Garth Goldsmith was delighted to show off a small metal anvil that likely dated from the 19th Century to passers-by at the Museum of Industry in Stellarton Saturday.
He had good reason to be happy, as the antique anvil that he purchased online would normally fetch for hundreds of dollars and was described as a miniature engine block.
“I got it very inexpensively because someone described it poorly,” quipped Goldsmith.
The little anvil and an assortment of his other tools including what looked like knives, scissors and wooden-handled timber scribes, which are used to mark wood, were one of many antique tools displayed at the Atlantic Tool Collectors spring show and sale.
Goldmsith’s Henry Boker anvil – made by a German company – was an advertising sample.
He described it as “the prize of my Boker collection.”
The Henry Boker company supplied tools, hardware and cutlery to its German and international clientele.
“A lot of people today don’t know what the story behind is a lot of these antique tools that were in existence many, many years ago,” said Jim MacLean, chair of the Atlantic Tool Collectors Association.
Unlike modern machine tools that are cast from industrial molds, those used in the 19th and early 20th Centuries were typically hand-crafted, just like the furniture and other equipment that they were used to build.
Even the smallest designs were intricate, as shown by a stall displaying old Morse code telegraph key machines that were often used on steamships 100 years ago.
The oldest Morse device on display dated from 1908 and the newer ones were built in the 1950s and 1960s. Morse code was a common form of radio communication before voice transmission technology was widely adopted.
It was a telegraph key machine similar to those on display that the crew of the Titanic used to send out their distress call after the ship hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage between Southampton and New York in 1912.