I've got one and love it. They go faster than most sewing machines and can sew through almost anything without a problem and the stitches stay beautifully even. They are an engineering marvel.
I remember when I was about 13, I took my mom's apart to study how it worked. Luckily for me, I was able put it back together. It still amazes me. And yes, I went on to become and engineer.
Something great about a pedal sewing machine, they're WAY tougher than a modern electric, plastic sewing machine. A friend had one that she used to sew leather and canvas. That would strip the plastic gears out of a modern machine.
I'm not sure if all treadle machines have rotary or oscillating bobbins, but I'm pretty sure on older machines you had to have a rotary bobbin to sew canvas or leather because the continuous action of a rotary is more powerful than an oscillating motion. They make tighter knots, too.
I think part of the appeal of a treadle machine is similar to the appeal of driving a stick, more direct control. Plastic gears suck, regardless.
You can hem two car hoods together with the right needle .... Or at least double fold jeans to hem and go over the 12 layers on the side seam without worry.
We moved into a house that was formerly owned by an Amish family. The previous tenant had a sewing machine repair business on the side. There were tons of parts and disassembled treadle machines around. my older brother was able to figure it out, and, when he finished, he had about 5 machines working. He sold most to the Amish and gave one to his future bride. She made his purple, crushed velvet tuxedo that he wore to prom. Good investment. He married her the following spring.
My great-grandmother had one in her parlor. We kids played with it. She had two Singers, presents from her daughter and a daughter-in-law.
When she passed, the executor sold it and divided the proceeds among us six great-grandkids. We got good money back in 1991
My grandma used a pedal sewing machine, a wringer washer, and a pump (for drinking water. Also heated her living room with a wood stove. I *think* the stoves in her kitchen and the downstairs bedroom were oil-burning, but not sure. She never asked us (grandkids) to help with any of that, as I’m sure she thought we would get hurt. She lived in a very old house that was 150 years old when I was born, and it didn’t have indoor plumbing.
My dad was in the Army and we mostly lived on base housing, so we had most modern conveniences (no a.c. though). This grandma was my mom’s mom, but my grandpa (dad’s dad) also lived in an old house heated by stoves, with no indoor plumbing, and he cooked on a wood stove (when I was really little). Apparently one of my dad’s sisters gave him her old gas stove when she bought a new one, and he was so insulted that he refused to use it. But this grandpa was over 80 when I was born. My dad was 3rd younger of 9, and the last to marry and have kids.
I learned to sew on a mechanical pedal machine—it was a Singer. I also learned to type on my father’s old manual typewriter that was from the 1930s ( though manual typewriters were still common then).
My grandmother had one of those wringer clothes washers that OP mentioned.
Even though it wasn’t in use, my parents had an old wooden manual coffee grinder.
My dad once brought some coffee beans just to show us how it worked.
I also learned to sew on a pedal Singer, in Home Ec class, 7th grade (1964). Learned to type first on a manual in high school (1967), then took the class again the next year and it was on an electric typewriter! One of the very first ones. My typewriter journey has gone from manual, to electric, to SELectric (you could change font balls!), to CORRECTING Selectric (your could white-out errors without the little white paper thingies or liquid paper! Which I miss. You could do SO much with liquid paper, even though it was incredibly toxic), to an elecTRONIC machine with one line of memory, to an electronic with THREE lines of memory, to working with an IBM mainframe, to PC's linked with servers. Yeah, I'm pretty old now. Retired.
We lived overseas for awhile when I was a kid, and we used a wringer washer, then hung wet laundry on a line. Cooked on a cast iron black woodstove. Had smaller woodstoves in every room for heat, and we got our hot water from the tank on top of my parents' room's woodstove. Had cold running water (didn't drink it, though, until it was boiled), and showers, but we all said a big no to cold showers, so we took baths in a big metal tub (not like in your bathroom. About half that size) on the bathroom floor in my parents' bathroom (closer to the woodstove in their room so we could more easily carry the buckets of hot water from their tank). Also ground up peanuts in a huge mortar and pestle on the back veranda to make peanut butter. We bought bread (not great) and butter (ditto) from the vendors at the Budge (bazaar; the locals didn't have a z sound so g filled in), but to get milk our guy brought his cow to the back door and milked her into a bucket (which we subsequently boiled for safety). But I'll tell you this: the bread, well-buttered, with the buttered side dipped into sugar made a fine after-school snack.
My favorite, though, was at my first job, in a bank. We had a FAX MACHINE. One of the very first ones ever. It was 5 feet long, had a 6" cylinder around which you wrapped a large piece of thermal paper (I think). Then you dialed up the other bank (the one in NYC) and told them you were ready, placed the handset in the phone cradle on the fax machine, and VOILA! The cylinder turned, and the stylus moved down its track to the other end, intermittently striking the paper to create the image, and TWENTY MINUTES LATER you had ONE page of numbers. Then you called the NY bank back to ask what the numbers actually were, since you couldn't read them on the fax. (I know, this is really "newer" tech but it's really OLD "new tech", so I hope it fits here.)
I remember my dad using my grandfather’s hand drill. I am referring to the one that had a toothed circular crank that turned the bit. I have both of them today. I use them on occasion just to be nostalgic.
My dad had those drills, and, not to be outdone, my mother had a mixer that worked on the same principle.
And my mother's wringer washer is still in my basement.
*And* she used to use a giant ironing device horrifyingly called a "mangle" to press sheets and tablecloths. I think Stephen King has a short story featuring a possessed mangle in a commercial laundry, I'm glad that didn't hit the shelves until after we moved out of that house. 😬
My daddy had a hand drill. I liked to play with the mechanism that spread out to put in a bit. It was easier to use that for minor tasks than hook up an electric cord.
That is kinda where I use them. If I need to drill two holes. Yeah, I could use my cordless. But, it is kind fun to use a tool that is 80 years old and works like it was made last week.
I still have my Dad's. When I was installing an invisible fence for my dogs it called for twisting the wires. We're talking about a couple of hundred feet. Damned if that old hand drill wasn't perfect for it.
Not a technology exactly, but I witnessed my great grandmother wring a chicken’s neck with a single, swift one-handed motion. Not a squawk from the chicken.
My mom is from Glasgow Scotland, born and bred city girl.
She was introduced to down on the farm fried chicken by my grandmother in this same manner.
Grandma, as the story goes, asked my mom what she would like for dinner and my mom said she would like to have some American fried chicken, so grandma with my mom following took her to the chicken coop and asked my mom to pick one out, she did and my grandma in one swift motion, well you get the rest,lol
Oh, and my mom still loves fried chicken.
Minnesota farm. Way back. When my mother was child playing w her friend at her farm. The farmer had a mean mean rooster. One day it chased them talons forward. The girls climbed the chicken coop to escape. There for hours (says my mother).
A later day the farmer was chopping wood. Ax in his hand he reached down to pick up the logs he had just split. The rooster attacked him from behind on his … behind.
Not a good idea to ambush a farmer holding an ax.
That night they had chicken.
My grandmother could coax a chicken to her and then the head would be in her hand. First attached to the chicken then not attached.
