- Sep 2015
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archive.ncsa.illinois.edu archive.ncsa.illinois.edu
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pneumatic post?
Was used in the 1897 NYC postal system.
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she put out her hand to steady her. "How dare you!" exclaimed the passenger. "You forget yourself!" The woman was confused, and apologized for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.
Oversensitive due to a lack of contact with other people- isolation. "you forget yourself"- she is calling her uncivilised. The flight attendant is one of the few that has human interaction on a daily basis, so it was not foreign to her to reach out and help someone, she had not become as self centred as the others had in their isolation.
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The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms.
Meeting were conducted in isolation, removing the human element and focusing on the power of the machine. This isolation has many consequences including hypersensitivity to natural sunlight, the inability to display emotions for her own son, and human contact is considered a violation of personal rights/ uncivilised .
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The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air."
Striking resemblance to the description of space, with similar consequences for something that was written in 1909. The "ruining" of the world was not a popular opinion then.
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