Essay: Adeiu to the Pneu

Sad news from Paris the other day: they have abolished the carte pneumatique, otherwise known as the pneu, an institution that dates back to the empire of Napoleon III. For those who did not spend some of their youth in Paris and therefore do not know about the pneu, it was a letter on gray paper that whizzed through a 269-mile network of pneumatic tubes and then was delivered by a mailman on a bicycle. Faster than an ordinary letter (it took about two hours) but cheaper ($1.80) than a telegram, the pneu provided a valuable service at the moveable feast of the Left Bank, where very few hotel rooms had private telephones. By the pneu, you learned of a job found, a crisis solved, a date confirmed—or broken. "Can't make dinner tonight. How about Wednesday?" That kind of thing.

According to the French postal ministry, the pneu was obsolete and unprofitable, handling fewer than 605,000 messages in 1983, compared with 2.7 million a decade ago. The fact is that the ministry had actually stopped installing pneumatic tubes in all new post offices some time ago, thus converting the system into a sort of hybrid messenger service. The technique is easily recognized: first let the system deteriorate, then announce that usage is declining, so service must be curtailed and/or prices must go up. It sounds just like the New York City subway. The French postal ministry now offers "postexpress," which guarantees same-day service for two or three times the price of a pneu. Soon people will forget that the pneu ever existed.

In London, just after World War II, the older generation complained that the entire postal system was going to perdition. There were only three deliveries a day in these straitened times. Why, before the war, there had been five. One oldtimer recalled that Edward FitzGerald, the translator of The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, regularly wrote to London friends from his home near Lowestoft, 116 miles away, and counted on his letters being delivered before evening the same day. They had decent railroad service too in those days, by Gad.

What doomed the pneu and the postal service, of course, was the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell's new invention seemed so much faster, and consequently so much better. This was before the busy signal was invented, or statements like "He's in conference right now. May I have him call you back?"

There are people today who express wonder that figures like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote a good number of personal letters every day (and made copies too) and still found time to run the country. Or even that Harry Truman regularly wrote to his wife. There are people today who receive a wedding invitation and answer with a telephone call, or forget to answer at all. There are people today who are psychologically unable to write a letter to anybody on any subject. Meanwhile, the postal system has silted up with all the debris of computerized commerce: catalogues from Wisconsin cheesemakers, offers of stock tips, pleas for charitable donations.