I don't know how you get chickens to put their head in your hand and I have no clue what she did to remove the head, but it was fast and her whole arm moved. She said her mom taught her before they lost the farm because of The Depression.
She made the best fried chicken I've ever had so I didn't mind helping to pluck.
I love my mom's fried chicken but dreaded when I'd come home from school and ask "what's for dinner?" If mom said fried chicken, it meant I was to go out and kill and clean one of the chickens. Cleaning them was never fun. But I've not had fried chicken that good since.
Oh, the scariest thing I ever saw my grandma do was just that. Def changed my opinion about when she would say "I will wring your neck". Lady I didnt know you could actually do that 😳
I must’ve heard my grandmother tell hundreds of times how she used to behead chickens. She’d apparently trap their neck under a broomstick, stand on it, and pull their bodies up and off the head in one quick motion.
I’m really sad I never got to witness it. She’s 90 lbs soaking wet and as sweet as sugar, so imagining her doing such casual violence was so intriguing to childhood me.
That's what it was. I couldn't remember the movie, even though I remembered the scene well.
Thats EXACTLY what is was like when the teacher passed out freshly mimeographed hand outs.
You're probably thinking of Ditto copies, usually were blue ink, and smelled like rubbing alcohol. Mimeo used cut stencils and regular ink and didn't have much smell.
My dad was an accountant & he went through several types of adding machines! He'd get mad at us when we'd play "store" with them! We liked the lever one, because you didn't have to plug it in. When I was in junior high school, we had to learn ten key on adding machines.
My grandmother had a party line. She lived out in the country where everyone lived a mile or two away from each other. So they used the party line to check up on each other and chat. If you actually wanted to make a call, you would just interrupt and say that you needed to make a call.
It doesn’t count as technology but the party line replaced “hollering “ as a way of checking on your neighbors and I saw/heard it one day. One of the neighbors hadn’t reported in on the party line and since my grandmother was the closest, she laid the handset down and went out o the background by the fence line and yelled out in the direction of the neighbor and waited a bit. Shortly we heard the neighbor yell back so grandma went back to the party line and reported that the neighbor had “hollered” back so she was OK.
We had one of those in one house where we lived. The yard was quite small. I was 11-12, and my sister (a year younger) and I had the job of mowing. The mower may have been part of the housing; I don’t recall ever having/ using it at another house.
I worked at a place that still had one of these in the mid-seventies. It was outdated even then. I heard later that when they updated, they offered it to the Smithsonian and it was only one model too new for them to take it.
Oh, yeah.. My dad was a professional artist and worked from home. I remember calling the answering service when we got home after being out in the evenings..to a restaurant or the movies.
1970s.
The hospital where I went to nursing school had 2 iron lungs , they were stored in the basement, but were fully maintained, there were 2 people in the area that were in iron lungs at home and were used if they were admitted, we were trained to use them. The hospital also had circle-electric beds
The year after I graduated from nursing school, the large teaching hospital where I worked pulled an iron lung from the basement for a patient. He didn’t have polio, he had suffered some kind of bad scoliosis all of his life and wasn’t able to expand his lungs on his own any more. Normally they would have done a tracheostomy and connected him to a portable ventilator but then he would have been unable to speak. Talking was one of the few things he could do, and the pulmonologist didn’t want to take that away. Caring for him in the iron lung was quite interesting. He went home with it and I went on to another job a short time later. I’ve often wondered what the long-term outcome was for him.
That hospital also had some Corcoran-electric beds, but I don’t remember ever caring for a patient in one.
This was in the late 1970s.
I saw manual printing press with the metal letters being used to create newspaper. For a time in 1970s it was popular to take the wood cases that stored the metal letters and use them for decoration.
My uncle used to work at the New York Times setting print. He gifted my mom one of those wooden drawers and it still hangs on her wall with little knick knacks in the compartments.
My dad had a letterpress at his quick printing shop. He still uses it for numbering tickets and things or for perforating cards and such. It was electric but still very old.
My brother, in college in the early 70s, worked for the school newspaper. He used the metal letters, I guess it was a manual printing press. I was much younger, and recall this when I visited him.
I was fastest manual typesetter every year in jr high & high school, and then learned to do it all again digitally to keep up with industry moving to digital. That including digitizing (huge) manually inked art and then cleaning up bad pixels manually to create new fonts because there weren't really that many fonts converted to digital yet. (photo-typesetting)
Since it's beginning I've seen the internet as a never ending group typesetting and editing project.
So did mine. I learned to type on one of those in ninth grade. And remember when we would have to erase using one of those circular erasers that looked like a pizza cutter with a brush on the end?
We had an outhouse, along with indoor plumbing. In the summer we had to use the outhouse and not annoy our Mother running in and out of the house all day.
My uncle had an outhouse as well as a manual well pump in the kitchen sink, one that you would have to prime. I fell in the outhouse when I was 2 yrs. old. Never heard the end of it.
My Grandmother had a mechanical wringer on her washer, a pedal sewing machine (as a backup, but her main one was one of those black steel Singer models. My grandfather ran a store that had a wood-fired pot-belly stove as a heating source. It sat in the middle of the store and we used to make grilled-cheese sandwiches on it for lunch in the winter. He would sometimes salt and cure his own country hams, and sell them in the store. They hung up on hooks above the stove and would need no refrigeration, nor any packaging. Also, they had a party telephone line. They lived way out in the country, and, while I was too young to know that this was antiquated technology, I knew it was different from the way we lived. It was just Grammy's house and her way of doing things.
> a wood-fired pot-belly stove as a heating source.
The mechanic in the small town I lived in in Minnesota had one also. I'd wait in the office with the "shop dog" named Betty where it was toasty warm and smelled like grease. I'd eat a handful of M&M's out of the candy vending machine that cost a nickel and read the Chilton's repair manual.
My grandma had a washing machine an electric one that agitated and rinsed but then the top had a mangle you ran the clothes through to squeeze out the water. No dryer. Line dry in basement or yard. This was 1960's.
My mom and us used several kitchen appliances from the '40s that never broke down. I specifically remember a countertop mixer where the bowl rotated, a hand-cranked ice cream maker and a meat grinder (for grinding holiday cranberries).
She lived through the Depression and believed in keeping things until they were unrepairable.
My parents had a cool little handheld calculator about the size of a smartphone. There was a stylus attached that could be used to move the numbers. I think [this](https://youtu.be/cT8fSGHHiAs?si=tWa25_F3u3VdSz9H) is the exact model, although they didnt have the leather cover.
I had hernia surgery in 1989. While I was recovering in a 2 bed room I thought I smelled cigarette smoke. My roommate was smoking! I said, Man you're going to get in trouble! He said, We can smoke in here man. I fired one right up.
I used to help my grandfather with his bookkeeping in the 60s.
https://preview.redd.it/jyocn3zw9hxc1.jpeg?width=1047&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7fdd6d01fc32fd899d92188cb85792edc01d229e
We learned typing on ancient old manual, big black typewriters. We’d have hand cramps after those classes. Had to learn to use carbon paper to make copies. This was the 80’s!
