I found this drawing in the Dundee Evening Post for the 26th January 1900 and challenged Twitterfolk to guess its purpose.
I hid its true function and got some weird and wonderful suggestions. I’m not sure if something like this was ever used or even built. Maybe it was just a fanciful notion of the paper’s illustrator. If you know anything about it, let me know! Here is the description which followed the sketch.
References
Dundee Evening Post, 26th January 1900, pg. 4.