Great Balls of Fire! A Mystery Revealed

If you visited the museum to look at this little guy or perhaps if you had really good eyesight and could read the labels in the pictures in the first post, you might have been able to tell that this mystery artifact calls itself a “fire ball.” What a strange name, right? What that really means is that it is supposed to be used to start fires. Most likely those fires would be in a fireplace in one’s home. Essentially, this “fire ball,” is a replacement for traditional kindling, and supposedly it is meant to be much less fussy.

The full text on the label is as follows:

“For Kindling fires without Kindlings, shavings, paper, or any combustible matter. Costs but 25 cents and lasts a life time.

Directions for Use: Place the Fire Ball in a Wide mouth bottle and fill with Kerosene Oil, above the ball, no…ing the cork so that the wire may extend out of the bottle, and keep corked so that the oil may not evaporate. If oil is objectionable Turpentine or alcohol may be used in the same way, when lighted, hold the ball point down until completely on fire, then hold or place under the fire with moderate draft, and in three minutes it will produce a brilliant fire. Chinese Fire Ball Co., Sole Prop’rs, Augusta ME.”

While researching, I couldn’t find anything about this particular name referring to the firestarting item (I found a lot about a kind of dragon in the Harry Potter series). Instead, this artifact could be called a “Cape Cod Firestarter.” 

Many Cape Cod firestarters like this were made with pumice stone, which is porous, so it could hold a lot of the oil it needs to start the fire.  Others are made of soapstone, which we believe our “Fire Ball” is as well. Soapstone is a soft stone, so it would easily be shaped into the “ball” at the end of the wire  on our artifact.   It is also a very heat resistant substance, so it can be soaked in a flammable liquid, and the stone itself will not be harmed, even at very high temperatures, which is why the Fire Ball claims it will “last a life time.” 

Other examples of these objects look a lot fancier than our example, with their own little pot, kept by the hearth, and some are still being sold and used today!

What it looks like in use!

I hope you enjoyed learning about this unique artifact as much as I did! If you're curious, you can come see this artifact and tons of other cool stuff at the museum.

Will We Stump You with This Mystery Artifact?

Hello everyone!

Here’s the newest mystery artifact!

It’s a pretty simple artifact, as you can see. It consists of a thin metal handle, and a piece of cylindrical stone at the end of the handle.

The length of this object is about 7 1/2 inches, and the head is about 1 1/4 inches wide.  

Ours has a label that explains how it works, but that would be removed prior to use. 

Do you know what it is? Do you have a guess? Let us know in the comments here or on our Facebook page!

Shedding a Little Light on this Mystery Artifact

I thought I might stump our readers with this week's mystery artifact, but we got a correct answer from Brent on Facebook! Thanks to everyone for their guesses.

This is a head lamp! As in the kind that is worn on one’s head(not the car kind), and it was mainly used by miners. So, essentially, it is a very old version of this:

This kind of lamp is also sometimes called a teapot lamp (for the teapot-like shape), a sunshine lamp (for “Sunshine Wax,” a specific type of fuel made of paraffin wax mixed with oil) or an oil-wick lamp. The oil of the “oil-wick” goes in the center part of this lamp, and a wick would be inserted in the spout-like part of the lantern. And, as it is a head lamp, you might ask, “how does it go on your head?” Well, the hook on the back of the lamp hooks onto a hat or helmet. That would look a little like this:

The first kinds of lighting in mines were candles or small lamps that were usually affixed to timbers or walls near where there were working. Since this didn’t always give precise illumination miners needed, candles were sometimes also affixed to hats. Eventually, oil lamps were created to fill these needs.

The long spike was jabbed into the wood of support beams or crevices in the wall. The hook is for hanging on a hat.

The oil lamps  burned brighter than candles did, and they were easier to carry around while working. However, the burning of the wick also created much more smoke than the candles had, which could make working in a small space very difficult. Also, the open flame was susceptible to igniting flammable gasses inside the mines. This could cause explosions, which often had disastrous consequences.

Eventually, a new type of lamp, the carbide lamp, became more popular for the fact that it consumed less oxygen and provided cleaner, brighter light. These lamps had two chambers inside, one with water and the other filled with calcium carbide. When these substances mixed, they created a flammable gas which burned with a clean white flame. They usually looked like this:

The reflective surface made the flame even more effective.

 Even carbide lamps were short-lived, since battery-powered, electric lamps soon became widespread, and were much safer (since there isn’t the nasty problem of having an open flame anymore). If you want to know more about mining lights and hats, here's a site all about them from the National Museum of American History.


Thanks again for your guesses! And as always, come visit us, check out our exhibits and take a look at the mystery artifacts if you do! 

A *Little* Mystery

Hello again, and welcome to the mystery artifact of the week.

Here is this week’s artifact:

As you can see it is a cylindrical copper object with a front that looks like a spout, and a downward-facing hook on the other side. 

What may surprise you is the size of the artifact. It is only 2 1/4 inches tall at the center, and 4 inches wide from the end of the spout to the end of the hook. It is 6 inches around the base. So....it's pretty small! 

What do you think it could be? Please leave a comment on the blog here or on our Facebook page with guesses or questions about the artifact. 

A Sweet Mystery Reveal

In case you missed it, here's what our mystery was this week:

As some of you readers probably knew, these are spiles, used for tapping maple trees.

