pipe could be used for a capsule. Sealing the outside and making it reliable might be a problem. You could experiment with O rings (not for use in cold weather!) with manual lubrication using sump oil.
You would need a low pressure electric pump. Should be a few available off the shelf. Maybe I could rework my front letterbox. Saves one trip out of the house every day.
Re:Big supermarkets have them here. (Score:5, Informative)
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I think the biggest problem would be finding a way to reliably make those large-radius bends. Most buildings that have pneumatic systems installed usually have the "kinks" (pun intended) that have to be worked out by the installer before you end up with a reliable system.
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Hmmm maybe you could send spherical packages down the tube (literally, balls) and use normal pipe junctions. Then you could control air movement for routing. I can't think of a good application with such inconvenient shapes but how about a fast food joint....
Order at your table with a cheap touch screen. Shove cash into a ball, your change comes back the same way, or pay by CC though the UI. Everything on the menu fits into a ball. Used balls go back through a dedicated garbage tube which goes strai
all major australian supermarkets do too (Score:2, Interesting)
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Sure, if you have a lot of small objects (pills, cash, whatever), pneumatic tubes are great. But Stanford Hospital is using them to manage data.
Handwritten medical words add to costs, mistakes (as in people dying), and miscommunication. That's why the U.S. needs an electronic medical record system. I believe Finland already has one.
Stanford has just added a little speed to an obsolete system. Rather sad for a school that has played such a big role in the development of information technology.
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Did you actually RTFA? Sure, they send documents (might as well when they have the system), but what they're raving about in TFA is that they can send tissue samples and other bits and pieces of their patients.
Futurama (Score:2)
I look forward to the day when humans can be transported through these tubes as in Futurama.
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Sounds pretty simple. You just need slightly bigger tubes.
Ancient transportation technology is better (Score:2)
Ancient transportation technology is better
I bet they use fire too (Score:2)
Why is this news? Seriously, old technology lives on if it's useful. Even sometimes if it's not.
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Why is this news? Seriously, old technology lives on if it's useful. Even sometimes if it's not.
I think the newsworthiness of this is that it offers evidence of a technological "plus ca change ..." Put another way, instead of looking like Star Trek or a Spielberg movie, the future will more likely resemble what we see in Brazil [wikipedia.org].
Pneumatic tubes used to be big in the 19th century (Score:5, Informative)
Both Berlin and Paris had a networks with a total length of more than 400km.
obvious link [wikipedia.org]
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Actually, the Paris system lasted until 1973.
Fluff piece, sorta (Score:5, Insightful)
I found the article mildly interesting but the lack of details disappointing. They only mention things like switching points and waiting areas in passing. It would've been a great article if they'd talked about the specific tech - I know it's old tech, but most of us have had little to no exposure to it (I've been to banks that use it at their drive-through windows... that's about it). For example: there are switches; is there any sort of prioritization protocol, or are the switches simply for collision prevention?
Common in the UK, good way to loose an ear (Score:5, Interesting)
Tesco supermarket uses them in some stores for moving cash to tills, and they are widely used in Hospitals.
There is one great, if slightly lengthy story that a friend tells, from when she was working in a hospital in Western Scotland a few years ago, I'll try to recount it best as I can.
A patient who has Hepatitis and Epilepsy is admitted to the hospital, he had a fit, and his Dog bit his ear off while he was fitting. So he came to hospital with his ear in his pocket. He was treated in A&E (UK ER) and sent up to the surgical department. His Ear though was wrapped up and put in a tube, however before the doctor could tap in the destination, the pod whizzed off. The hepatitis positive ear was not found for several days (is this just a bit error rate?), as it was quiet a big hospital with a lot of tubes. It could have been worse, as the ear was not intended to be sown back on, but just photographed and incinerated. The doctor who put the ear in the pod was known as Stupid Dave before the incident, but I'm sure this didn't help him shake of the moniker. The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
You don't get that with TCP/IP
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Something in common with the Transporter from Star Trek, then. Transfers matter over long distances and sometimes you get someone else's random appendage arriving in your office for no reason.