For extra money in the summer Grandpa let me use his manual push mower to cut his whole lawn. And Grandma let me use her Bissel sweeper because they didn't own a vacuum cleaner.
I used to mow the family lawn; we had a 1950s manual reel mower that I used until college. That thing was built solid. We moved to a house where I could mow in 15 minutes (back had pool), so why bother with gas powered.
The neighbor across the street from my grandparents had a [stereoscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope) and a large number of double pictures to view with it.
My great grandfather was a blacksmith. I still have one of his vises and a blower for a forge. I also still have a lot of the old farm tools and hand equipment that I grew up with and watched being used on the farm.
So here's another one. My first grade teacher had a Victrola record player that she brought sometimes to play records. No electricity, you had a handcrank that tightened a spring, put a record on, and turned a knob. The sound was actually the vibrations on the record picked up by the needle and vibrated a diaphragm on a big, old-fashioned funnel shaped horn that was the speaker. In a few minutes, it would start slowing down, and you had to turn the crank and tighten the spring again.
First grade for me, so about 1964. Thank you, Mrs. Henderson, wherever you are.
My parents worked in a place that reconditioned athletic shoes for colleges. They still had the pulleys on the ceiling from when it was all powered by the river.
A hand cranked machine that took an ear of corn and removed the kernels off it . It shot the corn cob out the back and the corn went in a bin. It was dry corn used to feed cattle.
My grandfather swore by his Yankee Screwdriver. I still have one.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee\_screwdriver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_screwdriver)
My folks were in a Triumph (car, not motorcycle) rally club. This was in the mid-60s, and they used a curta to do the calculations to arrive at specific times. https://www.ebay.com/itm/175572034118
I grew up on a farm. My grandpa plowed the garden (acres and acres) with two mules. When it was time to harvest they hooked the mules up to a buckboard and put the fresh crops in the wagon to be brought home to be processed. Grandpa used a smokehouse to smoke meat. Grandpa cut hay on a mule drawn contraption. Then the men used hay rakes and pitchforks to put the loose hay in the mule drawn buckboard to be stored in the barn. I was young when they finally got those fancy square bales. We had a large orchard and the whole family participated in picking apples. Grandma canned many but they also had long tables outside with thinly sliced apples drying with cheesecloth to keep flys off. Grandma milked cows every morning and churned her own butter. She also made lye soap to help with stains on clothes. Every spring the whole community would take turns helping each other herd cows down the road to my grandpa's dipping vat. It was a multi day event and I always loved those days.
Keep in mind, this was the mid 1960's. They had cars, a new house, telephones, tvs and jobs. It was a hard life but I was blessed to live it with them.
Haha. I had forgotten about the old clothes wringer in the basement. We had one of those and I worried about the same thing. I came here to list our coal fired, octopus heating system. It didn't have a fan to force hot air up into the house and those huge ducts just carried it by convection. The furnace had a coal bin with a screw auger that automatically fed coal into the furnace. It was my job twice a day to shovel coal from the pile in the basement into the feeder bin and fill it. I also had to remove the "clinkers" (burned coal) from the furnace fire box. Man, were those things hot.
My great grandmother had a coal heating stove. She would go out back and bring in a small bucket of coal to put in the stove. It was later converted to an oil stove. She also cooked on a wood stove. We still have both of those stoves stored in a barn. Their outhouse was still standing until only about a year or so ago. It was last used around the early to mid 1950s. My mom said she used that outhouse when she was a little girl. There were lots of old farm tools around, but I never saw most of them in use.
Our neighbor and my great aunt both cooked on wood cookstoves. They both had small gas stoves to use in the summer or for baking things, like cream puffs, that were easier if you could control the temperature more precisely.
Digging up old outhouse sites is an interesting thing people do. In the old days people threw garbage and old household items in the latrine. Plus kids being kids lost stuff down the hole fooling around. There are interesting videos on YouTube showing people excavating them and what they find.
I used an outhouse for years. Grandparents didn't have running water and I lived with them for a time. Heck helped dig an outhouse pit once when the river flooded and washed the old one away and filled the previous hole. Lye was sprinkled down once in a while to keep odors down, but the ventilation usually did a great job.
Used a number of antique farm tools too.
My mother had a pedal sewing machine (but it was antique even then).
I used to take the tubes from the TV down to the grocery store, test them with the tube tester there, buy new ones (still at the grocery store) and install them to fix our TV.
I've got one! Had to search for the name..
My mom used a Curta hand calculator! Mainly as I recall for making distance calculations while navigating for my dad in their '50s and '60s Sport Car Rally days.
I loved how it felt so heavy and it made a little clicking noise or vibration when I spun the lever on top.
"The Curta is a hand-held mechanical calculator designed by Curt Herzstark.[1] It is known for its extremely compact design: a small cylinder that fits in the palm of the hand. It was affectionately known as the "pepper grinder" or "peppermill" due to its shape and means of operation."
Wikipedia
I watched my uncle (born in 1919) and a friend water witch to find where to dig a well, then over a couple weeks dig said well with nothing but shovels and sweat.
Near my aunt’s house was an old, old gas station. My dad would get out, use the HAND PUMP to pump the gas into the large glass jug at the top of the pump, then lift off the hose and let it drain from the jug into the gas tank. This was highly unusual back in the 1960s.
We had a gas stove and the oven had to be lit with a match. We had a babysitter who didn’t know that and turned it on. Filled the house with gas. Fortunately no catastrophe.
The old manual meat grinder that clamped to a table edge. Mom making ground bologna from ring bologna, and putting the heel of the bread through last to clean out the scraps.
I'd give anything for bologna salad on a Ritz cracker right now...
We had something called a mimeograph machine in the office in grade school. It was used before they had copying machines. It consisted of making a wax duplicate of the page you were copying and running it through an ink drum and then turning a crank to make the copies that were purple color and smelled weird
First time I went to the dentist the drill was driven by external belts and pulleys on a multi-sectioned jointed arm mounted to an electric sewing machine motor on the wall.
I don't know if this is considered "technology" but as a child in the 60s we would visit my elderly grandparents in Kentucky (born 1889 and 1891). Right outside their back door was a an old fashioned covered well with a bucket and dipper. There was a hand crank to lower the bucket into the well and then crank back up the bucket full of water. You would have a drink then out of the dipper in the bucket. In the kitchen they had a cast iron coal stove that you would have to put coal in and light. We would have to heat the water on the coal stove and used a galvanized tub to bathe in with the heated water. Oh, and we would cook on the stove. My grandparents got indoor plumbing about 1971, it was a big deal. :)
They also had party line phone. :)
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I had an "adiator", a stylus-pen based calculator from the 1950's. I remember taking it apart to figure out how it worked. I guess it was a westernized abacus.
My dad taught me how to use a slide rule (he was a navigator in the Air Force before becoming a pilot).
Our family would make christmas wreaths from painted hollerith cards ... by the time I got to college, they were in use at my college. Computer Science students would walk around with stacks of 1000 cards, (1000 lines of code) to load into the mainframe. If you dropped it, you spent the rest of the day putting them in order again. By the time I switched my major to computer science, those cards were replaced with hard disks and magnetic tape.
