Long before sparkling water with brand names like Polar, Perrier and La Croix crowded bodega refrigerators and apartment dwellers used household carbonators to bottle bubbling beverages themselves, New Yorkers relied on seltzer men to deliver refreshment in clanking glass bottles.

Eli Miller, one of the last of the old-fashioned seltzer men, covered a route in Brooklyn from 1960 until he retired in 2017. Mr. Miller died on March 12 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 86.

The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his brother, Steven, said.

When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.