Very common in all hospitals (Score:3, Informative)
I thought the headline of the article was actually a joke; these systems are found in almost all major hospitals. There are companies that will install them:
http://www.swisslog.com/index/hcs-index/hcs-systems/hcs-pts/hcs-pts-translogic.htm [swisslog.com]
this is an established industry, and nothing new... Each hospital in the conglomerate that I work in uses a pneumatic tube system.
Weird that somebody picked up this Stanford "press release" and found it suitable for Slashdot...
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The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
I'm surprised it fit in the tube.
Networking 101: fragmentation [wikipedia.org]
also functions as as hort range time machine (Score:4, Funny)
Marvelous (Score:2)
Do you suppose they got the idea from the drive-through prescription lane at Walgreen's?
rj
I just the other day got (Score:2)
A sample was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things.
Fastest Sytem of All (Score:4, Interesting)
Place a stack of DVDs in a pneumatic device and you can pump data faster than on any type of existing system of delivery.
Pub use (Score:2)
The Red Lion in Hunningham, Warwickshire, uses pneumatic tubes to shuttle food orders to the kitchen (the order, not the food). The tubes are transparent and take a slightly convoluted route, so it's fun to watch.
What you wouldn't expect from that, is that it's a reasonably traditional country pub in most respects...
19th-century technology (Score:2)
If it works, why replace it?
Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Interesting)
I used such tubes all day, every day, for several years, doing Neutron Activation Analysis. The samples were loaded three per tube, known as rabbits. They went into the slot, closed and blew down the outside wall of the building, underground, and then up into the core of our TRIGA reactor. There they got neutrons of various energies for anywhere from 0.05 to 2-3 seconds, and then they blasted back to me. Behind the shields I removed the samples and placed them at the gamma detectors--moving very fast. Counting gammas took anywhere from seconds to days, depending upon type and elements.
We proved the existence of the Northern Hemisphere ozone depletion with 800 samples, and several of my graduates got PhDs. Another project showed trade routes extant through northern Italy at the construction of the Colliseum.
Once in a while a rabbit would get stuck. A particularly hot one did, right at the corner of my lab. We timed that test so no one else was in the building, and it got so hot it wouldn't come back past the tube joint. If I hadn't known just where the 36" wrench was, the building could have been badly contaminated, and would've shut down, as in national news. I got it out without too much exposure, and was offered the job as building manager later.
Another time a sample exploded while removing it from a rabbit, showering my nose with hot dust. I still get stray hairs growing there...
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sector 7g?
Would be interesting for home plumbing (Score:3, Funny)
I've occasionally thought it would be interesting to use this kind of technology for home plumbing. For example, when you turn on your sink and ask for hot water, instead of having a continuous flow in a pipe from the hot water heater to the sink (which wastes a lot of energy), why not use a pneumatic tube system to deliver a packet of hot water to the sink?
Note that the same tubes could be used for delivering hot water an cold water, and taking away waste water? (You'd have separate containers, of course, for fresh water and waste water).
You could do cool things with a pneumatic packet-switched water network. For instance, it would be easy to add a storage tank and route shower waster water to the tank, and then from there to the toilets for flushing.
And I bet with some clever design, you could make it so the pneumatic tube system could double as a centralized vacuum system for house cleaning.
Re:Would be interesting for home plumbing (Score:5, Funny)
Are you fucking high?
>Note that the same tubes could be used for delivering hot water an cold water, and taking away waste water? (You'd have separate containers, of course, for fresh water and waste water).
Are you fucking high?
>You could do cool things with a pneumatic packet-switched water network. For instance, it would be easy to add a storage tank and route shower waster water to the tank, and then from there to the toilets for flushing.
Are you fucking high?
>And I bet with some clever design, you could make it so the pneumatic tube system could double as a centralized vacuum system for house cleaning.
Seriously, are you fucking high?
Re:Would be interesting for home plumbing (Score:5, Informative)
Why not? Possibly because of the following:
1) The energy required to transport "packets" of hot water is many, many times greater than the losses through the hot water pipes.
