What Is That? 9 Peculiar Artifacts of Yesteryear

Walk through life with a 6-year-old and you find yourself often answering the question “What was that for?” It's applicable for everything from phone booths (“Is that a TARDIS?”) to cathode TVs (“That TV’s fat.”) to cassette tapes (“Look at all the brown string that comes out!”). It can be depressing. So, let’s let the grownups have a turn. Some of these objects do have modern counterparts. Most serve needs we no longer have, leaving us to ask, what was that used for? 

1. Lawn rollers

Nowadays, most of us have front yards that were cut and leveled by professional developers with heavy equipment. But this wasn’t always so. As people began to build the beautiful old houses that make up our historic neighborhoods, turning the trampled mud and weeds that surrounded them into lush welcoming lawns was their own responsibility. Lawn rollers (above), heavy cement wheels that could be attached to a tractor (or pushed if you were angry at your spinal discs), were best used on lighter, sandy soil that needed help taking seed. The heavy wheel helped smooth out tilled dirt and pack grass seed firmly into it. They reportedly could help keep the grown turf adhered to the dirt, too.

2. Obstetric Phantoms

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If you look closely, you’ll probably see more than you ever wanted to. There’s a gangly little baby, with yellow pillow placenta, inside a whitish womb, all stored in a small creepy hollowed out torso. Obstetric phantoms have been used for centuries to train doctors and midwives to assist the birth of babies. This 18th century Italian phantom would allow the teacher to manipulate the fetus, whose head you can just see emerging from the phantom’s vagina (best band name ever). This way the instructor could imitate some of the dangerous variables a midwife would encounter and train her students to compensate for them.

3. Hair Receivers  

Etsy

The hair you pull out of your hairbrush, are you throwing it away? Shame on you. Use a hair receiver! From Victorian times to the early 20th century, a lady would put the hair collected from her hairbrush into a lovely pot like this one. The hair could be reused in many ways. Stuffing pillows, pincushions (hair was often more fragrant than now, due to use of oils and perfume in place of washing), and hair ratts. Hair ratts were sewed up, potato-sized bundles of hair that a woman could use to give her hairdos fullness and variety. And you wonder why your hair is so flat and lifeless, Wendy Wasteful.

4. Beauty Micrometer

Lela London

Max Factor’s Beauty Micrometer was invented to help movie make-up men pinpoint exactly what was wrong with a starlet’s face. It could be adjusted 325 different ways, and would scientifically reveal how far a face deviated from the perfection of the mean. Even if the imperfections were invisible to the naked eye.

As ridiculous and painful as this thing looked, there likely wasn’t a single starlet in Hollywood who would argue with Max Factor if he told her to put it on. Max Factor figured out in the 1920s how to cook up cosmetics that actually looked good on camera. Until then actors had been using greasepaint. He kept adapting his recipes every time the method of film-making changed, taking into account things like speed of film and heat of lights. So if Max Factor told you to put on a Hellraiser mask so he could pinpoint every flaw on your face, you put on the damn mask.

5. Mortsafe

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Medical science was absolutely booming in the 19th century. The renowned medical schools of the United Kingdom were turning out brilliant doctors, partially due to how often students were able to witness the dissection of actual human cadavers. People didn’t donate their bodies to science back then; in fact ,many believed a body had to be wholly intact to ascend to Heaven. The only legal source of cadavers were the bodies of executed criminals. That was fine until the medical schools got bigger and the pool of crimes punishable by death got smaller. Enter the burgeoning field of grave robbing. Fresh cadavers sold, no questions asked, to medical schools. In parts of Scotland the fear of losing your loved one to science was so great that people began to fortify the graves of the departed. There were many different designs for mortsafes: some were cages, some just heavy rock slabs laid over the grave that could be removed after time, and some were heavy metal coffins, as pictured.   

6. Antimony Cup

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Nothing will clean you out and leave you feeling as refreshed as using a cupful of toxic wine to make yourself violently ill. At least that was the popular notion in the 18th century. The cups were made of antimony, a metal that would react with the acid in wine to produce a purgative. That is to say, every fluid in your digestive tract would race for whichever exit was closest.

This was considered fine medicine, unless the wine used had too high of an acid content. Then it was considered accidental death by poisoning. Families would often pass down their Antimony Cups through the generations, a general curative for countless ailments.  As awful as this is, it could be considered superior to use of the Antimony Pill, which when swallowed would have the same effect. The metal pill itself would travel undigested and unchanged through the digestive tract, where it was retrieved … and reused. Over and over again. They called it “The Everlasting Pill.”

7. Perforation Paddle

Smithsonian

Your mind, like my own, perhaps goes to a dark place at the sight of this. Fear not. The only backside this paddle was used on was that of the highly deserving Yellow Fever. The Board of Health in Montgomery, Alabama used this paddle in 1899 to poke holes in the mail. This was to prepare it for effective fumigation, hoping to stop the spread of the disease. The people of the era weren’t sure how Yellow Fever was transmitted (mosquito bites), so they tried to contain outbreaks by any means possible. It was useless, but you have to admire their determination and ingenuity.

8. Wooden Leper Clappers

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Biblical lepers were required by law to stay away from The Normies, but should they have to come near to civilization, they were to cry out, “UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!” to announce their approach. Things were more civilized by the 17th century, when lepers could save their voices and just rattle clappers like these (which are actually replicas) to announce their miserable presence. Some historians believe the clappers were also a sound associated with the most desperate of beggars, and helped lepers in their daily fight for the charity that sustained them.

9. Dummy Tanks

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If you looked closely, you’d see a weird wooden jungle gym covered in green tarp. But if you were doing a flyover re-con mission, you would see a fortified line containing many more tanks than you thought your enemy possessed. So many you might even divert your planned attack to the route your enemy wanted you to go in the first place.  Decoy tanks were first used to deceive and intimidate enemies in WWI by Allied forces, and by both sides in WWII (inflatable tanks were popular during that time).  Some sources indicate the US Army still use decoy tanks that replicate M1s, right down to their infrared heat signature.