Voss tool

[jimwrench]

 Heres a tool I bought at auction today only because I didn't know what it was. Now that Iv'e looked up patent its obvious. Marked (Voss) I'm old enough to have seen it in use but we didn't have one. Will post closeup of patent no. in couple of days. Color of wooden part is a clue.

[jimwrench]

 Heres the close up of patent no. Thinking wringer washer led me to same picture(almost) on internet. Someone had one for sale. How could you sell such a salient part of domestic life from yesteryear ?

[rusty]

What an odd device. But it would be a very handy thing to own back in the day.
Given that it would have been totally obsolete by, say, the 40's or 50's, it amazes me it survived...

Then again, those big round monstrosities that have been sleeping in people's basements for decades keep showing up on antique sites, offered by ever hopefull people who are certain they are worth a fortune, who have no thought to the fact that every middle class family in the country owned one, and they are not exactly rare.

[m_fumich]

My grandmother used a wringer washing machine in the mid 70's.

She didn't have running water in the house. The toilet was about 50 yards out back. She lived with an old man and his sister. They didn't pay rent because the old man had worked many years for the farmer that owned the place. Their nearest neighbor was about 1 1/2 miles away. She'd say "If you can see your neighbor, they're too close."

The house burnt down in the late 70's. They moved to a house closer to town that had all the modern conveniences. A couple years later, the farmer had another house moved to the property and they moved back into it. That house had a kitchen sink with running water but no bathroom. You could cook with the water and use it to make coffee but it was too rusty and dirty to drink. She went to the store 5 miles away every couple weeks to fill milk jugs with drinking water. After the old man died and the old woman went into a home, my grandmother couldn't stay there by herself. She hated to move from there.

Her wringer washer burnt up with the house. After that, she had to use the laundry-mat.