The Pneumatic Diversity Vent
A tube, a blower and a hole in the wall at the far end. You put a thing in. Ninety miles an hour later the thing is somewhere else. The vent has no opinion whatever about what the thing was, and that is the whole of the invention.
Every plant in America has the same disease and every plant in America has decided to live with it. A man picks a thing up at one end of a building and he carries it to the other end of the building, and for the whole of that walk he is a wage being spent on a corridor. We do not have that disease here. We cured it in 1955 with a length of tube, a blower the size of a bull and a decision nobody has been permitted to revisit.
The Pneumatic Diversity Vent is a sealed steel tube of twenty-four inch bore. At the sending end there is a hatch. At the far end there is a terminus. Between the two there is a column of moving air at four and a half pounds to the square inch, and anything you place in that column arrives at the terminus at ninety miles an hour. Not approximately ninety. Ninety. The velocity is set by the blower and the blower does not consult the cargo.
Why It Is Called Diversity
Sales asked me to change the name. Sales has asked me to change the name four times. The name is correct and the name is staying, and here is the reason, and Sales may cut this paragraph out and paste it inside the lid of the sample case.
A chute carries coal. A conveyor carries crates. A dumb-waiter carries a tray, and it carries the tray at the speed of the boy on the rope. Every one of those machines was designed around a cargo and every one of them fails the moment you hand it a cargo it was not designed around. This machine was designed around nothing. It is indifferent. Put in a ledger, a ball bearing, a drum of Repulsion Gel, forty pounds of ground lunar substrate, a hat, a sandwich, a cat, a two-hundred-page contract the size of a phone book, or the man who typed it. The vent moves all of them at ninety miles an hour, with an even hand, and asks you nothing. That is diversity. That is what the word means. I have looked it up, which is more than Sales has done.
Where To Put One
Warehouses. Granaries. Department stores — a receipt from the fourth floor to the counting house in under two seconds and the customer still buttoning his coat. Hospitals, where we have eleven installations and where the specimen work is very well thought of. Foundries. Newspaper composing rooms, which took to it faster than any trade we have sold to. Any building in which a man is presently walking, and by walking, costing you money.
It goes in against the ceiling on standard hangers, it takes a bend of no less than nine feet radius, and it will run vertically for as long as your building is tall and then a good deal further, which we know because ours runs four thousand feet down and has never once had to be persuaded.
The Diverter
The junction is the clever part and it is the part I want you to buy. A diverter is a cast steel Y with a vane in it, thrown by a solenoid off a push-button at the sending hatch. One trunk, nine destinations, one man, no thought. Set the button, drop the item, the vane throws, the item goes.
The vane throws in one hundred and ten milliseconds. An item travelling at ninety miles an hour covers fourteen and a half feet in that time. The Facilities Division would like the customer to understand that these two figures are the entire engineering of this product and that nearly every difficulty ever reported to us is one or the other of them arriving late. Set the button first. It is on every placard we have ever screwed to a wall and it is the only instruction the vent has.
Specification — Model 208-T
- Bore
- 24 in. standard; 30 in. and 42 in. to order
- Velocity
- 90 m.p.h., loaded or empty
- Working pressure
- 4.5 lb. per sq. in., blower continuous
- Minimum bend
- 9 ft. radius. Tighter bends are sold; they are not recommended.
- Maximum run
- Not established. Our own is 4,000 ft. vertical.
- Diverter throw
- 110 milliseconds
- Maximum payload
- 240 lb.
- Payload note
- Two hundred and forty pounds is the average American male plus a winter coat. This was not an accident of the design. It was a specification.
- Terminus height
- 4 ft. 2 in. above finished floor
- Blower
- Aperture 9-series, 40 h.p., no user-serviceable parts
- Noise
- Considerable. Customers report they stop hearing it by the third week.
He measured the bore himself, in the shop, with his own rule, and then he stood in front of it for a while with his coat off. I have moved the sending hatch on the third floor and I have not told him why. If anybody asks, it was for the hangers. — C.
“A machine that asks what you are putting into it is a machine that has already wasted your morning.”
Performance, By Cargo
Trials conducted on the Sub-Level 2 test loop, 1957–58, twenty runs to each entry. Velocity is fixed by the blower and does not vary with the cargo; the columns that vary are the ones after it.
| Cargo | Mass | Velocity | Arriving intact | Facilities note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ball bearing, 2 in. | 1.1 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | 100% | The terminus plate is a consumable. Order spares. |
| Ledger, bound | 6 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | 97% | Bound work travels. Loose work does not. |
| Correspondence, loose sheet | 0.02 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | 41% | See Form ASI-108. Records is still at the light table. |
| Casting, iron, crated | 180 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | 100% | The crate does not arrive intact. The casting does not care. |
| Pail of emulsion, lidded | 44 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | 12% | Lidded is a claim made by the lid, not by us. |
| Sandwich, commissary | 0.6 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | 0% | Twenty runs. Twenty. Materials has asked to be given the problem. |
| Wire screen, terminus guard | 31 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | — | Fitted April 1957. Recovered June 1957, Sub-Level 6. |
| Personnel, one | 168 lb. | 90 m.p.h. | 100% | Entry unauthorised. Result recorded. Both of those are true. |
The Facilities Division wishes it recorded that the eighth row was not a trial, was not scheduled, and appears in this table only because the President read the seven rows above it and said that a table with a gap in it is a lie with a ruling on it.
