Pneumatic tube mail in New York City
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Drive-thru banks in the US still use something similar for moving cash.
If you had to take a little boy or few shopping for clothes, the combination of "small, local, has a fascinating pneumatic tube system" was often a winner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_vacuum_collection
I've always dreamed of a pneumatic tube burrito delivery system that went straight to my house.
I think these systems are really cool but it isn't clear that they are net positive. Even today I would suspect many parcels being too heavy or large for the tube system. You might just end up with the tube system AND vehicular delivery.
They also ended up switching to someone just driving a van - which they already had to have ready to go for when the tube system broke down for days at a time anyways.
"A series of tubes" is a phrase used originally as an analogy by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing net neutrality.[1] ... The metaphor was widely ridiculed, because Stevens was perceived to have displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, despite his leading the Senate committee responsible for regulating it.[2][3]
"... They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material...[4]"