20 Everyday Tools Homes Needed Before Electricity Existed

Cast-iron sadirons weighed from five to nine pounds and were heated on a wood or coal stove. Homemakers typically kept two or more going at once, ironing with one while the other heated up. And no, the name wasn’t a comment on how anyone felt about ironing with a nine-pound chunk of metal. “Sad” isn’t an expression of the user’s sorrow, but an old Middle English word for “solid” or “heavy.” In 1871, American inventor Mary Florence Potts patented a detachable wooden handle, which allowed one cool handle to be snapped onto whichever hot iron was in use.

In 1851, Isaac Singer, an American inventor, patented the foot-treadle drive mechanism for his sewing machines. An operator would rock back and forth on an iron pedal, turning a wheel that ran a belt to the needle, freeing both hands to guide the fabric. Singer didn’t invent the sewing machine; there were many earlier versions of the device. There was even an earlier lockstitch sewing machine from another inventor, Elias Howe. What Singer sold was the treadle and the cabinet housing it.

Chamber pots were often placed under the bed, or even in a wooden bedside commode. The chamber pot was often made of glazed ceramic, enamel, or pewter, and sometimes had a lid to help prevent odors. Each morning, the contents needed to be poured out and washed. Even affluent families made use of these, although they might be made of fine porcelain or mahogany rather than pewter.

A coal scuttle was a sloping sheet iron or brass bucket that allowed you to pour granular coal directly into the firebox of the stove without scattering it all over the floor. And when it burned up, the cinders needed to go too, into covered metal buckets to be hauled off, because leaving burning coals in any other kind of receptacle could set your house on fire.

The icebox cabinet was constructed of wood and lined with zinc or tin, but was otherwise filled with an insulating material such as cork, sawdust, or straw. In the upper portion, there was a compartment into which someone could drop a block of ice. This block would cool the surrounding food and eventually melt, dripping into a pan below. Someone actually had to drain that pan manually every day, or else the kitchen would flood.

A pie safe looked like something that went with an icebox, but it performed a completely different function. Made of wood, the cabinet had doors of punched tin or wire mesh, allowing air to flow past the food inside while keeping insects and rodents at bay. The air circulation reduced mold. No ice. No refrigeration. Just ventilation and a latched door.

In 1876, American inventor Susan Hibbard patented a feather duster made of turkey feathers, a way to use up poultry waste. Dust gets caught in the tiny branches, called barbules, of the feathers, aided by some mild static electricity. The soft ostrich dusters we imagine now didn’t arrive until around 1900, when they were imported from South Africa and were not part of Hibbard’s duster.

Before there was an electric grinder, nearly every home had a coffee grinder sitting on its kitchen counter or mounted to the wall. You’d turn the crank and two ridged steel discs, called burrs, would grind up your beans. The ground coffee would fall down into the little drawer at the bottom. Scoop it out and make your morning cup of joe.

A cast-iron pitcher pump, sitting over a sink or a well, used a hand-operated piston with leather seals to draw up shallow groundwater, working only down to about 25 feet. It wouldn’t function the way you might expect today’s water tap to work. If it went unused for a long while, the leather seals would dry out and lose all suction. To make it work again, you had to pour a cup of water into the upper chamber to swell the seals back up. You needed water to get your water!

Prior to the advent of indoor plumbing, washing took place in front of a washstand situated in one’s bedroom, which held a ceramic pitcher and basin. The water was heated on the kitchen stove, then carried up the stairs by hand in the pitcher. This was not a luxury practice, but a common household routine. The used water was emptied into a separate container called a slop jar instead of being reused.

Bed warmers were often used from the 1600s to the 1800s, a time before central heating was common. The device, made of copper or brass and filled with glowing embers from the stove, was used to warm up a cold bed and was inserted between the sheets just before bedtime. Before anyone went to sleep, the bed warmer was removed because having hot coals under the covers all night would likely cause a burn, or worse, set the bedding on fire.

Making butter meant taking a wooden plunger called a dash and plunging it up and down in a wooden churn until the fats in the cream were separated out. The time involved was not fixed and depended on the temperature of the cream, its acidity, and even the season’s butterfat content. It might take as little as 30 minutes or more than two hours.

American inventor Turner Williams patented his rotary egg beater in 1870. Two wire beaters were mounted on interlocking gears that spun them at high speed in opposite directions. The machine drastically reduced the work of hand-whisking, and the Dover Stamping Company turned it into a market success. There had been attempts before Williams at a rotary egg beater, but his model was the winner.

Clothes didn’t need to be wrung out by hand to remove excess water from them. They could be put through a clothes wringing mangle, a hand-cranked machine that fed clothes between two closely pressed wooden or rubber rollers. The rollers were turned with a hand crank, squeezing the excess water from the laundry back into the wash tub. Clothes-wringing mangles complemented the washboard, each one being a piece of equipment in the larger manual laundry process, prior to drying clothes outdoors on a clothesline.

The first fluted metal washboards were patented by American inventor Stephen Rust of Manlius, New York, in 1833. The ridges, be they metal, glass, or wood, allowed women to have a rough surface on which to scrub soapy, wet clothes within the confines of a galvanized tub. There was no soap booster needed, just plenty of rubbing to physically remove dirt from clothing. My arms hurt just thinking about an entire load.

Without a vacuum cleaner, the big floor carpets were carried outside, laid across a clothesline or draped over a fence. Then a flat paddle made of rattan, wicker, or wire was used to strike the carpet over and over, knocking loose the dust and grit that ordinary sweeping never could reach.

It was not until 1854, when Canadian geologist and chemist Abraham Gesner patented kerosene distillation, that a clean petroleum fuel replaced those troublesome tallow candles and expensive whale oil. In the lamp, a cotton wick absorbed the liquid fuel, drawing it up to the flame within a glass chimney, which helped protect the light from drafts while improving airflow. It still wasn’t smoke-free. A dull wick or low-grade oil would blacken the walls of any room in no time at all.

Every chore mentioned elsewhere in this house tour — heating water, warming irons, preparing meals — relied on one item: a cast-iron stove. To run it required feeding it with wood or coal, emptying its ash, and manipulating the dampers, which were small vents that opened and closed to control airflow to the fire. It was not automatic. It needed human assistance constantly throughout the day.

In 1861, the American doctor and author Oliver Wendell Holmes designed a lightweight handheld stereoscope, a viewer that made two flat photographs appear as one three-dimensional image. A card with two photographs printed on it was held up and viewed through two lenses, which created the illusion in normal indoor lighting. It was widely popularized as a parlor novelty over the next several decades.

In August 1906, the Victor Talking Machine Company brought the Victrola, an internal-horn record player, to market. You turned a crank on the outside to wind a steel spring in the interior. Once released, the spring, not the player’s hand, continued to drive the turntable at a constant speed, with a steel needle tracing the groove, producing sound that traveled up the interior horn. Nobody cranked the Victrola while playing a record.

This content was created with the help of AI.