References E-L

EVANS, Bill and LAWSON, A. A nation of shopkeepers. London: Plexus, 1981. Photograph of wire system at Anscombes, Harpenden.

FISHER, Lois. Go gently through Peking: a Westener's life in China. (London: Souvenir, 1979) p.133. "While the Chinese were becoming accustomed to mechanical devices, I was fascinated by an ingenious system of payment in one small store. A cashier sat in a booth with overhead wires from different counters leading to her."

FORRESTER, Helen. Liverpool miss. (London: Harper Collins, 1982) p.24. "The whispered remarks [of shopwalkers] almost drowned by the loud rings of the containers holding payments or change, shooting along wires above their heads on their way from the counter to the cash office."

FOX, Aileen, Aileen: the life of a pioneering archaeologist. (Leominster: Graceway, 2000) p.3. See David McLean

FRASER, Amy Stewart. In memory long. (Routledge, 1977) p.111 [referring to Edinburgh] "By the time I left school, however, they were being modernised, and the overhead railways which carried bills and money from all departments to the unseen cash-office and brought back the change, had been replaced by silent fittings."

GABLE, William F., Co. Gable's 30th Anniversary Souvenir

GAY, Eva. Who keep the cash. In: St Paul Daily Globe (Minneapolis edition) 2 Sept. 1888, p.9 "In many stores the evelated cash railway puts the cashier up in a box near the ceiling. A more uncomfortable place can hardly be imagined. The position is necessarily cramped and confining, and the air becomes heated to a point hardly short of suffocation. It is hardly wonderful that girls look prematurely old after a few months of such experience."

GERRARD, David. Yorkshire of one hundred years ago. (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997) p.73 reprints the article from "Middlesborough Daily Exchange". p. 74 has a photograph of the cashier's office in the Co-operative store, Hull, with 20 pneumatic tube terminals. Source: Ken Jackson of Memory Lane, Hull.

GRAHAM, L. Lillian Gilbreth and the mental revolution at Macy's, 1925-1928. An early time and motion study.

GRIFFITHS, John. The third man: the life and times of William Murdoch 1754-1839. (London: Deutsch, 1992) p220 "He developed the first pneumatic message system - in which a small cylinder containing a written message is impelled by compressed air through an exhausted air tube between sender and recipient. This, with very little alteration, was developed by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company and was employed in large department stores, such as Harrods, until well after World War Two."

HADFIELD, Charles and HADFIELD, Jill. Watching the dragon: letters from China 1983-85. (London: Impact, 1986) p.159 "Many shops in Shanghai have old-fashioned systems of payment. Overhead wires cross the shop, running from counters to cash till. If you are taller than the average Chinese, you frequently have to duck as bulldog clips with receipts, cash and change whizz over your head."

HAMMOND, A.Edward. Store interior planning & display. (London: Blandford, 1939), ch.VII: Service equipment. p.112 Pneumatic tubes. Detailed account of the central desk - "for systems of moderate size a gravity desk is employed, while for larger installations a belt desk is necessary." Fig. 107 shows Doggarts of Darlington , Fig. 110 shows a double-sided central desk installed by Sturtevant Engineering Co. Ltd for John Banner Ltd. of Sheffield and Fig. 112 shows "a small central desk in a credit drapery store". Figs. 114 and 116 show stations in Harrods.
• p.120 Catapult systems. "Still employed in .. shops with, say, three or four departments. These .. are less costly to instal and operate." Fig. 123 is a small photograph of the cash office at Moultons, Ilford.

HANRAHAN, Barbara. The frangipani gardens. (St Lucia, Qld. : Univ. of Queensland Pr., 1980) p.127 "The wooden balls of the cash railway trundled backwards and forwards."

HENDRICKSON, Robert. The grand emporiums: the illustrated history of America's great department stores. (New York: Stein and Day, 1979). Bewteen pp.50 and51 there is a photograph of the Lamson cash basket system at Levy's Red Star Store, Douglas, Arizona and another of "Wires running along the top of this J.C.Penney store in about 1915 [which] were part of the Lamson cash basket system."
p.54 "Boys were usually chosen for these positions [cash children] because it was feared that all the running around, often to deserted areas of a store , might prove dangerous for a young girl...
The thrifty founder of Macy's reduced the wages of his cash girls from two dollars to one dollar and a half in 1866.
p.55 The usual line of advancement in a department store was from cash boy to wrapper to salesman to assistant buyer to buyer - and a number of cash boys travelled even further along the road to become high-level management.

HILL, Frank P. Lowell illustrated (1884 ) "In the spring of 1881, he commenced manufacturing these carriers for others and in January 1882 incorporated the Lamson Cash Railway Company."

HISCOX, Gardner Dexter. Mechanical movements, powers, devices and appliances. (New York: Henley, 1904) p.27. "Cash carrier". Shows a diagram (left) of a bell-shaped wire carrier, rather like Fuller's. The horizontal rod with springs acts as a buffer. The levers are to disconect the pawls from the stopblock and start the car.

