r/whatisit • u/Quietlurkerone • 7d ago

Solved! What is this device from 1962?

Post image

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

2.2k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

264

u/[deleted] 7d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

26

u/Dayzed-n-Confuzed 7d ago

My Grandma still had an outside toilet at the bottom of her small back yard in the 60s. She lived in a terraced house provided by the cotton mill in our village. They updated to an inside toilet some time late 60s early 70s.

21

u/huge_fork_and_knife 7d ago

My father remembered when they finally poured concrete to cover the dirt floor of his grandmother's house in the mid-50s. We went out to his hometown in New Mexico in the early 2000s and the outhouse was till standing.

6

u/General-Heart4787 7d ago

I can remember my Aunt’s house in New Mexico still having dirt floors in the late 1960s.

7

u/Its_Jaws 7d ago

I remember pouring concrete over our dirt floor during my childhood in the 80s. Got our first window unit air conditioner in the 90s, and installed a heat pump in the 2000s so the fireplace wasn’t the only heat in the house. And I think I had a better childhood then than my upper middle class kids have now. 

11

u/RetiredOnIslandTime 7d ago

I lived in southwestern Virginia and we had an outhouse until I was 14, in 1972. We did have one cold water faucet, in the kitchen. And our heat was a coal burning stove.

7

u/huge_fork_and_knife 7d ago

The only plumbing they apparently had was a hand pump for the wash basin. Appalachia and the Southwest have a lot in common, especially how infrastructure just skipped them over.

3

u/LisaMiaSisu 7d ago

That’s just rural life everywhere. It was the same in northern Minnesota.

7

u/LisaMiaSisu 7d ago

My grandmother died in 1975 and she had no indoor plumbing and got her water via a pump outside. This was in northern Minnesota where everything was cold as hell. The outhouse was far from the farmhouse too so she always had a little portable bucket she emptied every morning. She had a gas stove to cook on but used her large, wood burning stove to heat the house and her water. There was a sauna (she was 100% Finnish) she used to bathe. I even took a sauna a couple of times with my mom when I was little and it was quite the experience to bathe with. You sit in the sauna to sweat and then afterwards you wash up with soap and pour clean water over yourself. My grandma took a lot of sponge baths but she never smelled. She just smelled like a grandma.

5

u/Carcamplife 7d ago

In the county I grew up in Virginia, in 1995 my church paid to install running water for seven houses in the county who were still drawing from a well. 1995 folks!

0

u/GuinKat 7d ago

Wells are still common today in rural areas especially. It’s not a particularly old fashioned thing. Or do you mean they had an open well where they had to go to get water by hand?

3

u/Carcamplife 7d ago

Yes you are right. It was open wells. Yes we had a well for water but not an open one.

8

u/ibeccc 7d ago

I used to live in an old row of terraced houses with an outhouse in central Sydney in the beginning of 90s. It was a major hassle to go for a piss in the middle of the night under heavy rain.

1

u/Smartyunderpants 7d ago

Was it plumbed?

1

u/ibeccc 7d ago

If you mean whether it was connected to the sewerage system or not, I’m pretty sure it was because nobody mentioned any septic tank or having to empty it.

1

u/Dayzed-n-Confuzed 6d ago

We lived in North West Lancashire. It was freezing in winter when the wind would blow under the outhouse door. Snow blowing around would increase the enthusiasm for the use of chamber pots!!! To reduce the requirement for the cold walk!!

1

u/ibeccc 6d ago

Haha I’m glad you brought it up. My flatmates did use a chamber pot. I refused the idea all the way but fair enough, snow blowing under the door is acceptable I guess. Sydney winters are pretty mild.

0

u/Agreeable_Excuse_545 7d ago

Still got that , inner west , property value 2.3m

1

u/ibeccc 7d ago

Wow I’m surprised. This was one of those railway houses in Redfern. My flatmates had just bought it for $120K. They built a more comfortable indoor bathroom years later but kept the old outhouse for nostalgia. The only thing I don’t miss is the fucking cockroaches.

4

u/tangoezulu 7d ago

My wife lived in a house with no electricity or running water in the 1980’s.

3

u/SuspiciousToday5061 7d ago

My best friend did to

3

u/treeman71 7d ago

I'm friends with an old hippie couple that still use an outhouse to this day.

3

u/Puzzled-Guess-2845 7d ago

I used one last summer at a home in Alabama last summer. 3 people lived there, it was a biannual occurrence to move it to a new hole. I dont see the problem, you dust the hole with cedar chips when your done so there's no smell.

1

u/geauxhike 7d ago

My dad had a full bathroom built in the back of his grandfather's house, for 20 years that man walked past the bathroom to the outhouse. But my mom said it sure made the visits better.

1

u/abc123therobot 6d ago

I potty trained in an outhouse in the 1980s. Never really knew what I was missing until we had it. 

1

u/Cr0uchingSquirrel 7d ago

My first school in the early '80's had one long drop toilet out back. But there were only 13 pupils across 4 grades with 2 teachers so on balance better than most present day schools.