When I was a kid in southwest Georgia, on those rare occasions my grandfather drove us into Valdosta, one of the things I most wanted to do besides eat way too much ice cream was visit a department store there. Not to pine for what was on the shelves that we couldn't afford, but to watch the clerks send cash and notes in little capsules through pneumatic tubes up to third floor where the bookkeepers and vault were. Whooooooosh! I often thought how cool it would be to ride in one of those if it were big enough.
Not quite the same idea that Elon Musk, of SpaceX and Tesla electric car fame, has in mind with his Hyperloops, but in the same genre of really cool transportation.
While Musk may actually make it happen, at The Atlantic, Megan Garber writes in Pneumatic Tubes: A Brief History that he isn't the first inventor to ponder the use of vacuums to speed people to their destinations and for other uses:
Otto von Guericke's Magdeburg Hemispheres, 1660s
Working in the 17th century, the German scientist Otto von Guerickeconstructed the world's first artificial vacuum. He demonstrated his invention using a contraption known as the "Magdeburg hemispheres": two large, copper hemispheres with rims that fit tightly together. When the rims were sealed, air was pumped out of the interiors. In an innovation that would lead to the pneumatic tube, Guericke was able to demonstrate that the air-less hemispheres could be held together by the air pressure of the surrounding atmosphere.
The Atmospheric Railway, 1830s
The atmospheric railway took advantage of Guericke's demonstration, relying on air pressure to provide its power for propulsion. In 1799, the inventor George Medhurst proposed the idea that goods could be moved pneumatically through cast-iron pipes; in 1812, he expanded the idea to include passenger carriages. […]
Robert Goddard's New York-to-San Francisco Vacuum Train, 1910s
The American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard didn't confine his ideas to the air: He also had a plan for making a train that would go from Boston to New York in 12 minutes flat. His idea? Float the train on magnets inside a specially-built tunnel with all the air pumped out; that would eliminate the friction that normally slows a train down. Goddard's vacuum railway was, of course, never built. [...]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—The Many Democratic Parties:
It is no secret that I am a proponent of a politics of contrast for Dems, a Lincoln 1860strategy. I am also a proponent of a Big Tent Dem Party. Are these two ideas mutually exclusive? I think not.
For example, while I am skeptical of a short term strategy that can deliver significant wins for Dems in the South, the medium and long term offer opportunities. But I think they come from the devolution strategy that Howard Dean is trying to execute, creating strong state Democratic parties that control their own local message. National branding still requires a national message and, more importantly, negative branding of the Republicans.
Today Mark Schmitt writes a compelling piece, "One Democratic Party, Or Many?" that I think nicely illustrates this point. [...]
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Tweet of the Day:
Our 5,000th tweet! What a milestone. We are finally starting to get the hang of this exciting new medium, to grasp the way it rewards brev
— @nybooks
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show, the live stream's data center is moving, so it's podcast-only once again. And too bad, because we got a glowing tribute from Bill in Portland Maine in Cheers & Jeers, marking the two-year anniversary of Daily Kos Radio! Without Greg on hand, we read through Georgia's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup. Excessive levels of Teh Crazee necessitated an extended GunFAIL report. Stop feeding Gop trolls on birtherism?
NYT's Q&A with Snowden.
Investing Daily questions the privatization of national security, leading to a surprise (to me) conclusion about private equity in the already too-convoluted picture.
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