Tapping
What’s that? Well, I suppose you need to know how to tap a tree first. What “tapping” means is making a hole in the tree so sugary water (sap) can come out. This is done in late winter and very early spring because the sap freezes on colder nights. Then, during the day, the temperature is above freezing, the sap melts and can run freely out of the tree. Let the collecting begin! Later in the spring, trees begin to bud, which creates a chemical reaction within the trees. This usually makes for lower quality maple syrup.

A Brief History of Maple Sugaring
The earliest instances of collecting maple sap were done by native North Americans, who made slits in the sides of the maple trees and stuck a hollow twig or thin piece of bark into it. The sap would flow down into a wooden bucket placed on the ground. One “legend” explaining the discovery of maple syrup says that an Iroquois chief threw an axe into a tree, and the next day the tree leaked liquid. That day, the liquid was used to cook meat in, and they discovered it to have a sweet taste. Another story says that a branch of a maple tree broke off. From that fracture, sap flowed out and created an icicle, or “sapsicle,” which they realized had a sweet taste.

Eventually, instead of using an axe, which hurts the tree quite a bit (and can kill it if done too much), people started using augers to drill holes into the sides of trees. Our mystery artifacts were most likely used in conjunction with an auger. The hole is cut, and the narrow end was inserted into the tree. The sap then ran down into a container which was set underneath the spile, or in some cases hung directly onto the spile (which is why some of our mystery artifact examples have a metal hook on them). This is what a modern one might look like, although many people also use plastic spigots and tubing to guide the sap to its collection container:

From Sap to Sugar
From that you can make maple syrup. How? Heat. The clear, watery sap that comes out of the tree has to be cooked down to make the brown, sticky syrup we know and love on our waffles and pancakes. Native Americans heated up  rocks and put them into the sap to heat it up. Eventually, people moved on to cast iron pots. These days, there are specialized “evaporator pans” which continually heat and cook down large amounts of sap, making them more efficient when making a lot of syrup (hundreds of taps-worth, for example).  It takes a long time to cook the sap that a tree produces down to the maple syrup that we put on the table at breakfast. In general, 40 gallons of sap makes about 1 gallon of maple syrup. Why do all that work just for maple syrup? What makes it different from store bought? Well, a lot of the time, the syrup that they sell at the grocery store isn’t even made from real maple syrup. It’s usually corn syrup, sometimes with “maple flavor” added. And in my opinion the real stuff from the trees is far superior.

Maple Sugar Days at CCFPD
Did you know that this particular mystery artifact has a connection to our very own CCFPD? We have Sugar Maple grove (or “sugar bush” as they are sometimes called) at Homer Lake that was tapped commercially from 1890-1942. At one point, around 400 trees were tapped!
In fact, for years we have held a program at Homer Lake Forest Preserve called Maple Sugar Days where families can learn a little bit about the process of tapping trees and making maple syrup. I'll leave you today with a few pictures with one such program.

Sap in a sap bucket!

Boiling sap down into syrup.

Drilling the tap hole. 

Hammering the tap in.

As always, please come check out the mystery artifacts at the museum. And while you're at it, check out our great exhibits too!

A Myriad of Mysteries

Perhaps 5 doesn't really count as a "myriad," but this post is a little different than a normal mystery artifact. This time we decided to show multiple versions of the same type of artifact, instead of just one.

They all have the same general shape. The narrow end of the wooden examples all have small holes. Most of the versions seen here have a groove or ditch down the center of them.

Though most of ours are made of wood, these can also be made of metal.

And a few of ours have a sort of hook attached to one end of them.

Some of you might know what these are right off the bat! Let us know your guess in the comments or on the museum's facebook page! 


Also, be sure to stop by to take a look at them. There's actually also a modern version of this artifact in the case along with the ones shown here.

A Mystery Uncapped!

Did you figure it out?

This mystery artifact is a bottle capper. Which means, it was used to fasten metal bottle caps,  or “crown corks” to glass bottles by hand. The machine uses leverage to push the bottle cap down onto the bottle top and seal it. The notches on the side of the bottle capper are there so it can move up and down and affix caps to many different sizes of bottles.

A patent for a very similar type of bottle capper was filed in 1921, so it is likely that this one is from around the same time. Even though the making, selling, and transporting of beverages with an alcoholic content was outlawed from 1920-1933 because of the Volstead Act, many people still brewed beer in the privacy of their own homes. It wasn't illegal to actually drink these beverages, and Prohibition agents couldn't search homes unless they had very clear evidence that alcohol was being bought and sold there.

To assist with this process of home-brewing, grocery stores also sold things such as these bottle cappers, along with hops, yeast, malt syrup and bottle caps under the guise of "breadmaking supplies" or similar euphemisms. In fact, the 1927 Sears & Roebuck catalog includes the following section, complete with bottle caps and grape crusher for making “grape juice”:

As you can see, there’s also a couple bottle cappers similar to ours.

These days, home brewers use similar bottle cappers (now referred to as "bench bottle cappers") that usually look something like this:

Looks pretty similar, doesn't it?

Finally, I leave you today with perhaps my favorite thing I've ever found while doing research for a blog post. It's a "bottle capping competition" from 1932, and they're using bench bottle cappers! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

That's all for this week! Check in here soon for a new mystery artifact!
And of course please stop by to see our new special exhibit Worth of Water and to check out the mystery artifacts up close.