Photographs

Paris: Disneyland

Channel Islands

ST HELIER, Jersey. Freddie Baker (drapers). Wire system in 1950s. (Jersey Museum)

ST HELIER, Jersey. Noel and Porter (drapers) 8-16 King Street (now BHS). Wire system in 1950s. (Jersey Museum)

ST HELIER, Jersey. George D. Laurens, 3-7 Queen Street. Wire system in 1950s. Firm closed in 1973 and site is now Monsoon. (Jersey Museum)

ST HELIER, Jersey. Le Riches Stores. Wire system in 1950s. (Jersey Museum)

ST PETER PORT, Guernsey. Le Riches Stores, 49 High Street. Four Rapid Wire propulsions shown in one photograph of the grocery department and three in another in Renault.

Czech Republic

OPAVA. Hermann und Vogel department store. "Those cash dispensers that shot capsules along wires across the store". (Heinz Vogel's Memoirs. ch.4)

PRAGUE. One of the staff at Beamish Museum told me that a lot of shops in Prague had wire systems.

Finland

A Lamson pneumatic tube system was "re-discovered" in store in Central Finland by Lamsons' agent. It was installed in 1903. (Lamson News)

France

MARNE LA VALÉE. Emporium, Disneyland Paris. This is built in the style of a 19th century U.S. department store. It includes "an overhead cable-driven money exchange system that serves the cashier's office" (Disney Vacation Planner).It is not an original but a reconstruction by Walt Disney Imagineering based on a photograph in "New York interiors at the turn of the century".

PARIS. Bon Marché (dept. store). "Unlike other stores which remodelled pre-existing buildings as they expanded, the Bon Marché was planned to function as a department store from the start... Internal communication ws handled by a system of pneumatic tubes that shunted messages from the main administrative core to the individual departments." Journal of Architectural Education vol.39, no.1, 1985, p.22

PARIS. Printemps (dept. store). "The 'Au Printemps' store in Paris contains two pneumatic central cash stations, each about 2000 square feet, one in the basement and the other on the top floor of the new building; also an invoice section .. of about 2300 square feet on the top floor of the old building. Over 200 sales and stock stations are connected by pneumatic tube with the central cash station and the billing office." Louis Parnes. Planning stores that pay: organic design and layout for efficient merchandising. Dodge, 1948, p.224
• "Printemps, built in the wake of the 1877 Paris Exposition, and located nearer the Opéra .. was richer in colour and materials... All the most progressive features - .. automatic cash registers, wireless telephones, pneumatic tube systems.. played an important role in creating the image. Meredith L.Clausen. Fritz Jourdain and the Samaritains: art nouveau theory and criticism. Brill Archive, 1987. p.213.

Germany

MAINZ. "Every once in a while my mother went to visit her father at his store close by the cathedral... Roaming through the store, we raced the overhead money cages which carried the customers' payments from the sales counters to a central cashier and returned with the change." Doris Drucker. Invent radium or I'll pull your hair: a memoir. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2004. p.38. (Her family emigrated from Germany to America in 1932.)

indicates systems which are still there (as far as I know) though they may not be working.