Friday, July 10, 2009

Friday Night = Mystery Artifact Night! See if you can guess it!

It's Friday night--time to PARTY! Historian style.

That means the first of a Friday-night series of Mystery Artifacts, drawn from the Museum.

Floor after floor of our beautiful Museum is jam-packed with mystifying tools, machines, and devices whose function is completely bewildering. Can you guess what this object is?

Here's the object on the floor. You can see it consists of a barrel, a platform, and a long handle.

A side view of the silver-colored barrel, at right, shows that it is thick and squat. In this view the long handle is in the back.

At left is a photo of this (heavy!) object being carefully lifted, to show you its scale.

OK! Have an idea? You can post it in "comments." The answer, and a new Mystery Artifact, will be posted next Friday night!
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5 comments:

  1. ThomasJuly 10, 2009 at 7:02 PM

    It's an old vacuum cleaner. But I've seen it in the Museum before, so perhaps this is cheating.

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  2. AnonymousJuly 10, 2009 at 8:09 PM

    sump pump?

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJuly 17, 2009 at 5:36 PM

    A tiny washing machine? Is that a window on the long side of the barrel?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dusty DJuly 17, 2009 at 6:05 PM

    Lisele: That is an excellent guess--and it looks similar to some of the many preceding models of wooden washing machines, doesn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dusty DJuly 17, 2009 at 6:06 PM

    p.s. there's one in the Cobblestone Farm barn attic that's not terribly different in appearance, more or less.

    ReplyDelete