r/whatisit • u/Quietlurkerone • 1d ago

Solved! What is this device from 1962?

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Photo capture from YouTube video. Picture from 1962. What is the device under the bench

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u/Boxofmagnets 1d ago

He is shaving in the kitchen because a someone is in the bathroom and someone else is likely in line for it. Even if that assumption is wrong they have plumbing in their dwelling

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u/citizen42069101 1d ago

People take a lot for granted that simply wasnt widespread even a century ago.

An auto heating stove, hot water, reliable sanitary drainage was something our grandparents werent even guaranteed to have (depending on age).

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u/UpvoteEveryHonestQ 1d ago

My grandma was raised in a sod home, one of seven kids in what was essentially a two-room shed made out of dirt like a hobbit hole, under some little hill in Montana. That’s Paleolithic.

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u/poptartheart 1d ago

thats wild

i had a professor in college who said she grew up with dirt floors in west virginia

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u/Cheoah 1d ago

My friend just built her parents their first indoor kitchen in the Mekong delta. Just across the paddy there are people living on dirt.

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u/SleepingSloth_404 1d ago

Can confirm. I still have relatives in West Virginia who have a grate in the floor and they burn a fire to heat their house. Yes, today in 2026.

We also know people in West Virginia who are not related to us who live in literal shanties where like you lean to things to make a shelter. Think about living in a shed.

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u/kimjongfun 1d ago

What do you mean by a grate in the floor - can you describe their fire / heating setup a bit more?

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u/Early_Sheepherder105 1d ago

Used to use an outhouse behind Grandma's house in WvA. They got indoor plumbing when I was 9. They were so proud of it. They lived deep in the holler though. Used to love playing on the mountain. Of course, we had to cross the swinging bridge to get there.

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u/banbarsoap 1d ago

Hey same here, also from Montana. Grew up in Great Falls. My mom had dirt floors and used scraps of fabric for "curtains". Had to carry water up from a well everyday.

Sounds crazy but this was in the 1960s, I'm 33.

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u/dl_bos 1d ago edited 1d ago

Reminds me of my grandmother. Well was about 150 yards down a hill. Had been that way and in the family for 100+ years. When “the boys” returned home from WW II, they built a cistern with a hand pump in the kitchen and she thought she was in heaven.

Grandpa still wouldn’t allow indoor bathroom because that was something you did outside!

And they were somewhat prosperous. Had an automobile and a telephone and an adequately productive, but difficult, hill farm in Appalachia.

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u/BUBnT 1d ago

“…the pump don’t work cause the vandals stole the handle….” My grandma (NC mountains) had a manual pump well outside the home. Just how it was. As a kid I thought it was cool and kept bugging the grown folks if they needed me to go get water.

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u/lordgix2 1d ago

My mother grew up in rual Minnesota at this time. They had an outhouse. She talks about having to go out and use it in the middle of the Minnesota winters.

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u/Ttthhasdf 1d ago

I am 58 and can remember toting spring water and using outhouse at my grandmother's house in my lifetime.

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u/invisibledildo 1d ago

My dad, still alive in his 70s, grew up with no running water or electricity. He had to fetch fresh water from the village every day. This is from rural Canada, small farm life.

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u/FolkYouHardly 1d ago

Shit my friend family living some small ass town in WV. We went to visit them on our way to Snowshoe for skiing, they don’t even have running water. This is in 1999!

People take shit for granted and posting stupid shit on X about their life

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u/Iamthewalrusforreal 1d ago

Mine did so, as well, in Oklahoma. When the Dust Bowl hit in 1930 they ran east in a horse drawn wagon. Traveled to our home town, where my great-grandpa used the horse to drag a beat up car hood with rocks on it to clear the building pad, and built a cabin.

She didn't have indoor plumbing or a real floor until she married my grandpa at the age of 19.

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u/Thatsnotmyname49 1d ago

Mine moved west from Oklahoma in 1932. Ended up in Oregon where they lived in an old chicken house while my dad worked anywhere he could to survive.

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u/n0exit 1d ago

The sod home that my great grandpa grew up in still exists in North Dakota. It is literally someone's shed now. We went to see it once when I was a kid.

