It happens in episode 3 of season 5, “Tea Leaves”, originally aired April 1, 2012. Copywriter Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss), tasked with hiring a new copywriter for the ad agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, comes across a portfolio that catches her eye. On the outside of the leather case is the winking admonition “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Inside is a striking newspaper ad for none other than yours truly.

Tearing through the entire center third of a page of classifieds, the perpendicularly-oriented ad shows a close-up of a man’s eyes, the slogan “Find what he’s looking for this Christmas”, and our logo and contact particulars. “Have I lost my sense of smell or is this good?” Peggy asks her brash creative partner, Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson). “Oh, that’s bitchen,” Stan says approvingly, using a slang term that would indeed have been current at the time (we shouldn’t have doubted it).

This turns out to be our introduction to Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), the show’s boldest exemplar yet of the agency’s (and the country’s) tussle between young and old. As Matt Zoller Seitz puts it in his excellent book Mad Men Carousel, the “grating” Ginsberg’s “provocative portfolio, prankster idiot-savant stylings, and ‘I’m not a jerk, I’m just honest’ routine” set him up as “the future of masculine American ideals” in a way that is “specifically mid-Sixties”. The ad itself belongs to the “Creative Revolution” that was changing advertising in the mid-to-late ‘60s: a bold image, one line of copy, the details left to the imagination.

It also can’t be an accident that the copywriter shares a last name with poet Allen, the best-known bridge between New York’s Beat scene and the countercultural ferment from which hippies will emerge. Eventually this hiring will turn out to be a mistake for both Ginsberg and the agency, but at this point in the story, Peggy and Stan see him as a kindred spirit.

Like the rest of Mad Men, the scene mixes fiction and historical fact. The true part is that we were indeed regular advertisers in the New York Times through this period, always in the first 30 or so pages of their famously Brobdingnagian Sunday edition, and often other days of the week as well. Our logo is period-correct and the address and phone number are not only accurate, but judging by the typeface, taken directly from one of our ads.

The fiction is the advertisement itself. We never ran this or anything remotely like it. In our real, more conventional newspaper ads of the time, the products were the stars. They were essentially mini-catalogs. We dug up our actual Times ad from the day on the one in Ginsberg’s portfolio, December 18, 1965, the last Saturday before Christmas. It couldn’t be more different from the Mad Men effort, crammed with small type touting some two dozen specific products. The Creative Revolution never quite made it to Hammacher; we were too busy selling things.

But what of it? We’re deeply flattered that the creators of one of our favorite shows considered us the kind of unorthodox brand that would’ve run an ad that bold, even though we never did.

Oh, and remember what we said about Mad Men‘s meticulous research? Well, we couldn’t help but check on the actual classified ads from that day’s Times. Sure enough, the page on the show matches the real page 51 from December 18, 1965. That’s what we mean by “painstaking”.

Nobody knows the doodads we’ve seen... but perhaps you can figure them out, if you’re strange enough. One needs a particular cast of mind to see the world through Hammacher-tinted glasses, the nagging inconveniences to be solved, the opportunities for whimsy that must be taken. It is to delight this curious minority that our new guessing game is designed.

What’s That Thing? presents an enigmatic assortment of product images from the past century or so. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out what on Earth they are. Give them a good once-over and mentally reverse-engineer their purpose. Every one was - and in some cases, is - an actual Hammacher offering. Our back catalog is indeed stranger than fiction.

Use the game’s share links to broadcast your triumphs to the virtual world, or pop down into the comments here. We’re simply dying to know what you got right, where you went wrong, and which oddball apparatus you hanker to see among our wares again.

You may notice that What’s That Thing? resides in our rather snazzy new Game Room, along with our ever-popular Classics Price Guessing Game, previously covered in this space. Delightful new game ideas are constantly popping up in our fevered minds, so expect more such diversions at the Game Room in the future.

We’ll be adding more cryptic contrivances to What’s That Thing? as we dig them up. After all, our past is getting longer every day.

But this week we dug up a recording by one of the giants of the era, from a radio show hosted by a fellow giant. On the October 15, 1947 edition of Philco Radio Time, master of ceremonies Bing Crosby introduced a rendition of “Hammacher Schlemmer I Love You” by none other than Dinah Shore. Dinah was then at the peak of her career - her version of “Buttons and Bows” would be the #1 song of 1948 - and Bing, of course, was the most popular entertainer in the world. Color us flattered.