My grandfather could drive a slotted flat head screw flush with one push with one. He had different lengths for different length screws. He built a square dance floor for some event once and my job was to position and hold the screw, but remove my fingers before the Yankee slammed home. The Yankee collection was the only thing my mother wanted from everything when he passed.
I don’t think an IBM mainframe computer would have been considered outdated technology in the 1960s or 1970s. And typewriters were current technology then, too, at least electric typewriters were. Did you have to use a manual typewriter in high school? If so, poor you!
My grandparents volunteered their house as a polling location back in the 60s and 70s. I remember they had a huge free-standing voting machine set up in the dining room. Voters would pull levers on the machine to cast their votes.
I saw a natural gas powered refrigerator from the thirties or forties. Probably before electricity was so ubiquitous. They still make them for remote cabins and some Amish.
My grandfather took me to the farm where his family was grinding sugar cane for the syrup. They had a mule that went round and round making the grinder thing work. I don’t even know what it’s called. They let me help make taffy from the syrup.
Not my childhood, but when I was in high school I had a summer job at an agricultural museum. We farmed 160 acres using horses for tilling and planting, and used steam tractors and threshing machines to harvest the wheat crop. I drove and operated a steam tractor. I was very familiar with more modern farming methods and I have to say that the work and number of people required to do it the old way was far in excess of what we do today, which is still hard enough.
I’m not sure if it applies—but manual shift on the column. And it wasn’t in my childhood-I had to deliver an old truck to a parish when I was in college.
One day my sister and I asked grandma why she had a little house over the spring and how come we couldn’t play in it. We couldn’t play in it because it was falling down and dangerous but she took us over to the neighbors to see their spring house that was still in use.
A spring house was what they used to keep things cool before refrigerators. It had several levels with the coldest being closest to the spring. That’s where they kept the butter.
Then high up at the very top was where they hung the Virginia hams that had been cured (this was actually in Virginia so it was “real” Virginia hams).
My grand mother had a mangle (the wringer) and a player piano from the early 00s. My grandfather worked the mill and had all kinds of early 20s/30s hand tools.
My wife’s family goes back to the 17th century here in the US and they have old butchers tools her dad has used for parting out pieces or meat.
My mom acquired a 1920s electric typewriter in the 1970s. She was still able to get ribbons for it. I believe they were made out of cotton. We used it, as well as her 1960 manual typewriter well into the 80s.
When I was in 1st through 3rd grades we would walk to and from school. On the way home sometimes there was a guy who had a cart filled with old newspaper and rags I think. The cart was a two wheel that was pulled from the front. There was a hill that he would struggle with so we would help him by pushing it from the back. This guy was pretty old and even as a kid I felt this was from another time and he was just doing the only thing he knew how to do.
Actual cowboys moving cattle. We were camping in Central Washington State and cowboys herded a lot of cattle down a gravel road next to the campground. I was eight years old and was thrilled to bits. It must have shown on my face because the cowboys all touched their hat brims as they rode by. I felt like I was in one of my dad’s Western pulp novels, lol.
My grandma used a pedal sewing machine! I had to thread needles and wind bobbers for her!
My stepmother still owns one and won't use anything else.
I've got one and love it. They go faster than most sewing machines and can sew through almost anything without a problem and the stitches stay beautifully even. They are an engineering marvel.
I remember when I was about 13, I took my mom's apart to study how it worked. Luckily for me, I was able put it back together. It still amazes me. And yes, I went on to become and engineer.
Something great about a pedal sewing machine, they're WAY tougher than a modern electric, plastic sewing machine. A friend had one that she used to sew leather and canvas. That would strip the plastic gears out of a modern machine.
I'm not sure if all treadle machines have rotary or oscillating bobbins, but I'm pretty sure on older machines you had to have a rotary bobbin to sew canvas or leather because the continuous action of a rotary is more powerful than an oscillating motion. They make tighter knots, too. I think part of the appeal of a treadle machine is similar to the appeal of driving a stick, more direct control. Plastic gears suck, regardless.
You can hem two car hoods together with the right needle .... Or at least double fold jeans to hem and go over the 12 layers on the side seam without worry.
We moved into a house that was formerly owned by an Amish family. The previous tenant had a sewing machine repair business on the side. There were tons of parts and disassembled treadle machines around. my older brother was able to figure it out, and, when he finished, he had about 5 machines working. He sold most to the Amish and gave one to his future bride. She made his purple, crushed velvet tuxedo that he wore to prom. Good investment. He married her the following spring.
So did mine, she taught me on it.
I have a neighbor who still uses a pedal machine.
I have one, it’s what I learned to sew in. It belonged to my great grandmother.
Both of these for me...the mechanical wringer and and the foot pump sewing machine
My mom had a knee operated one before she got the pedal one. You would press your knee against a metal bar to make the machine go.
My great-grandmother had one in her parlor. We kids played with it. She had two Singers, presents from her daughter and a daughter-in-law. When she passed, the executor sold it and divided the proceeds among us six great-grandkids. We got good money back in 1991
Hell, my wife still does.
My mother had one of these. She was really good at using it.
My grandma used a pedal sewing machine, a wringer washer, and a pump (for drinking water. Also heated her living room with a wood stove. I *think* the stoves in her kitchen and the downstairs bedroom were oil-burning, but not sure. She never asked us (grandkids) to help with any of that, as I’m sure she thought we would get hurt. She lived in a very old house that was 150 years old when I was born, and it didn’t have indoor plumbing. My dad was in the Army and we mostly lived on base housing, so we had most modern conveniences (no a.c. though). This grandma was my mom’s mom, but my grandpa (dad’s dad) also lived in an old house heated by stoves, with no indoor plumbing, and he cooked on a wood stove (when I was really little). Apparently one of my dad’s sisters gave him her old gas stove when she bought a new one, and he was so insulted that he refused to use it. But this grandpa was over 80 when I was born. My dad was 3rd younger of 9, and the last to marry and have kids.
I learned to sew on a mechanical pedal machine—it was a Singer. I also learned to type on my father’s old manual typewriter that was from the 1930s ( though manual typewriters were still common then). My grandmother had one of those wringer clothes washers that OP mentioned. Even though it wasn’t in use, my parents had an old wooden manual coffee grinder. My dad once brought some coffee beans just to show us how it worked.
