Adeiu to the Pneu

By Otto Friedrich

Sad news from Paris the other day: they have abolished the carte pneumatique, otherwise known as the pneu, an institution that dates back to the empire of Napoleon III. For those who did not spend some of their youth in Paris and therefore do not know about the pneu, it was a letter on gray paper that whizzed through a 269-mile network of pneumatic tubes and then was delivered by a mailman on a bicycle. Faster than an ordinary letter (it took about two hours) but cheaper ($1.80) than a telegram, the pneu provided a valuable service at the moveable feast of the Left Bank, where very few hotel rooms had private telephones. By the pneu, you learned of a job found, a crisis solved, a date confirmed--or broken. "Can't make dinner tonight. How about Wednesday?" That kind of thing.

According to the French postal ministry, the pneu was obsolete and unprofitable, handling fewer than 605,000 messages in 1983, compared with 2.7 million a decade ago. The fact is that the ministry had actually stopped installing pneumatic tubes in all new post offices some time ago, thus converting the system into a sort of hybrid messenger service. The technique is easily recognized: first let the system deteriorate, then announce that usage is declining, so service must be curtailed and/or prices must go up. It sounds just like the New York City subway. The French postal ministry now offers "postexpress," which guarantees same-day service for two or three times the price of a pneu. Soon people will forget that the pneu ever existed.

In London, just after World War II, the older generation complained that the entire postal system was going to perdition. There were only three deliveries a day in these straitened times. Why, before the war, there had been five. One oldtimer recalled that Edward FitzGerald, the translator of The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, regularly wrote to London friends from his home near Lowestoft, 116 miles away, and counted on his letters being delivered before evening the same day. They had decent railroad service too in those days, by Gad.

What doomed the pneu and the postal service, of course, was the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell's new invention seemed so much faster, and consequently so much better. This was before the busy signal was invented, or statements like "He's in conference right now. May I have him call you back?"

There are people today who express wonder that figures like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote a good number of personal letters every day (and made copies too) and still found time to run the country. Or even that Harry Truman regularly wrote to his wife. There are people today who receive a wedding invitation and answer with a telephone call, or forget to answer at all. There are people today who are psychologically unable to write a letter to anybody on any subject. Meanwhile, the postal system has silted up with all the debris of computerized commerce: catalogues from Wisconsin cheesemakers, offers of stock tips, pleas for charitable donations.

It is not antiquarian nostalgia to argue that a letter is much the best way to communicate anything more serious than a grocery order. For one thing, it enables the writer to devote a little thought to what to say and how to say it, rather than babbling the first words that come to mind. For another, it enables him to reread what has been said to him, to make corrections in his own answer, or to throw it away and start again. And finally, it provides him a copy of what was agreed or not agreed a month earlier. All the telephoner has is his illegally recorded tape, most of which consists of "you know" and "uh" and "right?" (remember Nixon in conference?).

Now that a whole generation has become addicted to the telephone, using it for everything from courtship to Dial-a-Prayer, a new phenomenon is occurring: the indispensable telephone system is beginning to fail us. The failure seems to have started when the A T & T monopoly was broken apart at the start of this year, or maybe it has just got worse since then. Have you noticed how much longer it takes between the time you finish dialing and the time the first ring comes? Or how often you dial and there's no ring at all? Or you get a busy signal when you know the line isn't busy? Or that the phones themselves, which never used to break down, now break down? And nobody will fix them, unless you dismantle them and send them--by mail!--to some repair shop in West Nowhere. And the prices keep going up: 25-c- or even 30-c-, soon, for a local call from a booth.

Perhaps the problems are temporary, as the various companies claim. Perhaps not. "The Roman Empire never actually fell," one wise woman has said. "The falling was just an endless series of announcements, like 'The messenger service doesn't stop here on Saturday any more.' " The only thing needed to make the decay of the telephone service even more exasperating is the same pollution that afflicts the Postal Service, not junk mail but phone calls from computers that summon you out of the bathtub to hear their spiels for more life insurance. The Internal Revenue Service has even acquired computers that will telephone an alleged delinquent all day long until he answers.

One of the interesting paradoxes of the new technologies, though, is that in making present systems obsolete, they tend to revitalize still older systems. In some ways, the computer revolution seems to be partially reversing the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps restoring some of the relationships that existed earlier. Generally speaking, the Industrial Revolution demanded standardization; the computer permits customization, individualization, everything "handmade" by machine. The Industrial Revolution demanded concentration, from the country into the city, from the city into the factory; the computer permits dispersion, work done at home. These are the still unrealized implications of the term electronic village.

As a generation that communicates by telephone gives way to a generation that communicates by computer, one of the oddities is that the computer communicates in writing. It can be made to talk, in a disembodied sort of way, but it does better at producing written messages. Computer enthusiasts Like to call this "electronic mail," which sounds very up-to-date, unlike what they call "snail mail," all those catalogues piled up at the post office. But the principle is the same as that of the pneu: a short written message that can be both quick and permanent. One reads nowadays of men and women making friends and even courting by electronic mail; one reads too of business executives who were trained to sell and deal by phone now being retrained in the long-unused art of writing. The computer demands it.

Reinventing the wheel is a phrase applied scornfully to the rediscovery of the obvious. When the obvious is half-forgotten, it is well worth reinventing.

--By Otto Friedrich