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Lydia Warren
2020-04-23T16:35:00Z
- You'd feel lucky if you got 10 years out of your household appliances these days, but some have been ticking along for much, much longer.
- A 97-year-old General Electric stove continues to cook for a family in New York.
- More than a century after it was made by a Massachusetts company, a discarded but still-working vacuum cleaner was found in England.
- The Livermore Centennial Light Bulbhas been illuminating a California firehouse since 1901.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
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A National Association of Homebuilders study found that the average appliance lasts fewer than 15 years, but it turns out that some have been ticking along for much, much longer.
A 97-year-old stove continues to cook for a family in Long Island, New York, while a microwave in England was still going strong after 150,000 meals. But they have nothing on a clock that is still striking a bell every hour — more than 600 years after it was made.
Here are 10 appliances and everyday household items that lasted way longer than you'd expect.
A light bulb at a California fire station has been burning since 1901.
The Livermore Centennial Light Bulb in Livermore, California, was installed in 1901, according to Guinness World Records, which recognizes it as the world's longest-burning light bulb.
The hand-blown bulb was made by the Shelby Electric Company in Ohio in the late 1890s and donated to Livermore's fire department in 1901. Originally a 30-watt bulb, it has been operating at about 4 watts since 2010. It's left on 24 hours a day at Fire Station #6 "in order to provide night illumination of the fire engines," according to Guinness.
You can even check on how the bulb is doing via the Centennial Light "Bulbcam."
A New York family still uses their almost-100-year-old stove.
Joann Saladino and Marcus Weisgerber, from Long Island, New York, bought the General Electric appliance for $100 in 1979, although it was reportedly built in 1923.
They showed Inside Edition how it worked. "I've been cooking on it since the day I got it," Saladino said.
The design was among the first line of automatic electric stoves produced by General Electric under the Hotpoint brand, which was born after Earl H. Richardson, a meter reader for the Ontario Power Company, found out how to introduce electricity into household appliances. Hotpoint started with electric irons before branching out to toasters, coffeepots, stoves, and more.
A nearly 85-year-old working fridge was found inside another New York home.
Mark Vail and Jane Galyean, from Montgomery, New York, were the owners of what a 2013 New York Post article called "America's oldest fridge," a 3-foot-tall General Electric Globe Top fridge that was first purchased between 1929 and 1931.But the article noted it was "still cooling food as though it was bought yesterday."
At the time of production, the fridge cost around $300, which would be more than $4,600 today.
General Electric stopped producing the globe tops in 1937, focusing on flat tops instead, like those pictured above.
A 1960s microwave was found to be working in the UK after cooking more than 150,000 meals.
The Panasonic NE-691 oven, which dates from the 1960s, was still going strong after more than 40 years and 150,000 meals, according to the Daily Telegraph.
The owner, Frederick Stephens, paid £250 for the microwave and needed a demonstration on how to work it because there were so few around.
"At the time it was life-changing and since then it's become one of those everyday things you wonder now how you could ever live without," he told the paper. "Even the shop which sold it has gone now, but the microwave itself is still going strong."
The first-ever commercially available microwave, the "Radarange," was built in 1947. The nearly-6-foot-tall appliance weighed 750 pounds and cost $5,000, which would be more than $57,000 in today's money. The first microwaves for home use came out in the mid-'60s.
A still-functioning TV set from 1936 went up for auction in 2011.
In 2011, a still-functioning Marconi 702 went up for auction in London. The TV, which had a 12-inch screen inside a walnut and mahogany case, was first bought in 1936, just three weeks after transmissions in the UK started. Unfortunately, the original owner had only been able to watch it in their London home for a few hours before a nearby transmitter burned down. Picture wasn't restored to the area until a decade later in 1946, according to Time.
The original owner bought it for £100 ($130), which was half of an average annual salary in the 1930s.
But that has nothing on the world's oldest working clock, which dates back to 1386.
The iron-framed clock is housed in Salisbury Cathedral in England, and, while it may be a bit large to fit in a home, it is recognized as the oldest working clock in the world by Guinness World Records.
The clock, which has no dial, was designed to strike a bell on the hour to remind locals of service times. It is powered by falling weightswhich have to be wound around giant spools once a day.
More than a century after it was made by a Massachusetts-based company, a vacuum cleaner was found still working in England.
Harry Cox of Manchester, England, rescued a still-working 1904 American Sturtevant vacuum cleaner No. 4 from the trash outside the paper mill where he worked in 2011.
"I didn't like to see such an old machine, and a piece of history, just getting flung on the tip," Cox told the Messenger the following year.
The Sturtevant company, which was based in Massachusetts, designed residential, commercial, and industrial vacuum cleaners, although its primary business was in fans. Its No. 4 vacuum cleaner was designed to clean churches and hotels.
"In using the Sturtevant, the machine itself is almost forgotten — one is conscious only of the amazing results," said a 1911 advertisem*nt for the vacuum cleaner. "It has none of the complicated mechanism — valves, gears, bellows, diaphragms — that mean endless repairs and short-lived efficiency."
Cox's vacuum cleaner long outlasted the company, which shuttered in 1989.
A 1930s phone was still in use at a British pub 77 years after it was installed.
A 1933 Bakelite phone, just like that pictured above, has been used by a small British pub for decades.
"Most people are quite stunned when they realise it still works. The sound is a bit muffly and you get crackly noises but I still love using it," Glenys Crampton, the landlady of the Birch Hill Inn in North Yorkshire, England, told the York Press in 2015. The pub itself dates back to 1860.
The phone, which was also the first in the village, is only used by the pub occasionally to help preserve it, the Press reported.
The oldest batteries go back even further — potentially more than 2,000 years.
A dozen clay jars, each measuring around five inches long, are believed to be the world's oldest electrical cells, or batteries, according to Guinness World Records. They were reportedly found in the Baghdad Museum (pictured) by German archaeologist Wilhelm Konig in 1938, earning the nickname "the Baghdad battery."
They contain a copper cylinder and an iron rod and, when they were found, there were signs they had been filled with an acidic liquid. One conclusion was they might have been used for electroplating, a process that plates a thin metal layer onto another surface.
They could date back as far as 250 BC, but "their exact origin and age is disputed," a Guinness rep told Insider. Exactly what they were used for, by whom, and when remains a mystery.
"They are a one-off," Dr Paul Craddock, an expert at the British Museum, told the BBC. "As far as we know, nobody else has found anything like these. They are odd things; they are one of life's enigmas."
In 1994, to mark its 75th birthday, KitchenAid searched for the oldest still-working mixer in the country and found one dating back to 1919.
Maude Humes, a then-91-year-old great-grandmother from Pittsburgh, was crowned as the winner of the competition for owning a still-working 1919 Model H KitchenAid stand mixer (although she admitted she preferred using her more modern model ... from the 1930s).
According to a 1994 report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, when Humes was told she had won $7,500 and a range of new KitchenAid appliances, she asked, "What's wrong with the old ones?"
- Read more:
- THEN AND NOW: How US kitchens have evolved over the years
- Vintage photos of products that show how far we've come in the last 100 years
- How TVs have changed through the decades
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