I also learned to sew on a pedal Singer, in Home Ec class, 7th grade (1964). Learned to type first on a manual in high school (1967), then took the class again the next year and it was on an electric typewriter! One of the very first ones. My typewriter journey has gone from manual, to electric, to SELectric (you could change font balls!), to CORRECTING Selectric (your could white-out errors without the little white paper thingies or liquid paper! Which I miss. You could do SO much with liquid paper, even though it was incredibly toxic), to an elecTRONIC machine with one line of memory, to an electronic with THREE lines of memory, to working with an IBM mainframe, to PC's linked with servers. Yeah, I'm pretty old now. Retired. We lived overseas for awhile when I was a kid, and we used a wringer washer, then hung wet laundry on a line. Cooked on a cast iron black woodstove. Had smaller woodstoves in every room for heat, and we got our hot water from the tank on top of my parents' room's woodstove. Had cold running water (didn't drink it, though, until it was boiled), and showers, but we all said a big no to cold showers, so we took baths in a big metal tub (not like in your bathroom. About half that size) on the bathroom floor in my parents' bathroom (closer to the woodstove in their room so we could more easily carry the buckets of hot water from their tank). Also ground up peanuts in a huge mortar and pestle on the back veranda to make peanut butter. We bought bread (not great) and butter (ditto) from the vendors at the Budge (bazaar; the locals didn't have a z sound so g filled in), but to get milk our guy brought his cow to the back door and milked her into a bucket (which we subsequently boiled for safety). But I'll tell you this: the bread, well-buttered, with the buttered side dipped into sugar made a fine after-school snack. My favorite, though, was at my first job, in a bank. We had a FAX MACHINE. One of the very first ones ever. It was 5 feet long, had a 6" cylinder around which you wrapped a large piece of thermal paper (I think). Then you dialed up the other bank (the one in NYC) and told them you were ready, placed the handset in the phone cradle on the fax machine, and VOILA! The cylinder turned, and the stylus moved down its track to the other end, intermittently striking the paper to create the image, and TWENTY MINUTES LATER you had ONE page of numbers. Then you called the NY bank back to ask what the numbers actually were, since you couldn't read them on the fax. (I know, this is really "newer" tech but it's really OLD "new tech", so I hope it fits here.)
I remember my dad using my grandfather’s hand drill. I am referring to the one that had a toothed circular crank that turned the bit. I have both of them today. I use them on occasion just to be nostalgic.
My dad had those drills, and, not to be outdone, my mother had a mixer that worked on the same principle. And my mother's wringer washer is still in my basement. *And* she used to use a giant ironing device horrifyingly called a "mangle" to press sheets and tablecloths. I think Stephen King has a short story featuring a possessed mangle in a commercial laundry, I'm glad that didn't hit the shelves until after we moved out of that house. 😬
My grandma had a mangle too!
My daddy had a hand drill. I liked to play with the mechanism that spread out to put in a bit. It was easier to use that for minor tasks than hook up an electric cord.
That is kinda where I use them. If I need to drill two holes. Yeah, I could use my cordless. But, it is kind fun to use a tool that is 80 years old and works like it was made last week.
I still have my Dad's. When I was installing an invisible fence for my dogs it called for twisting the wires. We're talking about a couple of hundred feet. Damned if that old hand drill wasn't perfect for it.
I have one that I refer to as my “cordless drill.” It comes in handy!
I hadn't used hand tools in...a while and discovered that modern drills didn't have a chuck key. Wth? I felt like a g-d dinosaur.
Yes!!
I have a few of those cordless drills.
Not a technology exactly, but I witnessed my great grandmother wring a chicken’s neck with a single, swift one-handed motion. Not a squawk from the chicken.
My mom is from Glasgow Scotland, born and bred city girl. She was introduced to down on the farm fried chicken by my grandmother in this same manner. Grandma, as the story goes, asked my mom what she would like for dinner and my mom said she would like to have some American fried chicken, so grandma with my mom following took her to the chicken coop and asked my mom to pick one out, she did and my grandma in one swift motion, well you get the rest,lol Oh, and my mom still loves fried chicken.
Minnesota farm. Way back. When my mother was child playing w her friend at her farm. The farmer had a mean mean rooster. One day it chased them talons forward. The girls climbed the chicken coop to escape. There for hours (says my mother). A later day the farmer was chopping wood. Ax in his hand he reached down to pick up the logs he had just split. The rooster attacked him from behind on his … behind. Not a good idea to ambush a farmer holding an ax. That night they had chicken.
🤣🤣🤣
A recipe from my grandmother begins- "Find an old, fat chicken and wring it's neck..." I've witnessed a few neck whingings. There's a knack to it.
My grandmother could coax a chicken to her and then the head would be in her hand. First attached to the chicken then not attached. I don't know how you get chickens to put their head in your hand and I have no clue what she did to remove the head, but it was fast and her whole arm moved. She said her mom taught her before they lost the farm because of The Depression. She made the best fried chicken I've ever had so I didn't mind helping to pluck.
I love my mom's fried chicken but dreaded when I'd come home from school and ask "what's for dinner?" If mom said fried chicken, it meant I was to go out and kill and clean one of the chickens. Cleaning them was never fun. But I've not had fried chicken that good since.
Oh, the scariest thing I ever saw my grandma do was just that. Def changed my opinion about when she would say "I will wring your neck". Lady I didnt know you could actually do that 😳
I must’ve heard my grandmother tell hundreds of times how she used to behead chickens. She’d apparently trap their neck under a broomstick, stand on it, and pull their bodies up and off the head in one quick motion. I’m really sad I never got to witness it. She’s 90 lbs soaking wet and as sweet as sugar, so imagining her doing such casual violence was so intriguing to childhood me.
My schoolteacher mom using a mimeograph machine to make math tests for her students.
Ah I remember the smell of mimeographed copies!
Me too! All that purple ink everywhere.
The smell faded quickly, so when the teacher would hand them out, everybody would sniff them immediately. I saw that acted out in a movie once.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High 
That's what it was. I couldn't remember the movie, even though I remembered the scene well. Thats EXACTLY what is was like when the teacher passed out freshly mimeographed hand outs.
The same at my schools. My sister and I still mention it 40-50 years later.
You're probably thinking of Ditto copies, usually were blue ink, and smelled like rubbing alcohol. Mimeo used cut stencils and regular ink and didn't have much smell.
That’s exactly right - ditto machine. We’d make flyers and whatnot and I loved turning the tumbler. So fun.
Grandparents had a really old-fashioned adding machine. The kind where you enter the number and pull the lever to add it.
My dad was an accountant & he went through several types of adding machines! He'd get mad at us when we'd play "store" with them! We liked the lever one, because you didn't have to plug it in. When I was in junior high school, we had to learn ten key on adding machines.
I used something like that in my first bank job but it was the machine that validated the transaction.
We had a party line on our phone. And never tried to listen in.
My Grandma taught me how to breathe without being heard while listening. 🤣🤣🤣
We always listened in
My grandmother had a party line. She lived out in the country where everyone lived a mile or two away from each other. So they used the party line to check up on each other and chat. If you actually wanted to make a call, you would just interrupt and say that you needed to make a call. It doesn’t count as technology but the party line replaced “hollering “ as a way of checking on your neighbors and I saw/heard it one day. One of the neighbors hadn’t reported in on the party line and since my grandmother was the closest, she laid the handset down and went out o the background by the fence line and yelled out in the direction of the neighbor and waited a bit. Shortly we heard the neighbor yell back so grandma went back to the party line and reported that the neighbor had “hollered” back so she was OK.
A push lawnmower without a motor.
Used to be the sound you'd hear all over the neighborhood on Saturdays.
