Pneumatic tubes - a thing of the past? Nope.

Most people are at least marginally familiar with pneumatic tubes systems - if you've ever made use of drive-through banking, chances are you've encountered a limited example of pneumatic capsule transportation. During the late 19th century through the turn of the 20th, though, pneumatic tube networks were extremely important administrative systems used throughout the Western World.

Then, these tube networks essentially served as a primitive version of today's internet (perhaps leading to former Sen. Ted Stevens's well-known confusion on the subject). They were most often used for the speedy transportation of telegraphs and other paper messages. In some places, pneumatic tube networks were deployed to deliver mail across entire cities. An 1866 London system, according to Wikipedia, was "powerful enough to transport humans"; Prague, in the Czech Republic, to this day has a "network of tubes extending approximately 60 kilometers in length" which "still exists for delivering mail and parcels."

Even in the United States, systems of pneumatic tubes remain in surprisingly widespread use. Beyond banks, pneumatic tubes are employed especially by hospitals, which are required daily to quickly transport small, time-sensitive laboratory samples from one side of a complex to another. Stanford Hospital is home to the largest such network:

Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye.

In four miles of tubing laced behind walls from basement to rooftop, the pneumatic tube system shuttles foot-long containers carrying everything from blood to medication. In a hospital the size of Stanford, where a quarter-mile's distance might separate a tissue specimen from its destination lab, making good time means better medicine.

[...]

The value of these pneumatic tube networks is not unique to Stanford--they are in use at hospitals nationwide--but SHC's system, which also serves the adjacent Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, is one of the largest in the country. Its architecture is a sophisticated design of switching points, waiting areas, sending and receiving points. It hosts 124 stations (every nursing unit has its own); 141 transfer units, 99 inter-zone connectors and 29 blowers. To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.

You can read - and see - more here.