One of the curiosities of recent history is how many objects once had secondary uses that are now on the verge of being forgotten. For example, a suburban front lawn photographed in the years up to 1990 might feature plastic soft drink bottles filled with water placed horizontally at regular intervals across the lawn.
To the contemporary eye, the image is as mysterious as one of those signs of alien life collected by Erich von Daniken in his wacky bestseller Chariots of the Gods?.
Not just for breakfast: the eggcup was a vital line of defence against avian milk theft.Credit: Craig Abraham
The theory was the bottles would deter neighbourhood dogs, preventing them, in the phrase of the time, from “doing their business”. Various explanations were offered as to why this might be so. Among them, dogs would see a water source and want to keep it pure. Or, more likely, the dogs would assume such insane behaviour indicated a homeowner who’d also have a stick or gun, so better not risk it.
This was not the only secondary use of the soft drink bottle. A pair would also be kept in the car boot so you could refill the radiator whenever it billowed steam – something that occurred whenever the car was asked to climb any incline exceeding the horizontal.
Anyway, sometime in the late 20th century, radiators stopped overheating, and the dog vigilantes simultaneously admitted defeat. The soft drink bottle, they concluded, had failed to deter a single canine, besides which it made your front lawn look like a tip.
The soft drink bottle is not the only example of a secondary use left in the past. People under 60 might look at a house brick and think it’s a brick for building a house. True, but in the days before the dual-flush toilet, a brick flung into the cistern was the only way of reducing your water consumption in times of drought. A brick was also routinely placed behind the back tyre of any car parked on a slope just to give the true handbrake a bit of assistance.
It’s true that a pencil was sometimes used as a writing implement, but it was more commonly kept on hand to tighten the spool on a music cassette. An eggcup could be used as a vessel in which to serve an egg, I’ll grant you, but it also served as a temporary hat for the bottles left by the milkman, preventing birds from pecking the foil lids.
A coat hanger could certainly be used to hang up a coat, a task it still performs admirably, but it worked an extra shift whenever someone wanted to break into a car, usually their own. Just straighten the hanger, form a small noose at one end, insert it through the gap between the door frame and the car, and then use the noose to capture and lift the locking pin.
The humble coat hanger was once a multipurpose motoring accessory.Credit: Pearce/Fairfax Media
The clever everyday objects that will baffle future historians
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12.04.2024
One of the curiosities of recent history is how many objects once had secondary uses that are now on the verge of being forgotten. For example, a suburban front lawn photographed in the years up to 1990 might feature plastic soft drink bottles filled with water placed horizontally at regular intervals across the lawn.
To the contemporary eye, the image is as mysterious as one of those signs of alien life collected by Erich von Daniken in his wacky bestseller Chariots of the Gods?.
Not just for breakfast: the eggcup was a vital line of defence against avian milk theft.Credit: Craig Abraham
The theory was the bottles would deter neighbourhood dogs, preventing them, in the phrase of........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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