19 Weird Objects From the Past That Gladly Served Their Owners Some Time Back

Occasionally, we come across unusual objects with purposes that are hard to guess, especially when it comes to antiquities. However, there is nothing impossible for some smarty pants on the Internet.

5-Minute Crafts made a compilation of photos whose authors discovered weird stuff in their homes that Reddit users helped them identify.

This is not a kettle with a nozzle of a weird shape but a portable men’s urinal for bedbound patients.

This is how an old table for making butter looks.

It lets you remove the remaining liquid from the butter after whipping it.

A knife in this shape helps make equally thick slices without having to try too hard.

It’s a plantation/planter chair. You’d put your sore, swollen legs up on the arms after sitting on a horse all day.

These bars are not for security reasons only. The bulge in the bottom part is designed for flower boxes.

These are old safety glasses that were meant to protect the eyes of workers from the bright light of welding.

This thing, which looks like a torture tool, is, in fact, an old soldering iron.

“The end you are holding is the head and is usually copper. The other end would normally have a wood handle.”

This scary device is designed for eating soft-boiled eggs.

It lets you remove the top of a soft-boiled egg without damaging the middle part.

No, it’s not a strainer or a net but an antique soap saver.

Small scraps of soap were put in the cage, and when people did dishes by hand, the soap saver was swished through the water to make suds.

This seemingly unusual thing is a device for stripping corn on the cob.

2 knives for fruit — the green one opens bananas and the blue one peels oranges.

This is what a fan traditionally used in India and Sri Lanka looks like.

The hook wraps around your arm to help with leverage/fanning by twisting your whole arm rather than just the wrist. It makes it easier to fan for longer.

This is somewhat like a cheese holder.

It lets you slice cheese without handling the block.

What appears to be a box with coal is actually a pocket hand warmer.

You light the rod in the middle. It’s coal, and you close it up and pop it in your pocket. Blow on it to stoke it up.

This is a kite spindle.

This bottle is an insect trap.

Sweet fluid and dish soap go in the bottom. Stinging insects fly in, and the dish soap eliminates surface tension and coats them.

This device was meant to act as a fire extinguisher and was placed in areas with an increased risk of ignition.

These weird scissors are for training kids. The extra holes are so a grown-up can co-scissor and help the kid.

This multifunctional letter opener not only allowed people to open letters, but it also worked as a ruler and scale.

To weigh a letter, you clip the letter to the opener, then hold the bead; if it’s balanced, that’s how much the letter weighs.