Vintage Household Gadgets Quiz

About Vintage Household Gadgets Quiz

Vintage Household Gadgets Quiz is a free memory games quiz with 15 multiple-choice questions with a mix of 8 easy, 5 medium, 2 hard questions. Can you still identify the washboards, coffee grinders, and rotary tools that filled grandma's kitchen? A typical run takes about 7 minutes, hints are always one tap away, and your streak ticks up the first time you finish a game on a given day.

A few sample questions

1. 1. What was a washboard used for in the days before electric washing machines?

   Answer: Scrubbing laundry by hand against its ridged surface

   A washboard is a ribbed or corrugated board — usually wood, zinc, or glass — used to scrub clothes against while washing them by hand in a tub of soapy water. Families relied on them for laundry well into the mid-20th century.

2. 2. A hand-cranked rotary egg beater was a staple in old kitchens. What did turning its handle do?

   Answer: Spun two wire-loop beaters to whip eggs or cream

   Turning the handle of a rotary egg beater spins two interlocked wire loops at high speed, beating air into eggs, cream, or batters. These ingenious gadgets were invented in the 1850s and remained the go-to kitchen tool until electric mixers became common.

3. 3. What was the main purpose of the old-fashioned box mangle (or clothes mangle) found in many laundry rooms?

   Answer: To press and smooth wet laundry by rolling it between heavy rollers

   A mangle (or wringer) used two rollers pressed tightly together to squeeze water out of freshly washed laundry and leave it smooth. Early box mangles used a weighted box rolling over a barrel-shaped drum. They saved hours of hand-wringing work.

4. 4. Which kitchen gadget was called a "meat grinder" and was typically clamped to the edge of a countertop?

   Answer: A hand-cranked device with a screw feed that minced meat through a perforated plate

   A countertop meat grinder clamps firmly to the table edge. You feed chunks of meat into the hopper, turn the hand crank, and a rotating screw (worm gear) pushes the meat through a die plate with small holes — producing fresh ground meat long before grocery stores sold it pre-ground.

5. 5. What was a "sad iron" (also called a flat iron) used for in the 19th and early 20th centuries?

   Answer: Pressing and smoothing wrinkles from clothing

   A sad iron — "sad" coming from an old English word meaning solid or heavy — was a heavy cast-iron pressing iron heated on the stove or fireplace and then used to smooth wrinkles from clothes. Housewives typically kept several heating at once so they could swap them as they cooled.

Things you'll learn along the way

• ✓A classic box coffee grinder holds whole beans in a small hopper. Turning the top handle rotates two steel or cast-iron burrs that crack and grind the beans; the fresh grounds fall into a small drawer at the bottom. The adjustable gap between the burrs controlled how coarse or fine the grind came out.
• ✓A butter churn converts heavy cream into butter through mechanical agitation. As the dasher (a plunger or paddle) is worked up and down — or a barrel churn is rotated — the fat globules in the cream break apart and then clump back together, separating solid butter from liquid buttermilk.
• ✓An icebox was an insulated wooden cabinet — lined with tin or zinc — with a compartment at the top or side that held a large block of ice delivered by the iceman. Cold air from the ice settled into the lower food compartment, keeping perishables cool. The melting ice drained into a pan underneath that had to be emptied daily.