What is the oldest object in your home?

Ignoring geologically-formed things like rocks, gemstones, hydrogen atoms or similar, I know I’ve got some books from 1895 or so. They’re packed up somewhere after our recent move, so I can’t confirm them at the moment.

Our two oldest bits of technology would be a wood wall phone that’s been roughly dated to 1913-1917, and a Victrola that was built in late 1914.

I have some old scores. A Damnation of Faust which claims a copyright of 1880, and two Novello scores, one of Haydn’s Creation and another of Handel’s Messiah, which I can’t find any date in. Given the similarity of appearance and the price (both two shillings), I assume they are contemporary, and the Messiah score has a reference to a facsimile reproduced with “permission of Her Majesty the Queen”. Since they clearly predate Elizabeth II, I presume that makes them Victorian. Of course, that’s a pretty wide range.

Some items from my grandparents youth. A cologne bottle and a candy dish.

The dish is a treasured memory. It used to sit on Grandman’s back porch and we’d try to sneak candy, not knowing that of course she knew what the kids were up to.

And I have a piece of Precambrian rock, so I think we can drop this line and let the thread stick to artifacts. :stuck_out_tongue:

On which note, I don’t have many very old human-made items. The oldest might be a glue bottle I found that dates to between 1916 and 1920. Otherwise, the title probably goes to one of my musical instruments–I have a few that are obviously pretty old, but I haven’t made any real effort to determine just how old.

I’ve got a few stone spearheads I’ve picked up in my wanderings around the country, so anywhere between 40,000 & 200 years old.

An early edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, from memory, published about 1850.

Trilobite fossils are probably the oldest, but can’t be dated to better than 100,000 years +/-. For actual dated artifacts:

Several Roman coins dated to the reign of Augustus, which makes them @2000 years old.
Various household items that have been dated to the 1700s.
A couple of rifles that date to the 1800s.
In fact, quite a bit of ephemera that dates to the 1800s - shot glasses, eye glasses, knives, barware, etc.

A magnifying glass, that swivels into a leather holder, with a horn rim. Acquired by my grandfather shortly after he immigrated to the USA in 1905, or possibly brought with him from the old country. I still carry it in my pocket all the time. It’s been a family possession for over 100 years and still in daily use.

It might be the Arts and Crafts desk I’m sitting at right now. Or the cedar table that my husbands (he’s 67) grandfather helped make. They might be around a hundred years old.

A box of 14 crayons from about 1890.

I have a couple meteorites, both are Sikhote-Alin. Depending on how you date it, they are either 60 years old or millions of years old. Apart from that, I have a Celtic money ring from about 500BC.

Somewhere around here are some coins that predate Christ - that would be the earliest manmade object. Arrowheads, but they are harder to date - they may or may not predate the coins - probably not. Fossils, but that seems like cheating. Rock from the North Shore - which is apparently some of the oldest rock on earth.

A seventeenth century netsuke.

Fossils and a Roman coin or two, potsherds.

Ignoring a fossil I bought at the Page Museum…

I think the oldest object in my home is my 1897 Winchester Model 92.

My dad still has a fifty year old bottle of barely used Aqua-Velva aftershave that I bought him for fathers day when I was six.

I have a small copy of Pilgrim’s Progress that was published in 1734. It was on my dad’s bookshelf since I was a small child, and when he passed away, I took it home along with some of his other things. It’s tied together with a shoelace and I’m afraid to open it.

I have several things that date back to the 1800’s.

I got a chair that my great grandfather crafted.
I have a family picture portrait of the same great grandfather when he was a young boy. He was born in the 1870’s. (this is probably the oldest) There are probably some other pictures too.
I have some China that were wedding presents to my Great grandparents.

We also did this exact subject a year ago. The oldest things I own that I know of are a couple of 1904 physics textbooks. One of them has an offhand mention of Michelson and Morley in one paragraph, and the other has no hint at all of the coming changes.

I have a copy of Hawthorne’s “True Stories” from the 1850s. Also, a few textbooks from the mid-1800’s (algebra, grammar, arithmetic, etc.)

I have gold, which was created in whatever star pre-dated the Sun. So something more than 4.5 billion years. So there. :stuck_out_tongue: