Wednesday, February 27, 2013
The Pneus of Paris
The Pneus of Paris
When I lived in Paris in the early 1970s, if you wanted to contact someone quick and they didn't have a phone, you sent a pneu. See below. Alas they were abolished in the 1980s:
PARIS PNEUMATIQUE IS NOW A DEAD LETTER
"By JOHN VINOCUR (The New York Times); Style Desk
March 31, 1984, Saturday
The epistolary tradition, which has been steadily running out of breath in this country since Madame de Stael, took another very hard blow on Friday at 5 P.M. Afer 117 years of service, the Government has done away with la lettre pneumatique. A whoosh of compressed air, a rattling of tubes under the city, and then a postman ringing the bell, announcing he had brought what the French simply called a pneu: For the equivalent of about $1.80, you could get a letter from any point in Paris to any other place in the city in two hours. The system was good for dispatching a theater ticket or paying a bill, and better when a phone call was best avoided. Sending a pneu, a letter that was always a bit of an event, offered an exquisite means to mask on paper the eagerness or anxiousness that even a practiced tone of voice could betray. If telegrams here are for announcing deaths and lottery winners, the pneu served more circumscribed but just as real emotions - and announced several generations of broken dates."
There was a whole system of tubes linking up the Paris post offices. Once the pneu , which was a letter sent in a canister, sped through the tubes to the nearest post office, a postman went with it to the recipient all in the course of a few hours. I used it a couple of times myself.
Labels: Paris, pneumatiques, Postal service
