I knew the name of this all my life but now I have reached an age when the names of things elude me.
It was an apaparatus used around the turm of the century (20th) in kitchens, pantries and dining rooms. It was a wooden box, built into a little elevater-type apparatus, raised and lowered on pullies. It was used to carry laundry, linens and food from one floor of the house to the next.
It seems to me that the word butler was in the name but I can’t get it to come to mind. Any help?
I always heard it called a “dumbwaiter.”
That’s it! Man, why couldn’t I have come up with the word waiter? That would have cinched it.
For more info, see Wikipedia: Elevator - Wikipedia
I’m sure such a mechanism is still used in many if not most restaurants today. Albeit in aluminium or some other shiny metal!
When I was a student, a couple of mates and I went to a fish ‘n’ chip shop to get some takeaway lunch. We’d not been there before. One guy, the first in the queue, placed his order, and the (very attractive) woman behind the counter smiled and said to him “do you want to go upstairs?”. His face was a picture - jaw dropped and everything.
Anyway, we hadn’t realised that the chip shop had a seating area above the takeaway, and you could ask for food to be sent up there when it was ready. The food was sent up to you in a dumb-waiter with a numbered ticket on the tray that matched the ticket you were given when you said to the nice lady that yes, you’d love to go upstairs.
I’ve never seen that arrangement before or since.
The only other dumb-waiter I’ve seen was when I was a programmer in the days of punched cards and printouts and batch jobs. You used it to send jobs down to the computer room, and your printouts from each job came in the reverse direction. We never had fish ‘n’ chips sent up to us, though. 
Large multistory libraries have electric versions - basically very small elevators - to move loads of books between floors.