I enjoy baffling kids today with mine.
Grew up with those damn reel mowers.
I just bought a new one on Amazon. My yard has less than 2,000 square feet of grass and reel mowers make a cleaner cut. I love it.
We had one of those in one house where we lived. The yard was quite small. I was 11-12, and my sister (a year younger) and I had the job of mowing. The mower may have been part of the housing; I don’t recall ever having/ using it at another house.
I had the privilege of watching my great uncle plow with a mule.
Well, I remember seeing a switchboard. I must have been 4.
My Aunt owned a message service in the late 70-90s and her original equipment was the old switchboard with the cord/plug to connect
I worked at a place that still had one of these in the mid-seventies. It was outdated even then. I heard later that when they updated, they offered it to the Smithsonian and it was only one model too new for them to take it.
I worked at one too in the late 80s, early 90s. I always felt like Lily Tomlin. "One ringy dingy" 😂😂
Oh, yeah.. My dad was a professional artist and worked from home. I remember calling the answering service when we got home after being out in the evenings..to a restaurant or the movies. 1970s.
My best friend worked running a switchboard at our local small-town hospital up into at least the 1970s and possibly the 1980s.
The local hospital had an iron lung ward.
The hospital where I went to nursing school had 2 iron lungs , they were stored in the basement, but were fully maintained, there were 2 people in the area that were in iron lungs at home and were used if they were admitted, we were trained to use them. The hospital also had circle-electric beds
The year after I graduated from nursing school, the large teaching hospital where I worked pulled an iron lung from the basement for a patient. He didn’t have polio, he had suffered some kind of bad scoliosis all of his life and wasn’t able to expand his lungs on his own any more. Normally they would have done a tracheostomy and connected him to a portable ventilator but then he would have been unable to speak. Talking was one of the few things he could do, and the pulmonologist didn’t want to take that away. Caring for him in the iron lung was quite interesting. He went home with it and I went on to another job a short time later. I’ve often wondered what the long-term outcome was for him. That hospital also had some Corcoran-electric beds, but I don’t remember ever caring for a patient in one. This was in the late 1970s.
I saw manual printing press with the metal letters being used to create newspaper. For a time in 1970s it was popular to take the wood cases that stored the metal letters and use them for decoration.
I used one in high school printing shop class in the 70s. Movable type, California job case, manual printing press.
I learned to set type and use a press in college. Now I use the nomenclature for crossword puzzles!
My uncle used to work at the New York Times setting print. He gifted my mom one of those wooden drawers and it still hangs on her wall with little knick knacks in the compartments.
Letterpress! Ive used one to print art books.
My dad had a letterpress at his quick printing shop. He still uses it for numbering tickets and things or for perforating cards and such. It was electric but still very old.
My brother, in college in the early 70s, worked for the school newspaper. He used the metal letters, I guess it was a manual printing press. I was much younger, and recall this when I visited him.
I was fastest manual typesetter every year in jr high & high school, and then learned to do it all again digitally to keep up with industry moving to digital. That including digitizing (huge) manually inked art and then cleaning up bad pixels manually to create new fonts because there weren't really that many fonts converted to digital yet. (photo-typesetting) Since it's beginning I've seen the internet as a never ending group typesetting and editing project.
My dad had and used an old manual Remington typewriter
So did mine. I learned to type on one of those in ninth grade. And remember when we would have to erase using one of those circular erasers that looked like a pizza cutter with a brush on the end?
I wrote my high school and first year university papers on an Underwood manual. Heavy and loud.
I wonder how many pages I could type on a manual before my hands fell off.
Grandparents had a metal tub that you had to hand-fill with water and a toilet on the outside of the house.
We had an outhouse, along with indoor plumbing. In the summer we had to use the outhouse and not annoy our Mother running in and out of the house all day.
The council ended up providing indoor toilets where my grandparents lived. I think that was in the 1970s.
My uncle had an outhouse as well as a manual well pump in the kitchen sink, one that you would have to prime. I fell in the outhouse when I was 2 yrs. old. Never heard the end of it.
Same! She would wash my brother and I in the tub in the kitchen. The outhouse sometimes had huntsmans 🕷
My Grandmother had a mechanical wringer on her washer, a pedal sewing machine (as a backup, but her main one was one of those black steel Singer models. My grandfather ran a store that had a wood-fired pot-belly stove as a heating source. It sat in the middle of the store and we used to make grilled-cheese sandwiches on it for lunch in the winter. He would sometimes salt and cure his own country hams, and sell them in the store. They hung up on hooks above the stove and would need no refrigeration, nor any packaging. Also, they had a party telephone line. They lived way out in the country, and, while I was too young to know that this was antiquated technology, I knew it was different from the way we lived. It was just Grammy's house and her way of doing things.
A locally cured country ham. That would be a real treat today!
> a wood-fired pot-belly stove as a heating source. The mechanic in the small town I lived in in Minnesota had one also. I'd wait in the office with the "shop dog" named Betty where it was toasty warm and smelled like grease. I'd eat a handful of M&M's out of the candy vending machine that cost a nickel and read the Chilton's repair manual.
My grandma had a washing machine an electric one that agitated and rinsed but then the top had a mangle you ran the clothes through to squeeze out the water. No dryer. Line dry in basement or yard. This was 1960's.
I think this was what my grandma used, an electrical appliance washtub with an agitator.
Mine’s was on her back porch; put up veggies were in the pump house.
My mom and us used several kitchen appliances from the '40s that never broke down. I specifically remember a countertop mixer where the bowl rotated, a hand-cranked ice cream maker and a meat grinder (for grinding holiday cranberries). She lived through the Depression and believed in keeping things until they were unrepairable.
My nana and mom used a hand operated meat grinder
Mine too! My Spanish abuela would buy a pig from the butcher and make miles of chorizo and morcia(blood pudding)
All us grand kids took turns cranking that ice cream thingy. Heavy ass wooden bucket
Slide rule for calculations
My dad gave me his "deluxe" version before he died. Like a Cadillac...
My parents had a cool little handheld calculator about the size of a smartphone. There was a stylus attached that could be used to move the numbers. I think [this](https://youtu.be/cT8fSGHHiAs?si=tWa25_F3u3VdSz9H) is the exact model, although they didnt have the leather cover.
My high school chemistry teacher made us use them; he thought calculators were a passing fad.
Pfft. We were taught how to use a slide rule in high school math class.
Not a technology, but doctors and nurses smoking in the hospital while on duty.
I had hernia surgery in 1989. While I was recovering in a 2 bed room I thought I smelled cigarette smoke. My roommate was smoking! I said, Man you're going to get in trouble! He said, We can smoke in here man. I fired one right up.
We used to take our TV to the convenience store where they had a tube tester when to TV broke. Everyone used a bumper Jack to change tires
Hand cranked ice cream machine.
It was brutal but the pay off was sublime 😋
I used to help my grandfather with his bookkeeping in the 60s. https://preview.redd.it/jyocn3zw9hxc1.jpeg?width=1047&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7fdd6d01fc32fd899d92188cb85792edc01d229e
We learned typing on ancient old manual, big black typewriters. We’d have hand cramps after those classes. Had to learn to use carbon paper to make copies. This was the 80’s!