HOLLINS, Peter and ENGLAND, Steve. Memory Lane Leicester. (Derby: Breedon Books, 1997)
• p.65 Photograph of cash ball system at the Beehive shop, Silver Street, being operated by Miss H.L.Grimley.
• p.68 Photograph of a scene inside "a pre-war Leicester provision store in Hotel Street" with two Rapid Wire propulsions visible

HOWER, Ralph M. History of Macy's of New York, 1858-1919. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1946) p.383. "The pneumatic tubes had eliminated the cash girls" [in 1915 compared with the 1870s]

INWOOD, Stephen. A history of London. (London: Macmillan, 1998) p.653 "In the 1880s and 1890s the more advanced shops installed electricity. Pneumatic tubes to carry cash and orders between sales floors and cashiers were introduced at about the same time."

JEHL, Francis. Menlo Park reminiscences. (Kessinger, 2002), p.42 "McCarty later on made many inventions, including the cash-carrier system still found in many business places."

KENNEDY, D.H. "Pneumatic tube services" in P.O. Electrical Engineers Journal, vol. 2 (Apr. 1909), pp. 26-32.

KNAPP, J.W. Store management and business organization. (New York: Alexander Hamilton Inst., 1927) p.78 "The pneumatic tube system, in which carriers containing the sales check and money are shot to a central tube room or cashier, by a current of air at low pressure, is a development of the cable carrier system used so widely in the past. The centralized control of cash secured by the tube system is assuredly a great improvement over the methods used before. One feature rarely mentioned is the saving in the amount of cash which the store must keep on hand for change purposes... In spite of these advantages, the tube system is losing ground to the cash register, although large department stores still find both systems necessary."

LAMB, Jim and WARREN, Steve. The people's store: a guide to the North Eastern Co-op's family tree. (Gateshead: North Eastern Co-op, ca. 1998)
• p.53 "A typical Co-op grocery interior of 1911." Shows two stations of a cash ball system.
• p.47 "Co-operative shopping in the pre-self service days". Shows three Gipe(?) propulsions.
• p.60 "A 1911 Co-operative greengrocery shop." Shows a Rapid Wire propulsion.
• p.95 "Interior of one of the Society's grocery stores." Shows Rapid Wire propulsions.

LAMSON COMPANY Publications

LANCASTER, Bill. The department store: a social history. (London: Leicester University Press, 1995). Page 49 has photographs of the cashier's office and a terminal station of a large pneumatic tube system - store not specified.

LANE, Rose Wilder. Give me liberty. (New York: Longman, 1936) "In America, commercial decrees did not hamper every clerk and customer, as they did in France, so that an extra half-hour was consumed on every department-store purchase. French merchants are as intelligent as American, but they could not install vacuum tubes and a swift accounting system in a central cashier's department. What is the use? they asked you. They would still be obliged to have every purchase recorded in writing in a leger, in the presence of both buyer and seller, as Napoleon decreed."

LEFÈVRE, Julien. Dictionnaire de l'industrie: matieres premières, machines et appareils, méthodes de fabrication. (Paris: Ballière, 1899) p.851. "Les transporteurs de monnaie ou cash-carriers sont très employés dans le... L'un des plus simples est le transporteur Gipe."

LEMELSON CENTER, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Two video recordings of Lamson wire system at Lowns Department Store, Penn Yan, N.Y. 1995. Features an extensive interview with the former owner and operator, Jim Kerbull.

LEONARD, R.L. and GLASSGOLD, C.A. American art deco: an illustrated survey. (Courier Dover, 2004) p.12. "The store architect .. knows the relation between the different departments and the Lamson tube system."

Lewes remembers: shops and shopping. (Lewes: Lewes U3A Publications). Three Lewes shops remembered on pages 59 and 83.

LEWIS, Thomas (ed.) Modern retailing: stepping-stones to success in shopkeeping. (London: Caxton, 1949) Vol. III, p.31. "The use of cash railways is probably diminshing, but many smaller firms continue to employ them, and some of the larger stores make use of them as relief measures in exceptionally busy departments at peak periods of trade, such as during the Christmas season."
• p. 32. "Modern store buildings almost invariably provide for pneumatic-tube equipment."
• p. 33. "Even in the largest buildings, the travel time of a carrier from the farthest station to the tube room is rarely more than twenty seconds and, as it has been proved that young cashiers.. can handle four to six transactions a minute, change should normally be returned to the department within one minute."
Three photographs of tube rooms, showing incoming and outgoing tubes, and one of a sales point.

LIFFEN, John. The development of cash handling systems for shops and department stores. In: Transactions of the Newcomen Society, vol. 71, no. 1, 1999-2000, pp. 79-101. The theme is centralised vs. decentralised registration of purchases. The majority of the article is concerned with cash carriers. It draws on a large number of original sources, especially patents and company documents.

LOVETT, Vivien. Kennards of Croydon: the store that entertained to sell. A history of a Debenhams store. (The Author, 2000). Photographs of the automatic central desk, the dispatch section ca. late 1920s, and the foreign fancy department with Lamson tubes in 1923.

LOWERY, George H. Louisiana birds. (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1955) p.442. "It is suggestive of the clicking sounds heard in department stores that have an overhead conveyor system for carrying money to the cashier and bringing back change in small metal containers. If one happens to be standing in the middle of the store, the metallic sounds made by one of the ..."

References A-D   References M-Z   Cash carriers in Fiction   HOMEPAGE  SITE MAP