vending machines

Around the world with 26 of the weird and wonderful.

And coming to a lobby near someone soon...

This isn't that modern, incidentally. 

According to wiki, a first century engineer and mathematician, Hero of Alexandria, invented a device that accepted a coin and dispensed holy water.  (The deposited coin fell on a pan attached to a lever;  the lever then opened a valve which let water flow out.)  Also, in the early 1600s, English taverns already contained vending machines that dispensed tobacco.

As for banned goods of the "weirder yet," an 1800s English bookseller named Richard Carlile devised a vending machine that distributed forbidden literature.  Mr. Carlile was an important champion for freedom of the press;  he was jailed in England for his writing, and prosecuted for publishing Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The Rights of Man and the Age of Reason.

*Photo credit, via Wikipedia, Minnesota Historical Society, "This vending machine was made by National Vendors, Inc., of 50555 Natural Bridge, St. Louis 15, Missouri, circa 1952, though there appear to be patent dates on the machine as late as 1960."