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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner

Vacuum Cylinder  
  Traveling first class, but like mail, in a tube system.  

This might be a good description of what it will be like to travel in the Hyperloop, if they ever build one.

We've got to get into his office secretly, by tte vacuum cylinders. We're to meet a man from his office at the Eighth Postal switch-station."

The girls were both in gray, with long dark capes. We took the public monorail down into the mid-Manhattan section under the city roof of the business district, and into the Eighth Postal switch-station where the sleek bronze cylinders came tumbling out of the vacuum portes to be rerouted and dispatched again,

A man was on the lookout for us.

"Daniel Dean and party?"

"Yes," said Snap. "We were ordered here..."

We were put into one of the oversize mail cylinders, routed through the tubes like sacks of recorded letters; and in ten minutes, with a thump that knocked the breath from all of us, we were in the switch-rack of Halsey's outer office.

Technovelgy from Wandl, The Invader, by Ray Cummings.
Published by Astounding Stories in 1932
Additional resources -

A bit more:

In the service room a passenger cylinder was waiting. Our guide entered it with us. At the switch-station we had our breath knocked out with the bumping, but the cylinder remained sealed. And after another ten minutes in the vacuum tube, we reached our unknown destination.

The cylinder-slide opened.

Compare to the submarine tube from An Express of the Future (1895) by Michel Verne, the sub-Atlantic tunnel from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback, the air tunnel from Through the Air Tunnel (19129) by Harl Vincent, the pneumatic tube station from Exiles of the Moon (1931) by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat), the pneumatic-tube zone from Mechanocracy (1932) by Miles J. Breuer, the vortal tube from Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert, the public vehicle tube from The Houses of Iszm (1954) by Jack Vance, the vacutubes from Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein and the bounce tube from Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Wandl, The Invader
  More Ideas and Technology by Ray Cummings
  Tech news articles related to Wandl, The Invader
  Tech news articles related to works by Ray Cummings

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