Commemorating thirteen years since Elon Musk revolutionized transportation with the hyperloop.

From Vaclav Smil’s book “Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure.”

(We'll be coming back to this one.)

These short pamphlets were not widely known, but in 1825 the British public could read about a much bolder proposal for using tubes, vacuum, and high speeds to cover the distance of just over 600 kilometers between London and Edinburgh in five minutes (yes, minutes, not hours). The proprietors of the newly formed London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company, after “having carefully matured their plans,” published (in the Edinburgh Star) their prospectus for a joint stock project “with a capital of Twenty Millions Sterling, divided into 200,000 shares, of £100 each, for the purpose of forming a Tunnel or Tube of metal between Edinburgh and London, to convey Goods and Passengers between these cities and the other towns through which it passes.”

Boilers would be placed every two miles along the two side-by-side tunnels (tubes), and the steam they generated would be used to create a vacuum. When the vacuum seal was broken right behind the train at the departure end, the inrushing air would instantly propel the train into the tube by pushing on “a very strong air-tight sliding door, running on several small cylindrical rollers, to lessen the friction.” The train would carry only goods because the tube would be just four feet (1.2 meters) in diameter, and passengers would be seated in railway carriages running on rails fastened to the tube’s top and coupled by strong magnets to the freight train inside the tube whose rapid progress would drag on the passenger train, covering nearly 800 kilometers in five minutes.

The London Mechanics’ Register, a new periodical established to diffuse scientific knowledge “among the operative classes of society,” reprinted the notice in order “to throw ridicule upon some of the preposterous plans now before the public for the investment of money.” Precisely!

The country’s unfolding steam-based industrialization offered many new opportunities for outrageous claims, financial scams, and false prophecies of technical miracles, and the decade’s leading satirical illustrator did not miss his opportunity to lampoon the early promise of travel in a vacuum. William Heath (1794–1840) initially called himself a “portrait & military painter,” but during the 1820s he published many satirical colored etchings, often alluding to political affairs of the day or lampooning generic human follies.

In 1829 Thomas McLean in London published Heath’s colored etching “March of Intellect. Lord how this world improves as we grow older.” The busy image is crowded with such would-be futuristic contraptions as a suspension bridge from Cape Town to Bengal, a four-wheeled steam-powered horse called VELOCITY, a gun-carrying platform that was lifted by four balloons, and a large winged flying fish crammed with convicts being transported from England to Australia. But the etching’s center of interest is a large seamless metallic tube that is conveying passengers from Greenwich Hill (in East London) directly to Bengal, thanks to the innovative acumen of the Grand Vacuum Tube Company.