Ok, yes, it was during a comedy segment called “Your Flop Parade”, featuring justly forgotten Broadway bombs of decades past. Bing, Dinah, and the John Scott Trotter Orchestra give the full White Way treatment to such stinkers as “Yachting” and “It’s About Time That I Wrote To The Folks In Terre Haute”.

But how can we take offense when it sounds this lovely? Bing stumbles over the phrase “department store floorwalker” in the intro joke (something about said floorwalker “falling in love with his work and marrying the floor”). When the opening harp flourish swoops in, Dinah asks “How does it go?” But she croons our anthem like pure honey. Cast your ear to this and tell us we’re mistaken.

Let’s see, then... we sold a Nothing Box to John Lennon, hosted a shopping spree by the Queen Mother, appeared on David Letterman’s show, provided White House closets for two First Ladies, provided a key plot point in a Tom Hanks movie, and now had our praises sung by Dinah Shore. When you patronize Hammacher, you’re keeping good company.

Time will tell... do you have a signature clock in your home or office? Clocks as statement pieces seem to have waned in the public taste. And yet, someone’s choice of clock can reveal much about their inner life.

On page 7 of our 1957 gift catalogue reposes a collection of nine clocks with, shall we say, strong personalities. In their manifold heterogeneity, they are also a litmus test, a Rorschach inkblot, a tantalizing marshmallow that will turn into two if you have patience... or will it? Look them over and then look inside yourself. These clocks, as the young people say, know what time it is.

60 Suspense

“Time suspended in space! Hands and Plexiglas disc ‘float’ free of dial, rotated by brass bead chain”

You’ve never found the upper limit of how long you can watch that desk ornament where the little metal balls swing back and forth.

61 Vista Clock

“Walnut case frames tile panels decorated with colorful seascapes.”

You miss the days when paper towels were printed with fruit motifs and scenes of rural life.

62 Satellite Clock

“Revolves in its orbit to show time in major cities in the world. Also a barometer and thermometer”

Your fondest wish is to be a Renaissance-era ship captain, navigating the high seas with an extensive array of astrolabes and sextants.

63 Double Take Clock

“Tells time front and back”

Your favorite humorous t-shirts are those that start a joke on the front and pay it off on the back.

64 Automatic Calendar Clock

“Calendar will correct at end of month allowing for 28, 30, 31 day months”

You have employed ChatGPT to write at least one wedding speech.

65 Candle Alarm Clock

“Enchanting bedside clock in gilt finish metal”

You have a favorite ghost from A Christmas Carol. And it’s probably Jacob Marley.

66 Modern Desk Clock

“Chrome with black dial”

You know Don Draper is supposed to be a tragic cautionary example in Mad Men and not the coolest guy in the world, but you don’t quite feel it. (Ahem. The author of this piece may fall into this category.)

67 Lantern Wall Clock

“Silver ornamented face, brass numerals”

You have purchased multi-day tickets to visit Colonial Williamsburg, and at least considered going in costume.

68 Piccolissimo Clock

“Little charmer for boudoir”

You say “boudoir”.

The joke’s on us… wits and wags have been having fun at our expense for at least a century. From the tongue-in-cheek showtune “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You“ to cartoons by The New Yorker, our outlandish inventory and tweedy bearing have been fertile soil for the seeds of mockery.

In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, however, the volume of Hammacher-centric chuckles reached a crescendo. Joe vs. the Volcano, discussed in this space previously, was just the beginning. Here, in reverse chronological order, we rate four offhand gags from screen and page during the peak Hammacher Schlemmer comedy era. And we explain why they’re funny, which always makes jokes funnier.

Family Guy

“It’s a Trap”, Season 9, Episode 18 (2011)

The joke: An extended parody of The Return of the Jedi features the lead roles played by the show’s usual characters. Luke Skywalker, in the form of awkward, depressive teen Chris Griffin, responds to the death of his Jedi mentor Yoda by going on a spending spree with Yoda’s credit card. “Hi, Hammacher Schlemmer?” Chris/Luke says into the phone from Yoda’s shadowy lair. “I’d like the wall-size crossword puzzle.”

