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.

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.

“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.

What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.

Gregarious, well read and engaging, Mr. Miller was welcomed by his customers as enthusiastically as the seltzer, and he enjoyed close friendships with many of them.

“I’m the product,” Mr. Miller was quoted as saying in Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink (2018), by Barry Joseph. “It’s not the seltzer. It’s all about Eli.”

Mr. Miller’s longevity in a disappearing business lent him a splash of fame. He was profiled by numerous publications and websites and became the subject of a children’s book, The Seltzer Man (1993), by Ken Rush, a longtime customer.