Postmodern pneumatic tubes
At 50 feet a second, Kelly Tube Systems shows no
sign of slowing down
By MAX
BROOKS, Staff Writer
January 12, 2006
|
Driving through
Chicago’s old industrial corridors, lined with the manufacturers of products as
elemental as sheet metal and as absurdly specific as blow pipe supplies, it’s
easy to feel transported to an era of industry titans, railroad barons, and
ACME slingshots. No company exemplifies this time warp effect as dramatically
as Kelly Tube Systems, the family owned pneumatic tube
designer and supplier whose headquarters at 422 N. Western is marked by a large
flying green carrier and the intrepid slogan "50 feet per second!"
"Fifty feet per
second … I remember that from when I was 10, and I happen to be 63, so it’s
been there a while," Loretta Mulcrone, a
granddaughter of the company’s founder and its current payroll manager, said
Friday during a ceremony marking the honorary rededication of West Hubbard
Street as "Kelly Systems Inc."
These days, more than
100 years after the company’s founding, a new generation of the Kelly family is
in charge; Michael Kelly, who got his start shoveling dirt at the company’s foundry is co-owner and vice president of engineering.
Cousin Walt Kelly owns the other half and sits as the company’s CEO, with an
office that looks over the converted space that was once his grandfather’s
home. Walt Kelly’s first unofficial job with the company was picking up nails
in the alleyway behind the building.
When Walt Kelly’s
grandfather started the business in 1904, catalog companies like Montgomery
Ward and Sears were the mainstays of the pneumatic tube business. A catalog
company’s entire physical operation, from orders arriving by
mail to workers loading specific products onto carts in a faraway warehouse,
were managed by the tubes.
"There were blocks
and blocks of warehouses, and they were tied together by tube systems,"
Walt Kelly said.
Later, train switching
yards and truck docks looking to make their paperwork-shuffling more efficient
became an important part of the business, but that too has changed.
"The advent of the
computer really changed the business," Walt Kelly said. "We changed
from moving paperwork around to moving physical things—we started going heavy
into steel mills and food warehouses."
Nowadays, Kelly said,
the company is more likely to send cash, pill bottles, and steel slugs through
its tubes, but the basic mission of building the systems piece by piece and
pushing tubes around with high-volume air pressure remains unchanged.
"I guess the
history of the company is that we’ve evolved," Kelly said.
Home Depot, Kelly said,
has installed nearly 300 tube systems to transport cash, allowing store
managers to avoid the security pitfall that keeping large amounts of money in
the front registers would present. As he was talking, a worker arrived with
blueprints for another client hoping to use the Kelly tubes to move cash around
at a bridge tollway.
Indeed, one entire room
of the Kelly System headquarters is dedicated to the modern new system devised
for Home Depot. At one end of the room, a plexiglass-faced
door opens into a small chamber known as a terminal. One tube leaves from the
terminal’s top end, leading to a large box on the ceiling, which in turn leads
to four more tubes.
During a tour of the
facilities last Friday, Walt Kelly placed one of the green-topped carriers,
about the size of a typical thermos, inside the terminal. After that, an
assistant typed a few directions into a network computer.
Inside the diverter, a
slightly curved section of tube pivoted to direct the path of the carrier to
one of four final locations. With a flick of a switch and a slight rumble of
the air-vac at the other end of the room, the tube
streaked through a transparent section of tubing and showed up a moment later
at a terminal more than 30 feet away.
"They go pretty
quick," Kelly said, when asked if the tube had traveled "50 feet per
second," as advertised.