The organized communication of personal mail and packages has been a staple of civilization for thousands of years, even if it only became truly ubiquitous in the Industrial Age with the emergence of mechanized transport and large corporate-like government bureaucracies. But automated packet transportation is a historically recent concept, first appearing in rudimentary form with the introduction of very simple mechanical cable shuttle devices, perhaps as early as the 18th century, and then seeming to culminate in the development of pneumatic tube transport systems in the late 19th century and finally –and curiously– going moribund by the end of the 20th century. Once common in office buildings in the western world in the early 20th century and once planned to evolve into nation-scale netw