The concept of fracturing the messages sent over a network into smaller packets was an approach borrowed from the freight world, specifically the house movers. It is reported in the page 38 of the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, and I think its a cool analogy for beginners about the concept of network packets
Think of each message as if it were a large house and ask yourself how you would move that house across the country from, say, Boston to Los Angeles. Theoretically, you could move the whole structure in one piece. House movers do it over shorter distances all the time—slowly and carefully. However, it’s more efficient to disassemble the structure if you can, load the pieces onto trucks, and drive those trucks over the nation’s interstate highway system—another kind of distributed network.