Marc Santora, writing for The New York Times:
It was immediately hailed as positively futuristic and yet dismissed as a fantasy.
In the search to find a better way to move people from one place to another, a wealthy inventor proposed packing passengers into a container that would hurtle through a tube, propelled by little more than a gust of air and gravity.
It is not the “Hyperloop” proposed this week by the technology mogul Elon Musk, which attracted some buzz by offering the possibility of whisking passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes.
This idea came more than 140 years ago, when pneumatic pressure for mass transit was first tested beneath the streets of New York City.
What’s old is new again.