When I was a boy, I had the good fortune to stay in a New York City hotel that was equipped with a Cutler Mail Chute. There was a brass letter slot on every floor and a large, beautiful brass collection box in the lobby.
Tenants, employees or guests put letters into the slot on their floor, and gravity did the rest. Letters fell down a glass-windowed shaft to the collection box below where they were collected by a mailman. I still remember my excitement when I happened to be walking by a windowed chute as a letter flew downward, and the rattling sound the letter made on its descent.
The inventor of this magical contrivance was James Goold Cutler (1848-1927), a Rochester, N.Y., architect and businessman. In 1883, Cutler received a patent for the mail chute, and installed the first one the next year in the Elwood Building in Rochester. Hundreds more were installed in tall buildings all across the nation.
Although few Cutler Mail Chutes are still in use (and fire laws today forbid their installation), hundreds are still in place in older buildings, stately memorials to ingenuity.
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