The verdict: Good callout of an actual Hammacher product from the era. In keeping with Family Guy‘s typical style, the bit feels more like a random fleck of wackiness than anything rooted in the characters or situation, but we’ll take it. C+

The Office

“Niagara”, Season 6, Episode 4 (2009)

The joke: Salesman, beet farmer, and unsentimental preparedness expert Dwight Schrute tells the camera: “I invented a device called ‘Burger on the Go’. It allows you to obtain 6 regular size hamburgers, or 12 sliders, from a horse without killing the animal. George Foreman is still considering it. Sharper Image is still considering it. Sky Mall’s still considering it. Hammacher Schlemmer is still considering it. Sears said no.”

The verdict: Dwight proposing his gruesome live-horsemeat contraption as a potential consumer product is suitably absurd. “Or 12 sliders” is the kind of super-specific detail that tells us all we need to know about how serious he is about his invention, and how oblivious to its horror. To top it all off, Dwight, descendent of German farmers, pronounces “Hammacher Schlemmer” with a German accent. A solid bit that’s more about him than us. B

Frasier

“Seat of Power”, Season 2, Episode 11 (1994)

The joke: Martin Crane dismisses the ability of his son Frasier to handle a plumbing problem, doubting Frasier even owns any tools. “Oh well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Crane fils replies. “Let me show you something, mister. Here... See this? Every possible tool for every possible need. Got this from Hammacher Schlemmer.”

As he brandishes a comically baroque multitool, his brother Niles takes notice of the fine craftsmanship: “Is that turquoise inlay?” Frasier confirms that it is, and it also comes in ebony and onyx. A brotherly argument ensues over the merits of onyx, confirming their father’s low opinion of their manliness.

The verdict: Guilty as charged! We would absolutely sell that turquoise Swiss army knife. And Frasier is exactly the kind of customer we would have in mind. A perfect unity of subjects in a ruthless twin skewering. Bravissimo! A+

Daddy’s Boy: A Son’s Shocking Account of Life With a Famous Father

Book by Chris Elliott and Bob Elliott (1989)

The joke: Chris Elliott came to prominence with deranged characters on Late Night with David Letterman, where we also made a couple of appearances. He then wrote this faux-Mommie Dearest celebrity exposé with (and ostensibly about) his father, comedic legend Bob Elliott. He paints the elder Elliott as a vainglorious egomaniac and domineering domestic tyrant, “a legend who cast a long, black shadow”.

At one point father and son embark on a cruise together, and among Bob’s luggage packed by his “Tahitian manservant” are such essentials as “Ouija boards, fondue sets, hundreds of boxes of paper clips, and a two-man submarine from Hammacher Schlemmer, complete with forty-amp thrusters and an air-supply system capable of maintaining up to one hundred cubic feet of oxygen.” Laugh if you will, but later the submarine saves their lives: they’d booked this getaway aboard the Andrea Doria.

The verdict: Elliott the younger knows what he’s doing including those specs, lifted verbatim from our catalogue. They make us believe the picture of his father as the kind of extravagant eccentric who would pay millions for our two-man submarine. (If you know anyone like that, please send them our way.) A

Thus ends our survey, but we know there are more out there. If you’ve encountered any Hammacher-oriented japes or joshes in the media, comment below or email me. We may no longer take personal checks, but we can always take a joke.

No sweat… that was most of America circa 1960. Outside of certain Finnish immigrant enclaves, the benefits of a good, intense sauna session weren’t yet widely understood. But as the new decade unfolded, the secret got out. “Celebrities now have saunas the way they used to have swimming pools,” reported the Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot-Ledger in 1966.

“A sauna will superclean your body, and it will also do wonders for your complexion and your looks,” the paper explained. “It will tranquilize your psyche, brighten your outlook on life, at least temporarily dissolve your troubles and make you feel years younger.”

Nothing that potent stays secret for long, and sauna fever duly swept the nation. “A private sauna became the biggest status symbol of them all,” said one V. S. Choslowsky in retrospect, before something called the International Sauna Congress in 1974. “Suddenly everybody who was anybody — and some nobodys too — wanted to have one in their house.”

Naturally, Hammacher Schlemmer was on-trend before it was a trend. As long ago as 1965, we offered the Saunette in our catalogue. “Sauna bath for the individual,” our product description described it. “Relaxes you completely; and after this therapeutic heat treatment, a cold shower makes you feel like a new person.”