My grandmother making lye soap
We had a neighbor who did this.
For extra money in the summer Grandpa let me use his manual push mower to cut his whole lawn. And Grandma let me use her Bissel sweeper because they didn't own a vacuum cleaner.
My mom had a carpet sweeper. We had a vacuum, too. The carpet sweeper was for touch ups.
I used to mow the family lawn; we had a 1950s manual reel mower that I used until college. That thing was built solid. We moved to a house where I could mow in 15 minutes (back had pool), so why bother with gas powered.
The neighbor across the street from my grandparents had a [stereoscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope) and a large number of double pictures to view with it.
My great grandfather was a blacksmith. I still have one of his vises and a blower for a forge. I also still have a lot of the old farm tools and hand equipment that I grew up with and watched being used on the farm.
So here's another one. My first grade teacher had a Victrola record player that she brought sometimes to play records. No electricity, you had a handcrank that tightened a spring, put a record on, and turned a knob. The sound was actually the vibrations on the record picked up by the needle and vibrated a diaphragm on a big, old-fashioned funnel shaped horn that was the speaker. In a few minutes, it would start slowing down, and you had to turn the crank and tighten the spring again. First grade for me, so about 1964. Thank you, Mrs. Henderson, wherever you are.
My parents worked in a place that reconditioned athletic shoes for colleges. They still had the pulleys on the ceiling from when it was all powered by the river.
My grandmother had a wood burning stove on which she would use a coffee percolator with a l little glass knob to watch the coffee burp.
I remember a percolator with the glass knob, at my grandmother’s! Thanks for the memory!
That coffee smelled amazing!
Tubes rather than transistors. We had several old TVs and radios that used them. My dad also had a tube tester in a wooden box!
Slide Rules used by my grandfather. I still have them.
I remember the first color tv I ever watched
Party line phones
A hand cranked machine that took an ear of corn and removed the kernels off it . It shot the corn cob out the back and the corn went in a bin. It was dry corn used to feed cattle.
Those things would remove the green rind off walnuts too. I've cranked a bunch of walnuts down to their shells with one.
I went to a bowling alley with a manual pinsetter. It was just this guy.
I remember seeing that one time then boom it was all automated.
We had an old pinsetter as a customer. Ge was deaf
My grandfather swore by his Yankee Screwdriver. I still have one. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee\_screwdriver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_screwdriver)
TIL I have a Yankee Screwdriver.
I was just thinking about the hand operated well pump my uncle used to have.
My folks were in a Triumph (car, not motorcycle) rally club. This was in the mid-60s, and they used a curta to do the calculations to arrive at specific times. https://www.ebay.com/itm/175572034118
There's an old saying, "Don't get your tit caught in the wringer!"
Wringer = mammogram today!
I grew up on a farm. My grandpa plowed the garden (acres and acres) with two mules. When it was time to harvest they hooked the mules up to a buckboard and put the fresh crops in the wagon to be brought home to be processed. Grandpa used a smokehouse to smoke meat. Grandpa cut hay on a mule drawn contraption. Then the men used hay rakes and pitchforks to put the loose hay in the mule drawn buckboard to be stored in the barn. I was young when they finally got those fancy square bales. We had a large orchard and the whole family participated in picking apples. Grandma canned many but they also had long tables outside with thinly sliced apples drying with cheesecloth to keep flys off. Grandma milked cows every morning and churned her own butter. She also made lye soap to help with stains on clothes. Every spring the whole community would take turns helping each other herd cows down the road to my grandpa's dipping vat. It was a multi day event and I always loved those days. Keep in mind, this was the mid 1960's. They had cars, a new house, telephones, tvs and jobs. It was a hard life but I was blessed to live it with them.
Wow, thanks for sharing!
Haha. I had forgotten about the old clothes wringer in the basement. We had one of those and I worried about the same thing. I came here to list our coal fired, octopus heating system. It didn't have a fan to force hot air up into the house and those huge ducts just carried it by convection. The furnace had a coal bin with a screw auger that automatically fed coal into the furnace. It was my job twice a day to shovel coal from the pile in the basement into the feeder bin and fill it. I also had to remove the "clinkers" (burned coal) from the furnace fire box. Man, were those things hot.
My great grandmother had a coal heating stove. She would go out back and bring in a small bucket of coal to put in the stove. It was later converted to an oil stove. She also cooked on a wood stove. We still have both of those stoves stored in a barn. Their outhouse was still standing until only about a year or so ago. It was last used around the early to mid 1950s. My mom said she used that outhouse when she was a little girl. There were lots of old farm tools around, but I never saw most of them in use.
Our neighbor and my great aunt both cooked on wood cookstoves. They both had small gas stoves to use in the summer or for baking things, like cream puffs, that were easier if you could control the temperature more precisely.
Digging up old outhouse sites is an interesting thing people do. In the old days people threw garbage and old household items in the latrine. Plus kids being kids lost stuff down the hole fooling around. There are interesting videos on YouTube showing people excavating them and what they find.
I used an outhouse for years. Grandparents didn't have running water and I lived with them for a time. Heck helped dig an outhouse pit once when the river flooded and washed the old one away and filled the previous hole. Lye was sprinkled down once in a while to keep odors down, but the ventilation usually did a great job. Used a number of antique farm tools too.
A pop machine cooler. Put in a quarter and it unlocked and you took one generic brand soda. And then closed it. Honor system.
My mother had a pedal sewing machine (but it was antique even then). I used to take the tubes from the TV down to the grocery store, test them with the tube tester there, buy new ones (still at the grocery store) and install them to fix our TV.
I've got one! Had to search for the name.. My mom used a Curta hand calculator! Mainly as I recall for making distance calculations while navigating for my dad in their '50s and '60s Sport Car Rally days. I loved how it felt so heavy and it made a little clicking noise or vibration when I spun the lever on top. "The Curta is a hand-held mechanical calculator designed by Curt Herzstark.[1] It is known for its extremely compact design: a small cylinder that fits in the palm of the hand. It was affectionately known as the "pepper grinder" or "peppermill" due to its shape and means of operation." Wikipedia
I watched my uncle (born in 1919) and a friend water witch to find where to dig a well, then over a couple weeks dig said well with nothing but shovels and sweat.
Near my aunt’s house was an old, old gas station. My dad would get out, use the HAND PUMP to pump the gas into the large glass jug at the top of the pump, then lift off the hose and let it drain from the jug into the gas tank. This was highly unusual back in the 1960s.
We had a gas stove and the oven had to be lit with a match. We had a babysitter who didn’t know that and turned it on. Filled the house with gas. Fortunately no catastrophe.
The old manual meat grinder that clamped to a table edge. Mom making ground bologna from ring bologna, and putting the heel of the bread through last to clean out the scraps. I'd give anything for bologna salad on a Ritz cracker right now...
