My grandfather was the maintenance foreman for a large-ish city hospital. When I was a kid, I used to get to visit him on the mechanical floor and he’d occasionally take my on calls or just tours of the physical plant. The rear wall of his office was a window facing the indicator and control panels for the chiller units and electrical systems. Huge system schematic dotted with red/green lights behind jewel lenses with heavy toggle switches throughout. I thought he had the most awesome job in the universe.
One day, I got to go down to the central transfer unit room for the pneumatic system. More modern systems use a rotating cylinder or similar arrangement in compact units that are distributed throughout the campus. This one had three huge transfer units that every container fed into. They came in one end and onto a conveyor belt, where a hydraulic actuator would move an arm that’d sweep the canister into the correct outbound tube. They were set up to cascade from one sorter to another if the transfer unit the canister entered wasn’t the right one to route it to its destination. Really cool electromechanical stuff for an eight-year-old.
