Paris was texting long before we were
Tomas k - Senior News Editor 
I have Jenn Bragg to blame for this. Her recent MyFrenchLife article about Paris’s old pneumatic post sent me off on yet another search, because I realised fairly quickly that I didn’t quite understand what she was describing. I knew about pneumatic tubes. I remember them, vaguely, from department stores years ago when I was very young. But I hadn’t realised that Paris once had this type of postal system running beneath its streets. Nor had I understood just how enormous it became!
And then I discovered the scale of the Paris carte pneumatique, or petit bleu, system. By 1933, 427 kilometres of tubes ran under Paris, connecting nearly 130 post offices. According to the Comité pour l’histoire de La Poste, it was the world's largest pneumatic postal network. I keep trying to imagine 427 kilometres under one city.
The other thing I hadn’t properly grasped was what travelled through those tubes. I think I had somehow imagined a telegram, or a message being transmitted and then written out again at the other end.
It wasn’t.
People wrote their personal, private messages by hand on special postal stationery and that message itself physically travelled beneath Paris in a cylindrical carrier. At the appropriate office it came back above ground, and a postal worker delivered it.
I don’t know why that changes the story so much for me, but it does.
Jenn had already been looking at what people actually wrote on these things and found, amongst other things, arrangements for dinner and suddenly the whole elaborate underground network seems rather intimate. All that engineering because somebody needed to tell somebody else what time they were coming to dinner. Ha.
And this was where I became thoroughly distracted.
Because once I’d pictured those handwritten messages disappearing beneath Paris, I wanted to know everything. How quickly did they arrive? What did they cost? Where did you buy them? Did people keep a few at home? And what happened when, after more than a century, Paris finally stopped sending them?
So I kept going…
