What Is This Thing? Guess It
What Was This Strange Household Object Actually Used For?
A heavy glass dome with a hole in the top, found in sideboards and attics everywhere. Three plausible answers, and one that is correct.
The object is made of heavy pressed or blown glass, between fifteen and twenty-five centimetres tall, roughly bell or dome shaped.
It has a small opening at the top, usually about the size of a thumb, sometimes with a stopper. Underneath, and this is the important part, the base is not flat. There is either a shallow circular channel running around the underside, or three or four small feet lifting the body a centimetre or so clear of whatever it is standing on.
They turn up constantly in house clearances, in the back of sideboards and on windowsills in old farmhouses, and they are almost always misidentified.
The three answers people give
A paperweight. Understandable, because of the weight and the glass, and wrong, because a paperweight does not need a hole in the top or a gap underneath.
A vase or a posy holder. Also understandable, given the opening. But the opening is too small for stems in most examples, there is no way to keep it stable with flowers in it, and the underside makes no sense.
A lamp shade or chimney. Closer in spirit, since some glass chimneys have a similar profile, but a lamp chimney is open at both ends and thin-walled. These are heavy, and the bottom is closed except for the gap.
How to work it out
The method is the same as with any unidentified object: ignore the part that catches your eye and look at the part that makes no sense.
Here, that is the underside. A gap deliberately engineered between an object and the surface it stands on is doing something. Either something needs to get in, or something needs to get out, or something needs to be held in the gap.
Combine that with a small opening at the top and a sealed interior, and you are looking at something designed to let a thing enter from below and not leave.
Why they disappeared
Two developments ended them. Window screens became cheap and widespread, which stopped the problem at the window. Then chemical insecticides arrived in domestic form from the mid-twentieth century, which made a passive trap look slow.
They lasted about two hundred years in common use and then vanished from households within roughly a generation, which is why the object is simultaneously very common in antique shops and completely unrecognisable to most people under sixty.
Have a proper guess, then open the answer.
Reveal what it is
Answer A fly trap
It is a glass fly trap, a form of which was in common domestic and commercial use from the eighteenth century through to the widespread arrival of chemical insecticides and window screens. The design is a clever piece of insect psychology. The base sits in a shallow dish or on small feet, with a moat around the underside filled with a sweet liquid — sugar water, beer or diluted syrup. Flies are drawn to the bait, enter through the opening underneath, feed, and then attempt to escape. The critical detail is that a disturbed fly flies upwards and towards light, not downwards, so it moves up into the glass chamber rather than back out through the entrance it came in by. It cannot find the small opening at the top, and it cannot work out how to go back down. The top hole is for filling and emptying, and is usually closed with a cork or a glass stopper. Almost identical objects were made in many countries for two centuries, and the same principle is still used in modern plastic traps. The reason people guess paperweight is the weight and the pressed glass; the reason people guess vase is the top opening. The giveaway is the underside, which always has either a moat or feet lifting it off the surface, because a trap that sits flush to the table does not work.
Where this came from
- Domestic life and household object collections — Museums Victoria
- Glass collections and manufacture — Victoria and Albert Museum
- History of domestic pest control — Encyclopaedia Britannica
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