Sort of a freestanding closet “of Philippine mahogany”, the Saunette brought temperatures up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit to, well, anywhere a 6’3”, 225 lb. compartment would fit. “It isn’t all that portable,” noted the high-end travel magazine Venture, “but it isn’t housebound, and can be taken from town to country and back again. A Saunette looks something like an armoire.”

The Saturday Evening Post took note as well: “Approval by Hammacher Schlemmer is reassuring to the image enhancer who wants to be certain that his heat bath will not expose him to the ridicule of the people he is trying to impress.”

At $595 (about $6300 today), the Saunette wasn’t exactly an impulse buy. But it offered enough value to be taken up by some homebuilders as an enticing add-on to new constructions. Williard Homes of Pittsburgh included it as one of “the intriguing innovations families desire but seldom feel they can afford… it has a built-in SAUNETTE, a Finnish dry heat bath that promotes physical fitness, glowing health and beauty.”

(The particular home in question still stands. If any readers are in the vicinity of Canonsburg, PA, would you do us the favor of knocking on the door and inquiring if the original Saunette is still intact? It’s polite to bring your own towel.)

Imagine our surprise when, some sixty years later, we uncovered all this and realized that our decision to offer The Solo Sauna and The Two-Person Infrared Home Sauna actually had a precedent in our own past. Here we thought we were doing something daring, when we were just retracing our own footsteps from six decades prior.

What’s more, at $2629.95 and $3799.95, respectively, both of our currently available mobile saunas are substantially cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars than the Saunette was in 1965. It just goes to show you: Hammacher Schlemmer is your best friend if you aspire to live like a movie star without the bother of, you know, starring in a movie.

In January 1958, the two nations agreed to host exhibitions by the other, “as an effective means of developing mutual understanding.” Of course, each promoted the “understanding” that their economic system was superior. But it was still an unprecedented glimpse through the Iron Curtain for two populations that had had very little contact since the end of World War II.

First came the Soviet exhibition in New York, in June and July 1959. The displays emphasized the USSR’s space program, engineering feats, heavy industry, and athletic achievements, along with a fashion show, a relatively modest model apartment, and displays of canned fish and chocolates.

The US exhibition in Moscow opened immediately afterward. Inside a purpose-built geodesic dome in Sokolniki Park, seven towering projector screens played a collage of filmed images by Charles and Ray Eames.

Exhibits of modern art and an early IBM computer continued the futuristic tone. Most dazzling was the RCA/Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen, a Jetsons fantasia complete with video telephone, self-propelled serving cart, and an early ancestor of the Roomba.

But it was the less spectacular Typical American House that would spark a historic confrontation. This reconstruction of an actual ranch house in upstate New York included “some 1,000 diverse furnishings,” the New York Times reported, including at least one from Hammacher Schlemmer.

“DOUBLE-DUTY TABLE is one of many that ‘do things’ sent to the show,” the paper wrote. “It is on wheels, has a top that heats. By Salton. $57.50. At Hammacher Schlemmer.”

This electric warming cart was the Royal Salton Hotable, featured in our catalogue for several years around this time. “Meals on wheels kept hot on shatterproof radiant glass, thermostatic control,” ran our sales copy in the clipped cadence of the catalogue format. Its price of $57.50 (about $657 today) and modern trapezoidal styling would have positioned it at the aspirational end of the market.

On July 24, 1959, as US Vice-President Richard Nixon showed Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev around the model home, the two began verbally jousting over the legitimacy of the display, and, by extension, their rival systems. “Any [American] steelworker can afford this house,” summed up Nixon’s argument; “In another seven years, we will be on the same level as America,” countered Khrushchev.

The status of women was a particular sticking point. Pointing to a dishwasher, Nixon contended “In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev retorted, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism.” Notably absent from the discussion was the perspective of any actual women from either country.

The drama was irresistible: a frank, off-the-cuff running debate between two high-level officials of the world’s biggest superpowers. Television cameras captured it all. The “Kitchen Debate”, as it became known, was later shown on TV in both countries, another unprecedented moment of unscripted cross-ideological communication.

Historians differ on the impact of the Kitchen Debate. Did it raise the Soviet population’s expectations for consumer goods, increasing pressure on the Khrushchev regime, as US officials hoped? Was its main legacy the elevation of Richard Nixon in the public eye, leading eventually to his presidency? Or was the exhibition’s biggest effect the introduction of Pepsi-Cola to the Soviet market?

