It’s Really Just a Series of Tubes
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
Do you remember the bumbling Senator Ted Stevens who said the Internet was not a big truck – it’s a series of tubes! And just the other day the Internet was sent by his staff on Friday and he got it days later because it got tangled up in tubes… mmm someone actually voted for that dick, right? Imagine a borderline-senile Sarah Palin and you’re well on the way to the good Senator Stevens. The DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix makes a lot more sense than his prolonged bumbling statement of stuttered techno-speak.
But, as Ignite’s Molly Wise points out, the good Senator was just a man behind his own times… we really did use miles and miles of tubes post-industrial revolution and into the 1950’s and further.
Ignite talks are 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds… so this isn’t a big time chewer to watch. But it’s an interesting look at the mailing tube system and it’s growth in Paris to become over 450 kilometres (1945) of pneumatic tubes. Error correction was firing a pistol into the tube to locate the blockage via accoustic measurement. Way cool. Way way cool.
Am I the only person to think this is way cooler and more amazing than the Internet? Had I been a little boy faced with the Internet or a series of tubes my heart would have probably followed the tactile embrace of physical gazzumption rather than digital ubiquity. What little boy never imaged driving one of those 1900’s steam engines littering our town parks (back in the days we didn’t overly coddle children onto child-safe apparatus approved by the committee of cotton-wool jumpsuits).
