January 2009 Archives

(Stepping out of pneumatic tube land and moving forward about 115 years into the major project I did in the 1990s...)

Last week, I attended the opening discussion for A Few Good Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production at Columbia's Studio X in New York. The discussion veered--maybe overmuch--into one about format: online, offline? Broadsheet, stapled, saddle stitched? Can a website be a zine at all?

It made me think of two things: the webzine I ran with three co-founders and the ways that the proliferation of blogging makes such a project less likely.

In 1997, four of us--Janelle Brown, Heather Irwin, Rosemary Pepper and I started Maxi, a pop culture feminist webzine under the motto "Pro woman. Post grrl." We were tired of the media options for women at the time: with very few exceptions (like Bust and Bitch), it seemed that our choices were fashion magazines that talked more about thin thighs and giving men better orgasms, or career sites that weren't much fun to read. Over two months, we planned the first issue, titled Girlfriends. 

Since all of us worked with Internet, technology, design and content in some way, it made more sense for us to build a webzine as opposed to a paper zine or magazine. Given our day jobs, we had electronic resources at our fingertips. We wanted the site to be well-designed and well-written, something that was easier for us to do online than on paper. We wrote, edited, designed and coded and launched the site to acclaim in April 1997, with international press following us throughout the time we published.

In the two and a half years of its existence, Maxi blended elements of magazine, creative web narrative and what would now be called a blog (the Raw Nerve section). We wanted to depict a world that accepted feminism but that had an edge, that was critical about the media, but still appreciated the guilty pleasures of consumer culture. We published themed every few months in which we would totally redesign the interface--they included Girlfriends, Marriage, Sex (also known as the vibrator issue), Technology, and Media.

Maxi was always envisioned as a collaborative effort. The four of us were all a part of the web community in San Francisco and New York from its early days; I knew Rosemary from college, Janelle and Heather had worked together at Wired, I had written for the two of them at another webzine. Our friends Bruce Falck and Simon Smith hosted the site; Peter Merholz wrote a cgi script for managing the table of contents, and Jim Petersen gave us the comments script that allowed us to start conversations with our readers at the end of articles.  We later migrated to a version of PHP BB to run our discussions: it was a vital, comprehensive community. For the most part, we hand coded everything. There was no better tool at hand than our HTML and UNIX knowledge or our Photoshop skills.

One element of Maxi's success is that other like-minded webzines launched around the same time as ours. We founded a network called Estronet that reached out to a small group of them. Bust.com (founded on paper by Deb Stoller and Marcelle Karp), Minx, gURL (founded by Rebecca Odes, Esther Drill and Heather McDonald), Wench (founded by Caterina Fake and Leanne Waldal), Tripod's Women's Room (led by Emma Taylor, one of the major forces behind Nerve.com), and Hues (Ophi and Tali Edut). We had no funding, but Heidi Swanson and Chickclick did: Estronet joined with Chickclick and Maxi's Heather Irwin joined forces with Heidi as its creative director, if I remember right. Chickclick's popularity grew such that it sponsored the 1999 Lilith Fair.

By the time we stopped publishing Maxi in Fall 1999, the face of web content for women had expanded. The edgier voices that Maxi and other sites had put out there had begun to move into the mainstream. And all of this had happened before Peter--the same one who had created our CGI script in 1997--coined the word "blog" (it's in the OED now) in 1999.

I'll pick up that point in my next blog post.

We would have loved to publish quickly and easily on a daily basis. We wanted a content management system (it would have saved the site). In one of our meetings in early 1999, we talked about how we wanting to be able to type in text, upload an image and publish. If we were publishing today, parts of our site would have been a blog. If we had started today, though, what would be be doing?

But what of the collaboration? Would that have happened, and if so, how? I'm not so certain. Would it have had the wide-reaching effect that Maxi and sites like ours had? I don't think it would have. Webzines like ours reflected a vital piece in a period between the personal home page and the blog. And I fear that the standardization that blogging brings about snuffs out some of the possibilities that were at hand in the mid to late 90s.

Where are we all now? Janelle's novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything was published last year. Heather is a food, wine and travel writer. Rosemary is a freelance writer. And as you've ascertained, I'm an architecture PhD student (who still writes, cares about digital content, and spent too much of her life online).

I'm in the midst of a bunch of intense writing on the origins of the pneumatic tube network. It's not done yet, but I'll share more here given the recent interest (thanks, Bruce, for the link!).

Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984. The pneumatic tube network relieved the saturated telegraph network, delivering physical messages across the city and to the suburbs faster and more reliably than the telegraph. What first began as a one-kilometer line connecting Paris's stock exchange and central telegraph office opened to the public service in 1879, and by 1910 reached all arrondissements and nearby suburbs, contained 210 kilometers of underground tubes, and handled approximately nine million postal telegrams a year. By 1953 at its height, it was 450 km long--the largest in the world--processing more than 11 million pieces a year.

Why did it make sense to send a telegram via pneumatic tube? It was a set of factors related to urban conditions in the 19th century. Cities with high population, heavy commerce and finance and urban congestion made good candidates for pneumatic tube networks. Moreover, in Europe, the pneumatic tube mostly relieved a communication boom caused by inexpensive telegraphy and saturated telegraph networks. Devised as an auxiliary to the telegraph, a medium that could only transmit 40-50 messages of 20 words per hour in 1860, the pneumatic tube network addressed the issue of rapid, reliable communication within the city (though telegraphy still made sense for messages sent over longer distances).

Poste Pneumatique was under the operation of the telegraph office within the postal service, although it only moved physical, written cards and not electric messages. It offered Parisians a quick and reliable method of sending messages across their congested city--something that could not happen with overburdened telegraph lines or on urban streets. To send a "petit bleu," (the one on the right from this collection) as pneumatic messages were known, the sender composed a written message on a card and delivered it to a special Poste Pneumatique mailbox or the nearest post office. There, the postal telegraph desk delivered it via pneumatic tube receptacle to the addressee's closest post office, where a messenger (bicycle or later, motorcycle) would deliver it to the recipient--usually within two hours of its inscription.

By 1870, Paris also had an extensive network of vaulted sewers, built by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire. The sewers were a natural conduit for other types of infrastructure (potable water, telegraph lines, and eventually electricity), making it easier to install pneumatic tube and compressed air lines and to access them in case of error.

Paris's pneumatic tube network was not the first--that was London, started in 1853) and by no means was it the only one. Urban tube systems existed all over the world, in Europe, North and South America, and Australia. London invented its pneumatic post in 1853. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865 and Vienna in 1878 Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. The technology transferred readily and with less competition than might have been expected (Austrian, German and French engineers shared technological improvements).

Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure). They fell out of favor for different factors: in the US, the invention of the gasoline-powered truck in 1912 proved competitive; elsewhere, reliable telephone, and later fax service obviated the need for the networks. But still, telecommunication contends with issues of last mile delivery and economies of scale. And as interest in embedded computing grows, of objects imbued with interactivity, there's something extremely attractive about a physical system that shoots a physical message to its addressee.