Day 1, A pair of oil cans
What better way to lead off what I hope will be a series of posts about stuff I find in my garage than a pair of humble oil cans? Honestly, who even has these things anymore? Sure, your car needs oil, but how many other things does the average consumer have that requires periodic oil and maintenance? Most things simply do not last long enough to need additional oiling, and even if they did, you'd probably just buy a little plastic disposable 3 in 1 oil dispenser. The idea that you'd have a purpose built gadget for dispensing oil into machinery is just not something that comes up very often.
That being said, I do have a fair number of wood working tools and old adjustable wrenches that could use a squirt of oil occasionally, so this pair actually sees some use in my shop.
My favorite is the one on the left, which I have the most information about. It was manufactured by the Gem Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh PA, and Gem oilers were obviously pretty popular, as they are reasonably easy to get on Ebay. I picked this one up at a garage sail for a pittance (this will become a theme for the objects that I'm choosing to highlight, I do not pay a lot for the items that I think are cool.) Gem was advertising cans like this around 1900, and went out of business in 1953 or so. You can read a bit more about the company on the Bay Bottles website, which has a lot of early advertisements and information about the company. Apparently Gem continued to make oil cans up until they were dissolved in the fifties, so this might be as much as one hundred twenty years old, or as little as seventy.
I am less sure about the provenance of the second can. It does not bear any manufacturer identification, and I am by no means an expert on such things. If anyone has any ideas of who made it and when, Feel free to drop me an email.
I'll be posting links to this series of posts to my Mastodon account so feel free to follow me there (and comment) if you like. For now, I'm using the hashtag "#mygaragegems" which I urge you to use if you'd like to share similar items.
Hope you all are having a good day.