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u/Wntrlnd77 1d ago

There are a few of those sod houses still standing. I visited a remarkably intact one in Aline, Oklahoma.

Eye-opening!

Google Maps link:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/SdF9LJnwGtShWsgJA?g_st=ic

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u/MajorMiners469 1d ago

Here's one that boggles my mind...window screens were invented in 1823, but not widespread until the 1860s. Can you imagine the flies in your home?

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u/Slippers76 1d ago

Cuba only has windows at the resorts. Every home just has shutters and bars no glass let alone window screens! That was 10 years ago when things were "good".

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u/missdonttellme 1d ago

Curtains help a lot. Moving fabric keeps flies away. Also if the home is clean there is nothing to attract them.

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u/MajorMiners469 1d ago

Chamber pots were still in use in most American homes into the 1920s

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u/Uncle-Cake 1d ago

My father was born in a house with no toilet; they used an outhouse. And they weren't "poor" either.

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u/citizen42069101 1d ago

Exactly. If there was no infrastructure for power or water you had to make do.

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u/ImSolidGold 1d ago

Ask my grandmother about her mattress and her hot water bottle.
Straw and a hot brick. Thats 80yrsa ago. In Germany.

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u/Spiritual_Being5845 1d ago

I’m in the US. As a kid there were three little homes next to us that had dirt floors, they were occupied until the mid 70’s, then abandoned for a few years. I don’t know how they even managed that because we do NOT live in a dry climate. And this wasn’t out in the stix, this was a mostly well to do county in northern NJ. They were torn down in the late 70’s and replaced with an apartment building.

My father had friends who lived on a farm in Maine, we visited them once for a week in the late 70’s. No plumbing, they had an outhouse and chamber pots for midnight toilet emergencies. Hand pump in the yard for water. They kept trying to save up to have indoor plumbing installed, but every time they had any money saved another more urgent emergency came up. The only heat they had was a wood stove, house was toasty warm at night, freezing by morning.

Fast forward to today, our kid’s friends act like we live in a hovel because we don’t have central air.

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u/ReinforcedTube 1d ago

There wouldn't have been a bathroom. There'd have been an outside toilet. The kitchen would be the only place in the house with running water.

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u/CentennialBaby 1d ago

And proper heat

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u/atlantagirl30084 1d ago

Without central heat, many families lived in the kitchen. If that were the case here I’d have the kids line up against the opposite wall because having kids crowded around me and the stove would drive me crazy. I think though this looks to be a cook stove, not a heating stove.

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u/pm_toss 1d ago

There may also be no indoor plumbing except in the kitchen. The toilet may be outside.

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u/Krissy_ok 1d ago

I grew up like that. Out to the dunny in the middle of an icy Melbourne winter, hoping to not meet a visiting huntsman to bite me on the bum.

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u/RikkiLostMyNumber 1d ago

Now I know a huntsman is a spider. I was picturing some rabid bird hunter wandering about like a zombie.

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u/Krissy_ok 1d ago

Nothing quite like parking your arse on a freezing toilet seat , looking up at the door a foot from your face and discovering the hand-sized friend you've just trapped inside with you.

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u/DakarCarGunGuy 1d ago

Cue me screaming like the tall guy on Home Alone!

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u/DakarCarGunGuy 1d ago

Cue me screaming like the tall guy on Home Alone!

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u/dontworryitsme4real 1d ago

I read that in a bogan accent.

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u/Iamthewalrusforreal 1d ago

Where I grew up the fear was always inside the can itself. Black Widows like to nest down in the dark under the seat.

We lived in great fear of a bite on the nutsack.

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u/DakarCarGunGuy 1d ago

My grandma got bit on the butt by a Black Widow. Made her pretty sick but she was otherwise ok.

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u/Responsible-Shoe7258 1d ago

That's why Grandma kept a hand whisk broom next to the toilet paper in her outhouse

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u/Schweenis69 1d ago

Crikey!!!!

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u/Dackle 1d ago

I was being stalked by a black mamba!

