BuckleBoy
Gold Member
Hello All,
With all the ice and snow here, I just wanted to share the "find" that I made after having the following item in my junk box for a good while. When I dug up the item, I saw that it had some lettering on it, but I couldn't make any sense of it. It's kinda like when you find a button that you can't see much but an "NGE" on it and you know that it will say "Rich Orange Gilt" because of having found examples before. You have a vocabulary of button backmarks in your head, and then it's not hard to fit the letters in with one idea or another... But in the case of this little Daisy-Shaped item, I had no such experience. I was up the creek. I thought that it might be a fancy schmancy wick turner knob from an oil lantern, since that was the only thing that I'd seen that was even close to the right size and shape.
Well, I finally found it. I work hard to help with ID's here--and some relics posted in "What is It?" give folks the fits, and I just can't get 'em out of my head until we know what they are. It's kinda hard to explain.![:-\](https://www.treasurenet.com/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
So here is the relic I found, after cleaning:
And here is a non-dug example I found today. It is a "Boyd's Battery," a Quack medical device that was sold to "purify the blood." The different metals arranged around the central piece that I found were made of copper, gilded brass, and "german silver." It created a very slight electrical current and was to be worn around the neck as a pendant. The belief that electricity could cure you was a common one, and it is called "Galvanism." Heck, dead muscles even move when you send that Magical Electricity through them. (Think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein here...) It seems that everytime humankind invents or discovers something new, they think it has the power to cure.
And in most cases, they're only partially correct. 
Electrical Current....Batteries...Radioactivity...
http://www.phisick.com/a8qbb1.htm
So have faith if you can't ID an item at first. Odds are in favor of seeing another one eventually.
Best Wishes,
Buckles
With all the ice and snow here, I just wanted to share the "find" that I made after having the following item in my junk box for a good while. When I dug up the item, I saw that it had some lettering on it, but I couldn't make any sense of it. It's kinda like when you find a button that you can't see much but an "NGE" on it and you know that it will say "Rich Orange Gilt" because of having found examples before. You have a vocabulary of button backmarks in your head, and then it's not hard to fit the letters in with one idea or another... But in the case of this little Daisy-Shaped item, I had no such experience. I was up the creek. I thought that it might be a fancy schmancy wick turner knob from an oil lantern, since that was the only thing that I'd seen that was even close to the right size and shape.
Well, I finally found it. I work hard to help with ID's here--and some relics posted in "What is It?" give folks the fits, and I just can't get 'em out of my head until we know what they are. It's kinda hard to explain.
So here is the relic I found, after cleaning:
And here is a non-dug example I found today. It is a "Boyd's Battery," a Quack medical device that was sold to "purify the blood." The different metals arranged around the central piece that I found were made of copper, gilded brass, and "german silver." It created a very slight electrical current and was to be worn around the neck as a pendant. The belief that electricity could cure you was a common one, and it is called "Galvanism." Heck, dead muscles even move when you send that Magical Electricity through them. (Think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein here...) It seems that everytime humankind invents or discovers something new, they think it has the power to cure.
And in most cases, they're only partially correct. Electrical Current....Batteries...Radioactivity... http://www.phisick.com/a8qbb1.htm
So have faith if you can't ID an item at first. Odds are in favor of seeing another one eventually.
Best Wishes,
Buckles
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