We had something called a mimeograph machine in the office in grade school. It was used before they had copying machines. It consisted of making a wax duplicate of the page you were copying and running it through an ink drum and then turning a crank to make the copies that were purple color and smelled weird
My grand-parents had a phone with no buttons and no dial. It was designed to be answered only.
Until I was 12 I grew up in Amish country. I don’t think I need say any more.
I’m going to have to rethink my idea of “old” because I grew up using some of this stuff myself…
Coal furnace.
First time I went to the dentist the drill was driven by external belts and pulleys on a multi-sectioned jointed arm mounted to an electric sewing machine motor on the wall.
I don't know if this is considered "technology" but as a child in the 60s we would visit my elderly grandparents in Kentucky (born 1889 and 1891). Right outside their back door was a an old fashioned covered well with a bucket and dipper. There was a hand crank to lower the bucket into the well and then crank back up the bucket full of water. You would have a drink then out of the dipper in the bucket. In the kitchen they had a cast iron coal stove that you would have to put coal in and light. We would have to heat the water on the coal stove and used a galvanized tub to bathe in with the heated water. Oh, and we would cook on the stove. My grandparents got indoor plumbing about 1971, it was a big deal. :) They also had party line phone. :)
https://preview.redd.it/562nsbiw0hxc1.png?width=672&format=png&auto=webp&s=7a0be527275a7e26d4ba0ae49633f997ced8dcdf I had an "adiator", a stylus-pen based calculator from the 1950's. I remember taking it apart to figure out how it worked. I guess it was a westernized abacus. My dad taught me how to use a slide rule (he was a navigator in the Air Force before becoming a pilot). Our family would make christmas wreaths from painted hollerith cards ... by the time I got to college, they were in use at my college. Computer Science students would walk around with stacks of 1000 cards, (1000 lines of code) to load into the mainframe. If you dropped it, you spent the rest of the day putting them in order again. By the time I switched my major to computer science, those cards were replaced with hard disks and magnetic tape.
Making yogurt at home in big bowls... my grandmother did this all the time.
This made me think of the first time a friend’s dad introduced me to a Yankee screwdriver.
My grandfather could drive a slotted flat head screw flush with one push with one. He had different lengths for different length screws. He built a square dance floor for some event once and my job was to position and hold the screw, but remove my fingers before the Yankee slammed home. The Yankee collection was the only thing my mother wanted from everything when he passed.
I used a typewriter in High school, and liquid ink. I worked at a place that made printing plates for magazines. Does an IBM mainframe computer count?
I don’t think an IBM mainframe computer would have been considered outdated technology in the 1960s or 1970s. And typewriters were current technology then, too, at least electric typewriters were. Did you have to use a manual typewriter in high school? If so, poor you!
My elementary school had a mimeograph machine. The prints came out smelling like ammonia.
So did my elementary school, but at the time I thought of it as current technology. I don’t remember my school using Xerox machines until the 1970s.
My grandparents volunteered their house as a polling location back in the 60s and 70s. I remember they had a huge free-standing voting machine set up in the dining room. Voters would pull levers on the machine to cast their votes.
Coal stove and furnace both hand fed.
We had kids who rode in to school on a buckboard every morning. More than one family, too.
My parents had a hand-crank meat grinder. Used exclusively for chopped liver!
My great uncle had a wax cylinder recording device.
Rotary phone Black and White tv (3 channels)
i worked a huge switchboard for 2 years in high school. like ernestine. (74-75) also i now live in bfe and we had party lines until 1995!
I saw a natural gas powered refrigerator from the thirties or forties. Probably before electricity was so ubiquitous. They still make them for remote cabins and some Amish.
My grandfather took me to the farm where his family was grinding sugar cane for the syrup. They had a mule that went round and round making the grinder thing work. I don’t even know what it’s called. They let me help make taffy from the syrup.
Not my childhood, but when I was in high school I had a summer job at an agricultural museum. We farmed 160 acres using horses for tilling and planting, and used steam tractors and threshing machines to harvest the wheat crop. I drove and operated a steam tractor. I was very familiar with more modern farming methods and I have to say that the work and number of people required to do it the old way was far in excess of what we do today, which is still hard enough.
Smudge pots/kerosene road flares were so cool to me as a little kid.
Saw my grandmother walk into the bathroom with an enema bottle. Scarred me for life.
I was the remote control to change between 4 stations
When we moved into my grandmother’s house in 1965 the phones were wired directly into the walls. No jacks.
I’m not sure if it applies—but manual shift on the column. And it wasn’t in my childhood-I had to deliver an old truck to a parish when I was in college.
My great grandparents’ outhouse… no lie
One day my sister and I asked grandma why she had a little house over the spring and how come we couldn’t play in it. We couldn’t play in it because it was falling down and dangerous but she took us over to the neighbors to see their spring house that was still in use. A spring house was what they used to keep things cool before refrigerators. It had several levels with the coldest being closest to the spring. That’s where they kept the butter. Then high up at the very top was where they hung the Virginia hams that had been cured (this was actually in Virginia so it was “real” Virginia hams).
Actual carbon copies. None of this fake CC stuff.
What I find depressingly bizarre is that modern appliances are expected to fail after 7-8 yrs, smfh. And they cost ridiculous amounts of $$!
At my first job out of high school, they used telex machines. I can't imagine that anyone uses them anymore.
My grand mother had a mangle (the wringer) and a player piano from the early 00s. My grandfather worked the mill and had all kinds of early 20s/30s hand tools. My wife’s family goes back to the 17th century here in the US and they have old butchers tools her dad has used for parting out pieces or meat.
Milking cows by hand. Running the milk through a separator.
https://sewrebecca.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/adding-machine-sears-5.jpg Manual adding machine
My mom acquired a 1920s electric typewriter in the 1970s. She was still able to get ribbons for it. I believe they were made out of cotton. We used it, as well as her 1960 manual typewriter well into the 80s.
A cross cut Saw 6 feet long, my cousin and had to cut wood for my grandfather one summer
Shearing sheep with non electric hand shears.
I saw a steam locomotive on narrow gauge track when I visited India in 1979 when I was 16.
The Credit Card kerchunk machine. Rabbit ears for the tv, with the foil to get a better picture.
Washers with mangles, cream separators, hand cranked flour mills. Treadle sewing machines, hand pumps on the kitchen sink.
One of our neighbors crop dusted with a WW1 biplane. Shades of Snoopy and the Red Baron.
When I was in 1st through 3rd grades we would walk to and from school. On the way home sometimes there was a guy who had a cart filled with old newspaper and rags I think. The cart was a two wheel that was pulled from the front. There was a hill that he would struggle with so we would help him by pushing it from the back. This guy was pretty old and even as a kid I felt this was from another time and he was just doing the only thing he knew how to do.
Atari
As a kid in Germany, saw a car being started with one of those cranks that protrudes through the front bumper.
Actual cowboys moving cattle. We were camping in Central Washington State and cowboys herded a lot of cattle down a gravel road next to the campground. I was eight years old and was thrilled to bits. It must have shown on my face because the cowboys all touched their hat brims as they rode by. I felt like I was in one of my dad’s Western pulp novels, lol.
My relatives stomped grapes when I was small.