Recovered From The Vent
Every pneumatic system in the world has a sump, and every sump has a drawer beside it, and the drawer is the honest part of the machine. Ours is at the foot of the Sub-Level 4 terminus. What follows is the drawer, printed, because I am told competitors do not print theirs and I would like the trade to notice which of us is embarrassed.
Items recovered from the Sub-Level 4 sump and the diverter galleries, 1955 to 1 April 1959, as entered by Records & Filing.
| Item recovered | No. | Recovered | Condition on recovery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Correspondence, fragments | 9,041 | Continuous | Sorted by fragment. Two in five reassembled. |
| Punch cards, Computation | 1,860 | Continuous | Legible. Out of order. Computation says this is worse. |
| Spectacles, wire | 14 | 1955–1959 | Six pairs claimed. Eight pairs unclaimed and undamaged. |
| Wire terminus guard | 1 | June 1957 | Sub-Level 6. Bolts still in it. Wall not still in it. |
| Bowling ball, league | 1 | March 1958 | Excellent. Returned to the league. Retired from play. |
| Weighted Storage Cube | 1 | August 1958 | Unmarked faces. Undamaged. The cube is always undamaged. |
| Hat, homburg, grey | 3 | 1956–1958 | One is the President’s. He has not asked for it back. |
| Personnel, one, initials H.M.K. | 1 | 12 October 1958 | Ambulatory. Talkative. Paid $60 from the tin and sent home in a company car. |
| Personnel, one, initials H.M.K. | 1 | 3 December 1958 | Ambulatory. Not talkative. Not scheduled. Not sent for. |
| Item recovered 14 November 1958 | 1 | 14 November 1958 | Records states that the item was not an item. Facilities states that the vent was not running. Both departments have been asked to choose and neither will. |
Records & Filing has appended a standing note to this schedule which reads, in its entirety: “The eighth and ninth lines are the same gentleman. The Facilities Division has been asked to confirm this and has confirmed it. Records is not satisfied and has said so on four occasions.”
Our Own Installation, Candidly
I will not sell a machine I have not lived with. In the spring of 1955 this company connected the mail room on the second floor to the Sub-Level 4 sorting floor: eleven hundred and eighty-eight feet of trunk, one diverter, nine seconds end to end, and a day of walking abolished before lunch. The arithmetic was right in 1955 and it is right in 1959, and it has cost this company a screen, a wall, four requests for disconnection and a certain amount of goodwill from a department on the second floor which I hold in the highest regard and intend to keep overruling.
The full account is on Form ASI-108, Correspondence, which Records wrote and which I have not edited beyond removing one adjective. Read it before you order. If a man is going to buy a thing from me I would rather he bought it with his eyes open, because the one thing worse than a customer who is surprised is a customer who is surprised in writing.
Interoffice Memorandum
Maintenance is instructed to refit the terminus screen at the mail-room discharge and to bolt it through the wall plate rather than to the flange, the flange having been the point of failure in June 1957. Facilities has costed the work at eleven dollars and an afternoon.
Maintenance is further instructed that the screen is to be fitted on the morning of the nineteenth and not on the morning of the eighteenth, the vent being scheduled down on the eighteenth for the annual inspection of the Sub-Level 4 gallery. The gallery inspection of November 1957 is not to be repeated in any particular.
Facilities notes, for the file only, that this department has no explanation for the item recovered on the fourteenth and has stopped seeking one. The blower log for that morning shows the machine stopped from 0400 to 0730. The terminus discharged at 0641. Facilities has checked the log twice, has had the log checked by a second man, and now proposes to file it.
Fit it Wednesday. Fit it Thursday. Fit it twice. But that blower log stays in the drawer and does not go up to the third floor, because he will want to try it. — C.
Ordering
Measure your building. Measure it honestly — the trunk does not care about the drawing, it cares about the wall. Send us the figure in running feet, the number of destinations you want served, and the weight of the heaviest thing you intend to send. If you do not know the weight of the heaviest thing you intend to send, send us the weight of your foreman and we shall size it from that, which is what we did here and which has held up.
Aperture Science Innovators — Enquiry Card, Form ASI-208-E
Conditions of the premises — tick all that apply
- The building has more than two floors.
- Men presently carry things between those floors on foot.
- The terminus may be sited clear of any seated man.
- The premises contain no cat.
- You accept that the vent runs in both directions at all times.
- You have read the whole of Form ASI-900 and wish to proceed.
That is the vent. It is a tube and a blower and it does one thing at one speed for one price, and in sixteen years of this company I have not built anything else about which every word of that sentence is true. Buy it by the foot. Set the button first.
Cave JohnsonPresident & FounderForm ASI-208, sixth printing. Dictated 6 April 1959. Recoveries schedule appended by Records under protest, and printed anyway.