Dear Double Zed,

Sorry it took so long to respond. My immediate thought is that gumball machines and other candy machines and toy dispensers do this. The whole entire process of using your coins and getting something back is mechanical, and I would imagine that there would be a way to scale this idea up so that you would need more quarters to buy something more expensive, but it would be pretty difficult for a mechanical machine to read bills, and that's what people use mostly. I think the other place you could look at is mechanical arcade games, such as pinball. Also, just when I was digging, I found this mechanical cigarette machine.

-Inklings