In the Bad Ass Cafe in Dublin’s Temple Bar, they used to (maybe still do) have a fascinating system of overhead rails powered by slingshot, that would carry your order (not sadly, your food) from your table to the kitchen.
Your server would write your order in the normal way, then roll it up and put it in a tube, and by means of pulling down on a toggle, catapult it along the rail where it might change direction at various terminals before making it’s way to the kitchen. It made a lot of distinctive whizzing and click clack noises.
The kitchen staff would unload the order, pull the toggle and send the contraption click clack whizzing back.
It always struck me as a wonderful piece of presumably obsolete technology from a world before I was born. As a young person I filed it away under things I’d find out about later, but I never did see anything like it anywhere else. Somewhere in that same file is a suspicion that it may have come from the newspaper printing industry, but I dunno why.
This BTW, is my mental picture of how the internet works.
