Pneumatic's Pains

Few people know that for years just below the sidewalks of Manhattan has run the 27 miles of tubes system through which mail-filled carriers are transported between 22 city post offices from the Battery to 125th Street and over to Brooklyn through a pipe fastened to Brooklyn Bridge. Curiously, a private company owns and operates the system with the Post Office as its sole customer. It is, with a two-mile stretch in Boston, the last survivor of similar lines that once operated busily in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago. Last week it looked as if Manhattan's system might also succumb.

A giant version of the pneumatic cash carrier system familiar to most department store customers, the 8-inch tubes of the underground mail service resemble gas mains, the containers that glide through them at 30 m. p. h. are about the size of fire extinguishers. As there is no switching, every carrier pops out at each station, is retained or passed on according to its destination mark. Motive power in the tube is a current of air blown into the system from powerhouses en route. Each 120-lb. steel container holds up to 500 letters. Every day the system efficiently carries 6,000,000 of Manhattan's 20.000,000 pieces of mail.

Long known to Europe, the large size pneumatic carrier and tube system was investigated by the great U. S. merchant John Wanamaker, then Postmaster General, on a junket abroad in 1889. He inspired the group who acquired patents and franchises, founded American Pneumatic Service Co., started tube systems in five cities. The biggest one, in Manhattan, carried its first article in 1897--a Bible wrapped in the Stars & Stripes.

From profitable Post Office contracts, pneumatic tubes prospered until the War. Then Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, President Wilson's man-Farley for eight years, persuaded his chief over a golf game to veto the $1,000,000 annual appropriation for ''letters shot through pipes"--Republican pipes. Not until 1922 during the Harding administration were Manhattan's tubes reopened.

Pneumatic's troubles are now labor troubles. Its 200-odd workmen work only in postoffices. but are private employes, as such are not allowed to touch mail. They can do no more than receive, dispatch and open the lids of the greasy carriers for the postal employes. Their wages are the same as Government postal laborers--about $32 weekly--but their week is 60 hours instead of 40 hours. This, says the company's Vice President George J. Murray, is not what "President Roosevelt believes workmen should have." Only difficulty is that the $1,700 a day his company pany receives from the P. 0. is not enough to provide the $135,000 annual addition to the payroll that shorter hours would entail. In place of the present contract the company suggests the P. 0. take over the system, pay it rent, "considerably less than $10,000 a mile." Last week's deadline, when the company threatened to quit, came and passed. The P. 0., which has the company under contract for another six months, is confident that it can make a better deal, sat tight, said "the tubes are operating as usual, according to contract."

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