A TORNADO IN A TUBE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 210, 26 August 1908, Page 4

A TORNADO IN A TUBE.

A NEW METHOD OF AIR-TRAVEL. Most people have seen the pneumatic cash-tubes that have taken the place of the spring cash-trams in up-to-date business houses. In all the advanced post-offices of the world the principle has been applied to the conveyance of telegrams, letters, and parcels from department to department. A Chicagoan, one, Joseph Stoetzel, now proposes to extend the principle to passenger traffic, and a magazine man, who has interviewed him for the Technical Worl.!. dreams of a day when the suburbanite ■will have the tube laid on like the telephone. In those days the business man will not risk heart failure by rushing for his train, and half a dozen other deaths in a stuffy railway carriage, but will step quietly into a little compartment like a dice box, and be whisked in a couple of minutes to his office.

Hut whether this tube will ever carry passengers or not, Stoclzcl certainly promises to revolutionise the present system of pneumatic tubing. Postal experts have maintained that no air tube the diameter of which is greater than ten inehes is practicable. But Stoetzel has driven a carrier, two feet in diameter, carrying 200(1 pounds, through a steel tulie. This lias never been done before. He is going to demonstrate that he can send mail bags hurtling through a tube at a speed greater than two miles a, minute. For this, a tube eighteen inches in diameter and a mile long is to be constructed -" Chicago. The inventor will send not only mail bags hut small boys as passengers through this tube, first at th; rate of a mile a minute, then increasing the speed until the youngsters have established a new record for speed in human flight. The inventor and his son have already made trips in the model in the inventor's workshop, and carriers laden with children have been forced through. The inventor says he got the idea from a tornado. Tornadoes are caused by a rareiication of the atmosphere, resulting from the sudden rising of superheated air at the earth's surface, cooler air rushing in with such violence that nothing can withstand its power. In the working out of Stoetxel's scheme a partial vacuum is first created. The inrushing -air then drives the carrier forward at a. s]wed depending upon the rarity of the air in the tube in front of it'.

Tile use of the vacuum principle is Very simple. Stoctzel takes a long tube, say two feel in diameter anil ten ■miles long, and divides it up into subsections of, say, half a mile. The division is nia4i! by the. use of valves, each section, because of the valves, actins; independently of the others. 'Beneath the carrier tube mentioned is a similar tube, but running straight through for the entire ten miles. Duels connect each section of the carrier tube with the others, through which the vacuum in the carrier tube is created. A big fan, hitched on one end of the uinlividcd tube, pulls out the air as fast •as 11-.". fan will do it. Naturally the partial vacuum created in the long lube exists also in .my section of the tube aljove it, the valve of which is open to permit passage of air to the long lulie. The iirst section of the, carrier tube is the one first affected. A carrier put into it shoots swiftly through It. strikes a trap door, trips the trigger of a valve opening the second section to the operation of the vacuum-produeing fan, closing the first section as it does so. At the time of this operation the flying carrier opens a valve leading to the outer air, permitting the natural air pressure to get in and push.