Yes. They are called, simply enough, ‘speaking tubes’. They were common on ships and there was even a sort of hand held version that allowed copilots to communicate with pilots over the roar of an open cockpit and a propellor (here’s a French example, as Aristocats is set in Paris). If you’ve been to a playground in recent years you may have even encountered a version of them that is relatively unchanged in design. The conical shape amplifies the noise coming out (in the same way you can put your phone in a bowl to act as a louder speaker), and the hollow air filled tube allowed the sound to cross distances/walls/stories without being interrupted. In short, they were proto-intercoms before the advent of the telephone by Antonio Meucci or Alexander Graham Bell (depending on which side you are on). When Bell and Meucci (they shared a lab) were experimenting in the 1870s with what become the telephone, they called it a ‘harmonic telegraph’, and Meucci had previously installed speaking tubes in his home.

We can see this ‘telegraph but for sound’ terminology at play in the speaking tubes that predate the telephone. A 1849 article in Scientific America called the speaking tube a ‘acoustic telegraph’ that would enable people to converse with friends ‘as far as 60 miles away’ by speaking through a tube made of ‘gutta percha’, which was a proto-plastic latex material sourced from Southeast Asian trees. The 60 miles claim is preposterous, but perhaps laid the ground for what a telephone would be able to do decades later.

A century before the Aristocats was set, Jean-Baptiste Biot had experimented with using water pipes of Paris apartments to see how sound traveled, and found that the thin confines of the piping served to keep speech intelligible over at least 1040 yards. There was a limit to how well voices could travel, and Biot found that any increase in the diameter of pipes decreased intelligibility. The ‘transmitted signal fell within the 200 hertz to 5000 hertz frequency range, which just so happens to be an excellent range of frequencies for human speech’. The tube's geometry -- small in diameter, with rigid metal walls -- served as an excellent acoustic filer, since those mid-range frequencies could travel through the tube far more efficiently than very high or very low frequency sounds’. To maintain privacy, the end of the tube would be covered by a whistle valve. If someone wanted to communicate, he or she would open the valve and blow through the tube, producing a whistling noise. Then whoever was on the other end would know to open their valve as well, and the two parties could have a spoken conversation through the tube, speaking into or receiving the sounds using the conical amplification of the flared ends.

But the advent of the speaking tube wasn’t, at first, meant for residential applications like you see in the Aristocats. Instead the technology was sold to as being ‘extremely useful for communication within factories, foundries and other public buildings’- basically loud spaces where ‘time was money’ and any way to speed up communication could be sold as a way to increase profits and production (in much the same way the telegraph was first employed. If you have access to it, there is a great article on the development of the telegraph in Germany that unpacks the business embrace of these communication technologies and the ways it then shaped spaces here). If you want to see Disney playing with this idea prior to the Aristocats, look no further than this Donald Duck short where he works in the gift wrapping basement of a Department Store.

For the home application, you have to look toward, appropriately enough, the aristocrats. Well, more accurately you’d have to look to the nouveau riche. In the mid to late nineteenth century industrialisation turned business and factory owners into the new wealthy upper class. These men then brought their work home, so to speak. If you ever watch a period piece like Downton Abbey, you’ll be familiar with the system of pull bells that allow the upper house to call on the servants. Speaking tubes were the logical next step, in that they allowed one to speak directly to the staff, without first having to ring for them, then wait for them to arrive, then speak. ‘Time is money’ but at home. Why the nouveau riche championing this technology? For starters, there is the stereotypical idea that the traditional upper classes were, well, traditional (in that they did not embrace change and new gadgetry in the same way as newer wealthy homeowners might). Think again to the episode of Downton Abbey about the hesitation of installing a wireless radio. But more practically, newly built houses could install speaking tubes in a way that would have been much less destructive than running pipes into the walls of old inherited stately manors.

TL;DR- Speaking tubes allowed for the newly bourgeois individuals (or cats as the case may be) to show off cutting edge communication technology within their home, using it to address the same artifices of established elites, being able to interact with the downstairs staff without having to literally lower ones standing by going downstairs.