Pneumatic tubes were used to deliver mail!
You can read more about the fascinating history here: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pneumatic-tubes.pdf
Credit: https://hachyderm.io/@miah
More steampunk than solarpunk, but yeah always interesting to read some details about complex but mostly forgotten technology.
In the medicine field this technology isn't uncommon because you can send samples quickly to the hospital laboratory.
Imagine upping the size, running the vacuums on renewables and automating it though. You could distribute farm fresh veggies to the doorstep of everyone in an entire city. I think that'd be solarpunk as hell.
What about this is "punk"? It's just old technology. I don't see a reason to give everything a "punk" label.
We had such a system (with only one pipe) a few decades ago in our company. Purpose was to deliver samples from the production to the laboratory. When I started in the late 90’s it was already not in use anymore. I got told that sometimes the pipe got clogged…
Reminds me of the tubes they send radionuclide to hospital for scanning