Prague's internet made of air

Before email, before fax, and long before anyone worried about their Wi-Fi, Prague had a much more satisfying way to send a message: shooting it through a tube.

Starting in 1889, the city built a pneumatic post, a network of underground pipes that used compressed air to fire capsules full of telegrams from one post office to another. By the 1930s, it had grown to about 55 kilometers of tubes running under the city. Capsules could carry up to three kilograms, and operators could slow things down for fragile packages, which is a courtesy most modern delivery companies still haven't figured out.

It also had some charming quirks. On lines with a junction, the switch had to be set before a send began, so the capsule that needed to turn always had to go first. Basically, it was a very slow, very loud, very physical internet, with routing rules to match.

Plenty of cities had one of these. Paris did. Berlin did. Vienna and London did. And one by one, they all shut them down. Prague's just kept going. It outlasted the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it outlasted Communism, and it was still carrying mail into the 2000s.

What finally killed it wasn't the internet. It was the weather. In August 2002, massive floods hit Prague and filled five of the system's eleven engine rooms with water. The tubes went silent. Telefónica, which owned the network by then, took a look at the repair bill and decided it was not worth it.

So it did what you do with any 113-year-old municipal mail system you no longer want: you sell it to some sweaty nerd who cares way too much about old junk. In this case, that nerd was Zdeněk Dražil, a Czech software entrepreneur, who wants it protected as a technical monument and reopened for visitors. Today, it's described as the last preserved city pneumatic post in the world, which means Prague's internet made of air is still technically out there, just waiting for someone to hit send.