- [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. Thank you so much for watching. You won't wanna miss
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interesting tips, tricks, and various other entertaining tidbits to keep your brain sharp.