We’ll let the experts settle that one. What the American Exhibition of 1959 does prove is that the cornucopia of American innovation wasn’t complete without something from Hammacher Schlemmer.

Your own kitchen of tomorrow awaits in our Kitchen & Dining department.

We’ll humbly take some credit for foresight in offering the Electric Grind/Brew Coffeemaker as long ago as 1980. “New, for the first time you can grind and brew the best gourmet coffee beans using a simple coffeemaker,” our catalog copy said. “Grind and brew your own favorite coffee quickly and easily for the freshest, most aromatic cup of coffee. No flavor is lost.”

Yes, when the likes of Folger’s and Maxwell House stood guard over the boundaries of America’s coffee palate, we believed in the potential of our countrymen enough to gamble on their eventual discovery of the genuine article. At $79.95 (about $320 today), the Electric Grind/Brew Coffeemaker was not for the lukewarm.

The appliance in question was known to its maker, Toshiba, as the My Café Mill & Drip Coffeemaker. The model we offered was the HCD 550, the first in the My Café line which Toshiba would develop throughout the decade. “I enjoy a strong cup of freshly brewed coffee as much as anyone, but I don’t care to fuss too much over it,” wrote Pierre Franey of the New York Times in a positive review of a later model. “That is why the new all-in-one coffee mill and drip maker by Toshiba, called My Café, caught my eye... The coffee is kept warm automatically for two hours, after which a true coffee lover would not consider drinking it anyway.”

To drum up business for the new My Café, Toshiba purchased a billboard on Century Boulevard near Los Angeles International Airport in 1980 and announced a contest. The first 50 entrants correctly guessing the number of beans on the billboard would win their own My Café. We presume contestants counted beans in LA traffic at their own risk.

Of course, no good idea goes uncopied. Within a few years of its Hammacher debut, the Toshiba machine would be but one in a growing grind-and-brew field. The evolution of America’s coffee tastes would make the subcategory a reliable seller to the present day. The result is better coffee in our homes, and thus better mornings.

One aspect of the My Café we’re thankful didn’t catch on? The term “mill & drip”. Against the much more potent “grind & brew”, “mill & drip” feels a bit, shall we say, watered-down.

It’s only natural that Late Night‘s quest for never-before-seen material would lead it a mile or so east of the NBC studios, to New York’s original purveyors of the best, the unique, and the unexpected: Hammacher Schlemmer. Twice during the show’s first half-decade, Hammacher representatives appeared during Christmas shopping season, our most telegenic inventory in tow.

Our first segment came on December 17, 1984. John Lowe, then manager of retail operations, looked dapper in a tailored suit as he tried to help Dave steer a radio-controlled blimp. Regrettably, dirigible pilot did not prove to be among Letterman’s many talents. Next, a temperamental talking scale took its sweet time reading the host’s weight. “This is much quicker than the old-fashioned way, where you have to figure out where the needle is,” needled the waiting host. “Is it 200? Is it 500? I can’t tell.” We had better luck with an electric log splitter, sending our debut appearance out on a piercing high note.

It was no doubt a tough act to follow for the guest who followed us, an up-and-coming comedian named Eddie Murphy. Wonder whatever became of him?

Somehow, America made it through the 1985 holiday season sans benefit of our Letterman-mediated advice. But we were back on December 9, 1986. “If you’re like me and haven’t finished your Christmas shoplifting yet,” Letterman said by way of introduction, bringing out our then executive vice-president Marc Baumann with a sackload of covetables seeking a tree to nestle under.

This time, our visit coincided with an experiment where the camera slowly rotated 360 degrees on its horizontal axis through the entire show, a characteristic piece of Late Night brilliant idiocy that rendered our whimsical innovations even more topsy-turvy than usual. Letterman gamely tried a lawnmowing tricycle, a face-down lounger, and a handheld copier before climbing into the bulbous Opsvik Arboreal Chair. On being told the price tag of $3700 (over $11,000 today), Dave asked, “You haven’t sold a one of these, have you?” Marc optimistically replied, “Not yet.”

It would be a few decades before a Hammacher product again played foil to Letterman’s genially scathing wit, when Ellie Kemper brought along The Selfie Toaster to his final run of pre-retirement episodes. Our only regret is that Dave never dropped any of our stuff off of a five-story tower.

