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Sampler? What is the "sampler"? Looks like it might be a tube tester.

Yeah, I remember the dryers in the Norge Village where I did my laundry in the early '80s. I never set the dryers any hotter than the "medium" setting, which was as hot as the high setting on most dryers. It wasn't unusual to go in there and find a dryer out of order because someone had put it...

Our family lived in Chattanooga in the 1970s. There is a suburban town next to Chattanooga called East Ridge. In the mid '70s, East Ridge still had some of its traffic signals hung with green on top. A friend of mine who was red/green color blind could not drive in East Ridge because he could...

I have to say that the voice recognition for the Bluetooth system in my car is incredibly useful. It's great to be able to make and receive phone calls and texts without taking your eyes off the road. I would be more inclined to give something like Alexa a go if I didn't know that everything I...

When I was a young child in the early '60s, a store in Gadsden, AL, down the street from my grandmother's house, had one of these. There was nothing better than pulling out a Coke, in the old heavy glass bottle, from that just-this-side-of-freezing water. They had a towel hanging from a peg in...

I'm a big fan of 50s/60s/70s game shows. I have vague memories of watching GE College Bowl, with Allen Ludden hosting, as a young child. I distinctly recall the original versions of Match Game and The Price Is Right, which were a lot different from the 1970s versions that everyone has seen. I...

Yeah, there were a lot more small independent telephone companies in the U.S. than most people realize. The smaller outfits were the main market for Strowger / Automatic Electric step-by-step switching equipment. The regional Bells inherited a lot of these as they acquired independents over...

The old downtown area here surrounds the county courthouse, as is the case in a lot of Southern county-seat towns. As such, historically, the shops and storefronts around the courthouse were a mix of retail, and services associated with the county government. In the first half of the 20th...

We used to have a 1960s-vintage Norge Village here. My mom did laundry there, and I did laundry there myself when I was a college student in the early '80s.

Whirlpool has been using that same basic design since the 1960s. Whatever patents covered it have almost certainly expired by now.

When I lived in Florida, the bedroom windows in my apartment opened onto an alley. Across the alley was a bar. A bunch of noise. A particular irritant was that the bar backs would dump beer bottles from the upstairs bar off the fire escape into the dumpster below. And every few months ago...

We have floor drains in our garage and utility room. They combine with the foundation French drains, which drain to daylight. Our air conditioner condensate drains into the floor drain in the utility room.

Well, I'll be darned The Bosch DW must be fairly well insulated, then, because if I don't open it until after the end of the cycle, it's still hot inside. The Kitchenaid we had previously, if you chose no-heat drying, the interior was cool by the end of the dry cycle. We do have to open the...

When I was a child, in the Southeastern U.S., the laundry room usually not in the finished part of the house. It was in the garage, or on the back porch, or in the basement (if the house had a basement, which most houses built in the '50s did not), or in a little unheated room off of the...

We have moderately hard water and have always used rinse aid. We also have been using the Cascade for the past year or so and seem to be getting better results than with Jet Dry. Our Bosch oddly does not have a no-heat dry option, so we usually make it a point to open the door for a moment...

Washer on the porch Not that unusual even this far north. My grandmother had her washer on the porch in Gadsden, Alabama, which is farther north than this. In the winter, the porch got sealed up with plastic, and leaving the inside door cracked kept it warm enough. Kind of bizarre that...

A few years ago I stayed in a hotel in San Diego that still had low pressure sodium lamps in its parking lot. Hadn't seen any of those in years. At startup they were ruby red, transitioning to the typical LPS mono-hue yellow as they warmed up. At one time LPS were the most lumens-per-watt...

Two weeks ago, our neighbors put out a Samsung FL pair that I'm pretty sure was only about three years old. Haven't had a chance to talk to them, so I don't know the story. Someone grabbed the dryer, but the washer sat until the city picked it up.

Wasn't the outer tub on Filter-Flos fixed to the cabinet? It seems to me like they would have to change that part of the design to make a dent in water consumption.

Not a secret-room story exactly, but interesting... The NASA Mission Control Center building in Houston is built in two halves, with elevator banks and stairs separating the halves. For reasons unknown to me, the two halves of the building have their floor levels offset by about 6 feet. The...