A closer look

Why take the stairs when you could be blasted through a subterranean pipe like a giant, fleshy bank deposit? Back in 1870, inventor Alfred Ely Beach built a block-long pneumatic transit system under Broadway. The genius idea was to use a massive industrial fan to literally blow a passenger car down the tube, and then reverse the fan to suck it back. Ultimately, politics and a lack of funding killed it, saving generations of New Yorkers from becoming human vacuum debris.