July 3, 2013 (Wednesday)
I have been reminiscing this week about my trips to downtown stores in Houston with my mother when I was still very young. One of the things that always fascinated me, although I didn’t have the slightest idea of what it was, was the pneumatic system in the larger stores for mail, receipts, etc. The salesperson would put some papers inside of what looked like a large metal capsule, then feed it to a glass tube. The tube immediately swallowed it and sent it through a tube to a mystery location somewhere else in the store. I was so young that I never even asked where it went; it just went. The clerks would also take the time to retrieve cylinders from the system. I never really knew what that was all about.
Banks today use such systems for their drive-in banking services. You have probably used them yourself. They do the job quite well. For all practical purposes, general use of pneumatic tube systems are a thing of the past, except for some hospitals and other special businesses, which make good use of them.
Yesterday I tried to describe the elevator systems in the very old department stores of yesteryear. There is another type of elevator that is used greatly in industry: the freight elevator. When I was a college student, 60 years ago, I worked for a while in a place where we used the freight elevator often. It was a crude looking thing, probably 10 feet square, with a wood floor, a gate that closed and opened manually by the use of rope and pulley, and a very limited travel distance from first to second floors. It was great for getting heavy crates upstairs.
Devotional Thought: Sometimes reminiscing is fun, remembering things that younger generations have never seen. It brings on attacks of nostalgia. And then reality hits with a sudden thud: Back in those “good old days” people constantly talked about “the good old days.” The New Living Translation of the Bible translates Ecclesiastes 7:10 this way: “Don’t long for ‘the good old days,’ for you don’t know whether they were any better than today.” The Apostle Paul didn’t live in the past. He spoke of “forgetting the things that are behind,” and urged us to “reach forth for the things that lie before” (Philippians 3:7-8). The child of God can live with purpose. But every once in a while it’s fun to sneak a peek into the past.