Maybe this guy?

It's also the middle name of J. N. Hummel, Austrian classical composer of the 18th/19th centuries. AFAIK, he has nothing whatsoever to do with those cutesy ceramic figurines old ladies like to collect.

However, if you could maintain a perfect vacuum in a frictionless tube, you wouldn't need any pnuematics -- the earth's gravitation would pull the matter from one end of the tube to another in about 45 minutes, no matter how long the tube is.

At least that's what I recall from freshman physics back in 1982. Anyone got a 1980's vintage copy of Halliday & Resnick?

About 5 years ago, I had an apicoectomy to treat a chronically abscessed tooth. The abscess had been around long enough to eat away some of the bone surrounding the root. The oral surgeon replaced the missing bone with a special mixture of cadaver bone in a protein matrix. Since it was open surgery and the root end of the tooth was exposed, he just packed it in there the same way a bricklayer would pack mortar into a joint. It seems reasonable that it could also be injected if one had a wide enough needle so that the bone bits wouldn't get stuck.