- [Narrator] Sometimes it's fun to dig around,
as you never know what you might find.
Like these life pack inserts
that were printed over 100 years ago in 1916.
Now we've got about 100 of these,
but wanted to test out some of our favorites
and see if they're still useful today.
So as they said back in 1916,
"Quit your crabbin' and let's get to scabbin'."
First off is a tip about removing long, troublesome nails.
It says it's often difficult to pull out a long nail
from wood into which its been driven.
If, however, a small block of wood be
placed under the pincers,
the nail can be pulled out without difficulty.
We took some scrap wood and pounded in a nail,
making sure that it was in there really good.
Attempting to remove it using just the hammer
as its own point of leverage wasn't very effective.
Even trying with a small wooden plank
didn't produce much help.
This one was going to need something serious
to serve as a base, as it literally wouldn't budge.
Using the basic premise of the card
ended up working in the end,
but a brick was required.
It provided enough height and sturdiness to leverage
the nail out of the block with some serious force.
So if you're in a situation with a stuck-in nail,
grab yourself a sturdy panel
and use it to get more prying force.
Works like a charm once you
figure out the right height that's needed.
All right, let's check this one out.
How to take ink stains out of a handkerchief.
It reads, "A fine linen handkerchief which has had
the misfortune to become stained with ink
can be restored to its original spotlessness.
When the accident occurs, the handkerchief should
at once be plunged in to milk."
Now while handkerchiefs aren't necessarily a common
accessory nowadays, the premise should still apply
to other fabrics, such as a white t-shirt.
I drew all over a small area with a pen
to make sure the ink set-in well.
Simple lines were all that were needed to try this one out.
Next up was to take a small bowl
and add some milk to it to see if it can remove the stain.
So after pouring that in, you have to get
the fabric in there and give it some time
to soak and saturate itself with the milk.
So let's set this one aside and give it some time
to chill in the milk while it works
its mysterious powers of stain removal.
In the meantime, let's check out this bread slicing tip.
As this card reads, "The difficulty of cutting new bread
into thin slices can be readily overcome
by the following expedient."
Plunge the bread knife into hot water.
The heated knife will cut soft,
yielding new bread into the thinnest slices.
So this seems simple enough, but cutting bread
isn't really that difficult to begin with.
Which led us to wondering
if they were using a serrated blade.
The answer is most likely not, as the common serrated
bread cutter we know today wasn't developed
until 1919 by a man named Joseph Burns.
It's still worth trying out though, to see if it makes
things even smoother for our glorious modern bread slicer.
We got the water up to about 124 degrees Fahrenheit,
or, 51 degrees Celsius, and let the blade
have a nice warm and relaxing soak.
I hit all sides to make sure it heated over well
and carefully wiped away the water
with the blade pointing down
before plunging it into the helpless loaf of bread.
This actually made slicing much quicker
and the serrated edge was hardly needed
to make a quick and easy slice or two, or six.
So if you need to slice some bread
and don't have a serrated blade, just heat up a regular one
under the faucet and go to town keeping the bread
cleanly cut and thinly sliced.
All right, back to the t-shirt that's soaking
in the bowl of milk.
After about 20 minutes or so, the shirt was removed
and it was clear that the ink
was still fairly ingrained into the fabric.
But you can never really get rid of a stain without a little
scrubbing so this shouldn't be any different.
With a coarse sponge I rub the ink stains fairly hard
until the ink seemingly bulked-up with the fat in the milk
and started to release from the t-shirt.
If you look closely,
you can see little particles rubbing out.
While this didn't fully remove the ink stain,
it did do a good job of getting it
to a much more reasonable level than before.
So that being said, if you're really in a pinch
or just wanna avoid harsh chemicals,
try a little milk mixed with some elbow grease and water.
Now this is one of my favorites.
Cleaning your boots with a lemon.
The card says,
"New boots are sometimes very difficult to polish."
A successful method is to rub the boots all over
with a half lemon, after which they will easily polish.
Seems simple enough to try, so I sliced up a lemon
and got my grungy boots that were last worn
in the Nevada desert a couple years ago.
If the lemon could cut through this, then it's surely
a great alternative method
to cleaning up your old leather boots.
By working the lemon slice all over the boot,
making sure it hit all the nooks and crannies,
it became pretty clear that it was doing a good job
and really working out that caked-on mud and dirt.
