J. Jacob

Lovely example of a technology that was pretty much at its height eighty years ago, but has now disappeared almost completely. In the 20s and 30s - indeed, up to at least the 70s - big offices relied on being able to transport vast quantities of paper around quickly and efficiently from department to department: files, forms, invoices, reports, letters, memos, and all the rest. Nowadays it's practically all electronic, but when it was still paper, most large office buildings would have had a maze of document lifts, pneumatic tubes, parcel chutes, cableways and other ingenious devices for dealing with the internal mail. All the normal staff ever saw of these systems would have been a hatch in the wall, or the end of a pneumatic tube, but some buildings would have had fantastically complicated exchanges down in the basement somewhere, where cassettes had to be taken out of one tube and fed into another.

M. Jacob gives us a wonderful insight into this all-but-forgotten world. A must for any steampunk enthusiast: some of the illustrations could be straight out of a Terry Gilliam film...… (altro)