You can read more about the fascinating history here: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pneumatic-tubes.pdf
Credit: https://hachyderm.io/@miah
More steampunk than solarpunk, but yeah always interesting to read some details about complex but mostly forgotten technology.
What about this is “punk”? It’s just old technology. I don’t see a reason to give everything a “punk” label.
Imagine upping the size, running the vacuums on renewables and automating it though. You could distribute farm fresh veggies to the doorstep of everyone in an entire city. I think that’d be solarpunk as hell.
In the medicine field this technology isn’t uncommon because you can send samples quickly to the hospital laboratory.
We had such a system (with only one pipe) a few decades ago in our company. Purpose was to deliver samples from the production to the laboratory. When I started in the late 90’s it was already not in use anymore. I got told that sometimes the pipe got clogged…
Reminds me of the tubes they send radionuclide to hospital for scanning