I hit both sides pretty hard,
trying not to leave too many pieces of lemon on the shoe.
When you're done, you just wet a cloth with water
and rub away all the little seeds or strings that
that lemon left behind, giving you
a fantastically clean boot that is ready to go.
If you wanted to take it a step further, you could also add
polish at this point to rejuvenate even the worst old boots.
Moving on, and here comes a tip
about keeping your flowers fresh longer.
"When sending choice flowers,
a long journey by post or otherwise,
an excellent way to keep them from fading
is to insert ends of stalks into small holes
or slits cut into a raw potato."
This will keep the flowers fresh for a week or more.
This is pretty interesting and makes sense.
The potato will essentially serve as a protective barrier
for the flowers, while also providing water and nourishment.
While I don't recommend going out and spending a lot
of money on potatoes just for this, it's great if you have
some that have been laying around a while
and might be past their prime.
I happen to have a sack of forgotten potatoes
that gave the perfect opportunity to preserve
some fresh flowers for Mother's Day.
All you need to do is put a hole into the top of the potato
and perhaps slice a bit off the bottom
so they won't wobble around.
Then just insert the stem directly into the spud.
This will also serve as a makeshift flower stand of sorts.
So if you had a way to cover them it opens up
many possibilities to keeping your flowers
freshly on display for a much longer period of time.
If you wanna save space as well as taters precious,
just get a big one and punch
as many holes in it as you need.
This is gonna serve as a home base
for your potato powered flower preserver.
How lovely.
Now you may find this one helpful if you ever need
to weigh or measure an item
and find yourself without a ruler or a scale.
It says, it's sometimes useful to know that half-a-crown
equals half an ounce in weight, and three pennies one ounce.
A half penny measures one inch in diameter,
half crown an inch and a quarter,
and a sixpence three quarters of an inch in diameter.
Given that the material used in coins
has changed since 1916, we had to find another way
to figure out the weight of various items.
The most all-around efficient way was to use quarters.
As you can see, a single modern quarter
weighs two tenths of an ounce.
So if you stack five of them together,
then you have yourself almost a perfect ounce.
So that means that 80 quarters equals a pound,
and more importantly, that 1,680 quarters
perfectly equals a lovely Watson slightly before dinner.
How many quarters do you weigh?
As the card also states,
you can use these to measure distances.
The best way to get a ballpark idea
of something's length is to use pennies
since you probably have a lot of them laying around already.
Each penny measures approximately
three fourths of an inch, as you can see here.
That means if we take four pennies
and line them all up together,
then we have a solid three inches.
If you're looking to measure out a foot or 12 inches,
then simply line 16 pennies up in a row
and you'll have yourself a temporary ruler.
If you often find yourself having trouble getting pictures
or other items level, this card might help you.
It says, this useful instrument can be made
by the exercise of a little care and accuracy
in construction of a box and top of the level
shown in the picture.
Now this seemed a bit overkill, so here's a similar method
without all the assembly required.
All you need is a mostly empty bottle
that has a straight line somewhere on it.
We're gonna use the label itself as the straight line.
Just get the liquid down to a point
where it sits below the edge and put it on a flat surface
such as the top of a picture frame
or whatever you need to level.
Once you have the liquid sitting flush along the edge,
you are now at a perfectly level position
and can rest assured knowing
that your wall art is no longer crooked.
Finally, how about cooling down a drink
quickly without using ice.
If no ice is available for cooling wine, a good method
is to wrap the bottle in flannel and place it
in a crock beneath the cold water tap.
While there wasn't any wine available,
or flannel for that matter,
we decided to go with a bottle of soda to cool down.
To get an accurate result,
some temperature readings were taken.
This soda was sitting around 73 degrees.
Next just grab a kitchen towel and wrap it around the bottle
as many times as possible until it's sitting snugly.
This will serve as an insulator to keep the cold in.
Just place the wrapped bottle into a bowl
and turn on the cold water tap.
Let the faucet run on low for at least a few minutes
or go with the suggested 10 as the card stated.
This works surprisingly well, dropping the temperature
more than 10 degrees in a relatively short period of time.
Obviously, the colder your tap water is, the better.
But if you're really craving a cold beverage
on the quickness, then bottoms-up, and enjoy.
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