This thread has been going on awhile, so someone might have mentioned this, but getting paid in cash. Actual bills and coins in an envelope at the end of the pay period. With a handwritten pay stub showing what was withheld.
Don’t know if the means of opening beverage bottles and cans has been mentioned. Most bottles have twist off tops now. The pop tops went through an evolution of their own that continues still. The first big change I recall was the pull off tab that you dropped into your soda can instead of simply littering. Of course everyone had heard you could accidentally swallow that pop top and cut your throat open and drown in your own blood, but that’s better than littering, right?
Also, I remember stopping at gas stations as a little kid on vacation trips. Around the vending machines there would be tons of bottle caps pressed into the asphalt. With plastic lids that can be put back on, you just don’t have that anymore.
Ah,the throwaway ring-pulls. Apparently, one day, years after ring-pulls (and tights, for that matter) had come in, my father came home from the shops and said to my mother “I can’t understand it - there must be all these women losing the clips off their suspender belts”.
Oh, there’s another one to fox the younger generation.
Garter belts in USAian English.
What, and deny Jimmy Buffett a career? Pop-tops were just a phase. The first attempt to bypass the sharp little suckers was by Coors, I believe. They introduced cans with a little pressure-release button you pressed, which supposedly made it easier for you to press in the main opening with a finger.
https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images3/1/0318/27/vintage-1970s-coors-press-button-top_1_b7735259def688bb68eb006036025194.jpg
This was a disaster, of course, since the slightest bit of inebriation made you slice the crap out of your thumb trying to open Beer #3. The industry eventually developed the levered tab we use now, but we paid for that convenience in blood.
There’s one I’d forgotten about!
And am happy to forget; along with belts with clips that held menstrual pads more or less in place.
I just cringed reading that.
In my youth we collected pop tops to use jamming parking meters. (Statute of limitations has passed)
And of course if you collected pop tops they will be used to buy kidney dialysis machines for the poor. And of course they aren’t really. Kidney dialysis is free of charge in the US but this myth persists. Old thread on the subject
Pop tops are old news in this thread:
Ah, there were also the aftermarket bottle caps! The ones you’d pull out of the kitchen drawer to put on the bottle to keep in the fizz in half-drunk bottles. They came in several different styles, some working better than others.
Wow, I had completely forgotten about those. As I recall, none of them worked really well.
We had these cool new remote controls for the television sets. I don’t think today’s youngsters would understand why we called them remotes when they were connected by a wire to the televisions.
Way back in the '50s when my dad was a college student, he and his roommates took turns cooking for the whole house. One night he put together a stew in the pressure cooker and turned on the heat. The problem was that he had filled it so full that a chunk of carrot or something blocked the main steam vent. Pressure built up until the emergency relief valve (basically a calibrated rubber plug) blew out, at which point a jet of boiling stew was directed at the ceiling through the resulting hole. Lots of heat and pressure in the cooker, so quite a bit of it was ejected before things settled down enough to even approach the stove and turn off the heat. Quite the mess, I was told.
Not completely true. There were the ones that clicked, striking an ultrasonic bar to trigger on/off or change the channel. Volume? 'Tis to laugh.
I had numerous versions of those, none of them worked. Even a bottle with a screw top doesn’t hold the fizz for very long.
Those tops to close up soda bottles were the type of thing you couldn’t find when you needed one and were clogging up the gadget drawer when you didn’t. Not working was just the icing on a cake you didn’t want or couldn’t eat. But that’s what most of those gadgets in the drawer were anyway.
The screw top works just fine for keeping CO2 in the bottle; the problem is that when you have a large airspace inside the bottle, CO2 will come out of the soda and fill that airspace until the pressure is enough to keep the rest of the CO2 in the soda. After one or two cycles of closing the cap, waiting for equilibrium, then opening the cap to relieve the pressure, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have flat soda.
And if you keep it cold it goes flat faster since less CO2 is dissolved in the soda.