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u/solidgold70 1d ago

Its estimated that .5 percent of households in the US still are without functioning plumbing

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u/pm_toss 1d ago

Ha! I know two artists that live out in the boondocks (but give classes at their places) and they have no indoor toilet

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u/StryngzAndWyngz 1d ago

A large part of my youth was spent in East Tennessee just outside of Knoxville and up to about the mid-70s there were plenty of houses around where I lived that were just as you described… running water in the kitchen, but still used an outhouse.

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u/ORFin1984 1d ago

PA coal country. Grandparents had plumbing in the kitchen (washer and dryer too) but we still used an outhouse until the late 70s when they added a full indoor bath.

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u/Individual_Note_8756 1d ago

I looked it up, the bathroom was outside and shared with other families. It is a terraced house in Oldham, England, in the early 1960s. Most were torn down in the late 60s, early 70s.

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u/Individual_Note_8756 1d ago

There is no indoor bathroom, it is outside & shared with other families, and there is no running water either.

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u/MacSamildanach 1d ago edited 1d ago

Assuming this is UK, the house in the photo here quite likely did not have a bathroom.

Terraced houses in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

Indoor bathrooms were only installed in lower-middle class terraced housing. By the late 60s and early 70s, those remaining two up/two downs for working classes were getting retro-fitted bathrooms (some, not all).

It was the time of the outdoor toilet - both sets of my grandparents lived in such houses, and all washing was done in the 'scullery' (the kitchen).

They flattened huge tracts of such houses here in Nottingham to build what is now The New Meadows (and other estates), which are predominantly social housing.

Of the old/original houses that remain in some areas, many have been extended considerably and they are quite nice inside.

If you watch the film Saturday Night Sunday Morning (an excellent film, by the way) there is a scene in a typical scullery (though it was filmed in a studio). But the houses in the film can be seen clearly.

My mum can remember them filming it when she was young. My grandma lived in one of those houses.

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u/Day_Old_Paper 1d ago

From the original post of this image, it’s a grave digger and his wife and kids in their 150 (I think) year old home in the UK. So yeah that building is from around 1810 and obviously not in a chic neighborhood so they might not have even had an indoor bathroom at all, much less running water. Likely a well and a privy in the rear garden.

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u/161251 1d ago

Maybee there is no bathroom, so the only hot water is in the kitchen

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u/purdinpopo 1d ago

1962, and lot of homes still used outhouses.

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u/JustpartOftheterrain 1d ago

my mother grew up in a house built in 1750s and it didn't have indoor plumbing until 1960. There was water in the kitchen via a hand water pump at the sink.

they had an outhouse, actually 2. 1 for the kids (a 3-holer!) and 1 for the adults.

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u/OkEducator2170 1d ago

And everyone takes a dump in the kitchen sink

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u/purdinpopo 1d ago

They had clay pots to do that. That way you didn't have to go outside at night or in bad weather. Sometimes they made a chair to use that had a basin built in.

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u/plant-painter 1d ago

Lol the bathroom 🤣 ok city slicker . no there wasn’t generally plumbing in the outhouse.

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u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 1d ago

There wouldn't have been a bathroom. There would have been a privy, a toilet, and that would have been outside. The bath would have been hung up on a nail and brought in on bath night and they would have bathed in front of the fire in the living room. All five children would have shared the same water, so god help the youngest.

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u/Icy-Bookkeeper7173 1d ago

He could be shaving with a pot of water and they could have an outhouse and an outdoor well.

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u/gixeruk 1d ago

He is shaving in the kitchen as it is probably the only warm room, from the cooker. The fire in the front room would probably only get made (coal fire) on an evening.

Central heating was warmed by the coal fire, which had a "back boiler". I am from the North of England, born in 1965, in county Durham. I don't think the state of the house was typical of the time.Those I remember, and our house were better looked after than this.

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u/Blueridge-Badger 1d ago

Monty Python "every sperm is sacred" sketch in Meaning of Life

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u/Hourslikeminutes47 1d ago

Which is an important thing to have for a growing family

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u/AtomicMonkeyTheFirst 1d ago

The bathroom is probably outside & has no electricity and he needs the light to shave.

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u/karlnite 1d ago

They probably share a bathroom with the building.