History

Pneumatic Press Corp. a.k.a “PNEUMATIC”, is a private company, founded in 1994 by Kenneth Grey, the company’s current owner. A pioneer in web development in Canada, PNEUMATIC has grown to be one of the best high-end web design and online solutions providers in the country, with a select client base from a broad range of industries in Canada and the US.

“Ok, so dude... what’s with the wacky name?”
(We get that a lot. Still.)

Back in the early days of the web, when I started the company, the web did not look like much. I was at that point still more impressed with the immediacy of email and how it changed everything. I was trying to think of a name for this media company and I recalled the PNEUMATIC tubes in Terry Gilliam’s cult classic, BRAZIL. I also did some research and discovered that in Paris in the 60’s there was an intricate underground network of PNEUMATIC tubes running between the postal stations in each quarter. You could take a letter to the post office and give it to the clerk and they would pop it into a tube, fire it off to another station in another quarter and an agent there would take the letter and deliver it. That sort of letter was called, wait for it...a “pneumatique”. Tada! So there we were and here we are still, over a dozen years later.

A few other related points of interest...

In his infinitely curious “Critical Dictionary”, Georges Bataille, the famous French radical intellectual-philosopher once associated with the Surrealists of Paris in the mid 1930’s, duly noted (under the entry pertaining to ‘spittle’) that “PNEUMATIC” really signifies “full of soul”.

In the dictionary, “PNEUMATIC” is reported to mean “filled with air”. Well, you can take that where you like.

Our full, legal name is Pneumatic Press Corp. The “Press” part of the name has always been about publishing. In fact, the original concept for the company stemmed from an idea I had about publishing an online arts and literature magazine.

We still actively support the arts and we are still enjoying the changes and challenges of this medium — and there are no shortages of those.

We still like our name. We hope you do too because we are not done with it yet.

Kenneth Grey
Founder
January 16, 2008