The first canister included a bible, wrapped in an American flag. Also present were copies of the U.S. Constitution and the inaugural address given earlier that year by President William McKinley. After the ceremony ended, however, things took a strange turn.
A fake peach was pulled from the canister by Senator Chauncey M. Depew, the Republican politician serving as Master of Ceremonies. “Chauncey, you’re a peach,” someone called out to uproarious laughter from the crowd.
The third canister contained a suit. Between the two, someone had sent a black cat, which emerged in front of the Senator disgruntled and confused.
“How it could live after being shot at terrific speed from Station P in the Produce Exchange Building, making several turns before reaching Broadway and Park Row, I cannot conceive, but it did,” lifelong postal employee Howard Wallace Connelly would write in his memoir decades later. “It seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket that had been provided for that purpose.”
The poor feline was the first of many live animals sent through New York City’s pneumatic tube system during its half-century existence. The list also included a goldfish and another cat, sent to a nearby animal hospital. The sick animal emerged on the other side alive, but far more ornery than its predecessor, requiring some effort to subdue.
New York’s pneumatic tube mail began life as an afterthought. Conceived of by Scientific American Editor-in-Chief, Alfred Ely Beach, the system was merely the public-facing facet of his grander ambition to create an air-powered subway system beneath the Manhattan streets. In the waning days of his reign as head of Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed opposed the project – due, at least in part, to a personal distaste for its creator.
Repositioning the public-facing project as a pneumatic mail system styled after the recently-formed London Pneumatic Despatch Company, the project got the green light from local officials. Beach began work on the subway project in secret, managing to keep it under wraps until the publication of a New York Tribune article a mere weeks before it opened.
An engineering marvel in its time, the Beach Pneumatic Transit ultimately didn’t amount to much. The entire system ran 300 feet under Broadway, from Warren to Murray Street. A single station opened in the basement of the Rogers Peet Building, effectively serving as a two-stop shuttle. There was enough novelty to attract 11,000 riders in its first two weeks of operation, but ultimately, the project’s scope was simply too small to justify its existence. The transit system shut down in 1873, a mere three years after opening.
When construction began on the New York City Subway two decades later, teams happened upon Beach’s tunnels and ultimately incorporated them into the broader system. The pneumatic tube mail, meanwhile, opened seven years before the subway.
“This is the age of speed,” Senator Depew declared at its 1897 inauguration. “Everything that makes for speed contributes to happiness and is a distinct gain to civilization. We are ahead of the old countries in almost every respect, but we have been behind in methods of communication within our cities. In New York this condition of communication has hitherto been barbarous.”
The system ran 55 miles, connecting 23 post offices, while being overseen by operators lovingly nicknamed “rocketeers.”
At its peak, 95,000 letters a day traveled through the tubes, comprising nearly one-third of the city’s mail. Aside from a suspension of operation during the first World War, the pneumatic tube mail system ran largely uninterrupted until 1953, when Eisenhower-appointed Postmaster General, Arthur Summerfield, called for it to be dismantled.
Sources:
That Time People Sent a Cat Through the Mail Using Pneumatic Tubes https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/that-time-people-sent-a-cat-through-the-mail-using-pneumatic-tubes/278629/
Fifty-Six Years In The New York Post Office -- A Human Interest Story of Real Happenings in the Postal Service by Howard Wallace Connelly
The Pneumatic Mail Tubes: New York's Hidden Highway And Its Development https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pneumatic-tubes.pdf