A restaurant in Christchurch, New Zealand, plans to install a pneumatic tube system for delivering sliders and a “wee packet of chips—um, fries,” chef Richie Ward explained.
The food, which will come enclosed in stainless steel capsules, will go barreling through the tubes at 87 miles per hour (140 kilometers per hour). Air brakes will slow the capsules to a safer speed before they drop down from above patrons’ tables, or rise up from below the tabletop, depending on the location of the table. The whole system will take a year to install and test, New Zealand’s The Press reports.
PopSci articles on Pneumatic tubes:
In 1874, Popular Science published a description of London’s Pneumatic Dispatch “for the conveyance of small parcels of goods from place to place.” A 1949 feature on Brookhaven National Laboratory’s nuclear reactor includes diagrams of its pneumatic tube system. And in 1930, the magazine published a feature about pneumatic tubes used for transporting everything from coal to wheat to mail. (You can still see those now-dormant mail systems in older New York City office buildings; at the time, they were new.)
At the Atlantic: Pneumatic Tubes: A Brief History has some excellent illustrations, as does this article: Series of Tubes: Pneumatic Tube Networks Then & Now.
Travel by pneumatic tube: 1905 predictions and the Jetsons.
Pneumatic System of the New York Public Library.
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