THE MEAT TUBES

You think your morning commute is a ball-ache? Try getting shot across London in a glorified spitball tube lubricated with what was probably whale spooge. See, back in the mid-19th century, some bright sparks looked at the pneumatic mail systems—little brass canisters zipping under cities with letters and the occasional bewildered ferret—and had a thought so monumentally stupid it could only have come from a rich man with syphilis: “What if we put *people* in ‘em?”

And so the Great Human Cannonball Folly of the 1870s was born. It started in London, naturally. Some aristocrat—Lord knows they were bored, having run out of cousins to marry and foxes to terrorize—funded the first “Personal Pneumatic Dispatch.” The passenger—a deeply unlucky and catastrophically hungover footman—was crammed into a padded canister that smelled faintly of metal and desperation. With a sound like God sneezing, he was blasted from Westminster to Chelsea in ninety seconds. He arrived looking like a man who’d just gone ten rounds with a cement mixer, his waistcoat somewhere around his ears and his dignity back in the last postcode. But he was *alive*. And that’s all these lunatics needed.

Suddenly, everyone with more money than sense was digging. Paris, Vienna, New York—all burrowing into the earth like sexually frustrated moles. The French, of course, tried to make it chic, with velvet-lined pods and a tiny, useless champagne flute holder. The Germans made theirs brutally efficient and twice as likely to shatter your pelvis. One American tycoon, a railroad bastard named Cornelius McScrotum (name DEFINITELY real, look it up), envisioned a tube from New York to San Francisco, apparently forgetting about the f—king Rocky Mountains. The primary selling point wasn’t speed, you see, it was *privacy*. A lord could visit his favorite high-end brothel, a politician could attend an opium den, a duchess could go get serviced by a stable boy with shoulders like a prize-winning hog—all without prying eyes. It was the ultimate rich-person creep-mobile.

Of course, it all went tits-up spectacularly. The “Great Clog of ‘88” saw a 16-person blockage under Berlin when a portly Bavarian diplomat got wedged, creating a human traffic jam that took rescuers three days to clear with a truly heroic amount of industrial lubricant. People were accidentally shot to the wrong cities, ending up dazed and confused in places like Cleveland, which was arguably a fate worse than death. One canister, legend has it, was fired with such force it breached the surface in a Belgian cabbage patch, giving a farmer the fright of his life. After a decade of bruised kidneys, scrambled organs, and one too many millionaires arriving at their destination as a fine pâté, society collectively decided that maybe the choo-choo train wasn’t so bad after all.