2) The cost of building such a system would exceed any logical benefit; adding a large-diameter pipe system would occupy considerable space and would require some (presumably mechanized) system for sorting, draining, and filling the containers (as well as isolating waste water containers from the others) in a space-consuming "sorting room".
3) Each shower, sink, and drain in the building would require a large accumulation tank, since it would take multiple "packets" to flush a toilet, and storing enough hot water for even a brief shower would require many, many trips through the system. Any drain reservoir that filled faster than the system could empty it would back up into the sink/toilet/bathtub. The largest conceivable container to fit into a typical building could hold about a gallon of water and would be twice the size of the system used at banks--it certainly wouldn't fit inside a standard wall and would require a special breakout conduit.
4) For home use, building a sufficiently complex system would simply be impossible--all water flow would stop while your "packets" were en route to other destinations. There is no conceivable way to build bypass structures and waiting areas sufficient to allow multiple taps to work simultaneously at an acceptable refill rate.
5) Given the necessary locations for most of the accumulation tanks, you would need active pumps to run most faucets--the system would not function on water pressure alone as it does now. This adds cost, complexity, and new failure modes. Power outage? There goes the toilets.
The whole idea is a Rube. If the relatively small losses in the hot water pipes concern you, build a home with insulated hot water pipes. Add a central vac if you like. The end result will be cheaper, more efficient, and 99% less insane.
You whippersnappers, nowdays! (Score:3, Informative)
"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."
This article might be interesting if you are, say, 15. But they were (and still are) used in banks, the post office, supermarkets and anywhere else people need to transport small packages and money in a complex. Look around next time you are out in the world and you will likely see a few of these tubes.
How about an article on another archaic, 19th-century piece of technology that works better than any modern Silicon Valley wizardry: the internal combustion engine. I look forward to the one about the bicycle too!
Re:I guess the only question is... (Score:5, Informative)
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You must be new here.
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actually some pneumatic tube systems have procedures for a stuck cylinder, by sending a second heavier cylinder, or by increasing the pressure to higher than normal levels, either way clearing the tube.
Re:I guess the only question is... (Score:5, Funny)
actually some pneumatic tube systems have procedures for a stuck cylinder, by sending a second heavier cylinder, or by increasing the pressure to higher than normal levels, either way clearing the tube.
as in Futurama: Governor lady said "I'm sending in more trains!"
Re:I guess the only question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
(and no couriers available to fall back on)
Luckily, they have plenty of *general purpose* organic units to fall back on, which, while less efficient than the tube network, can quickly transport the physical objects. Just because no one has "courier" in their job description, doesn't mean there are no available couriers.
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I think most if not all hospitals have this tech.
The station(s) go offline, and service personel come and fix it... parts of the network going offline is not an unusual event. Unlike the 19th century tech, these packet (plastic canister) routed pneumatic tube systems lack humans at the core of packet routing.
From a volunteer's point of view at a non-Stanford hospital, the IT integration was less than stellar. Maybe Stanford has done some work in that area, or maybe this is just astroturfing by a pneumatic
Re:What they do... (Score:2)
It has been a while, but from what I can remember -
If something gets stuck or really fouled up, they shut off the system, force air through it backward, and empty the system (channel by channel). From what I could tell, this is usually enough to clear any obstructions, but it does take some time depending on how big the system is.
If something contaminates the system (like a spilled or ruptured sample), they send a special container through that contains a liquid agent (bleach + water, or some other disinfec
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Yes, tubes DO get clogged, and pretty regularly. We fixed it by calling maintenance and saying "tube's down". I think they reversed the polarity or something. If something was extra-stuck it could be down for an hour or so, so they probably have access points or something if reversing didn't work.
If you use a damaged capsule it can end up clogging the tube, so it's
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I for one welcome our new tubular overlords.
...and I am right behind you with Tubular Bells on.
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I for one welcome our new tubular overlords.
...and I am right behind you with Tubular Bells on.
Dude, that is totally tubular.
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No. The internet is a series of tubes, and this pneumatic tube communication system is like a convoy of trucks on the highway.
And yes, the convoy of trucks is now connected via Wi-Fi, so these trucks are like the internet.