Upon selection of one of 13,000 songs via the touchscreen, this orchestra non grata launches into an instrumental rendition of said tune. We use the term “instrumental” advisedly. The sounds aren’t recorded or sampled: they’re produced by mechanically striking the guitar and banjo strings, drum heads, xylophone bars, what have you. There are real instruments really being played - just not directly by human hands.

How does The Self-Contained Hootenanny actually sound? This video of it playing Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” brings to mind such adjectives as “carnivalesque” and “whimsical”. We’re not sure how apt the term “hootenanny” is; the sound here is less folky and more fanciful, closer in spirit to They Might Be Giants than Pete Seeger. But life gives you few legitimate chances to use the word “hootenanny”. When one comes, you’d best take it.

Alas, the $54,000 price tag kept The Self-Contained Hootenanny off our best-seller list. Imagine the live musical performances you could commission for that amount. But it was a prolific provoker of commentary. “Adorable“, “ridiculously expensive“, and “it’s not like anyone else is going to be dumb enough to make one“ were among the judgments passed by the Internetariat of those simpler times.

The last of which strikes us as badly mistaken, considering the makers, Ragtime Automated Music, have been smart enough to stay in business since 1971 concocting thousands of such contraptions. They range in size from automated ukuleles to custom multi-instrument monuments like this one, all played mechanically through the magic of pneumatics.

One of their machines was bought by the producers of Cheers for set decoration, as good an indication as any of their cultural and aesthetic character. Jazz star Pat Metheny recorded an album with Ragtime gear; the company’s website touts fans ranging from Peter Jackson to Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Automated music machines like these are known as orchestrions. The most common is the player piano, and the concept is the same all the way up to The Self-Contained Hootenanny. A piece of music is encoded somehow - on a paper roll, or nowadays, digitally - and the orchestrion plays it with mechanical action on physical instruments.

As you’d expect, they arose well before the advent of recorded music, all the way back in the late 1700s, peaking in the late 1800s just as sound recording appeared. If you wanted to insist orchestrions and other mechanical melody makers, like music boxes, were in fact the earliest form of recorded music, I wouldn’t argue with you. The conceptual difference between a stylus playing the grooves on a record and a piano playing the holes in a paper roll seems minor to me.

No, The Self-Contained Hootenanny did not inspire a mass movement toward playfully quaint automated music. And no, we don’t sell it anymore. But when that xylophone kicks in over those pounding swing drums, we remain fully prepared to verify the shin-dig.

We may not have any of these knocking around the warehouse, but with The Best Portable Record Player & More, the hootenanny goes on forever.

So when I spied this High-Speed Potato Baker in our fall 1981 catalogue, promising to cut the baking time in half, my curiosity was piqued. Assuming that we were, as always, telling the truth, why did it work so much better than other potato nails? And why would we ever stop selling such a miraculously effective device?

I would find that both questions have the same answer: Freon.

As patented by William Perez in 1958, “Thermal Pins” are hollow metal skewers with “liquid in the pin that quickly evaporates for delivery throughout the extent of the pin” and then condenses and starts the whole evaporating/condensing cycle again. I don’t pretend to really understand the physics, but suffice to say, the kinds of chemicals sold under the brand name Freon were more efficient at absorbing and releasing heat in that chamber than a solid piece of steel would be. So the spike gets hotter and the potato cooks faster.

Marvin Spath then entered the picture. As a marketing executive at Westinghouse, Spath had helped introduce that firm’s appliances to Europe after World War II. He formed the Thermo Pin Corporation around 1959 to commercialize Perez’s invention and explore other applications of the idea. The initial Thermo Pins, which were about the size of an arrow and had similar fins on the end, were intended for cooking large meat roasts. At some point, the Freon-chamber concept was adapted into the four-pronged potato baker, sans fins.

Initially, Spath peddled his wares to restaurants and commercial kitchens, where time is most keenly of the essence. By the early 1970s, Thermo Pin had its eyes on your kitchen, too. Hammacher Schlemmer was one of the select retail outlets that recognized its potential.

Did it work? “The Thermo Pins cut the cooking time [for a baked potato] down to about 25 minutes, which is great for us,” Hans J. Hoelzer, director of operations for New Jersey’s Governeur Morris Inn (and the figure at left in the photo above), told the Morristown Daily Record in 1975. “By the time they have their soup and appetizer, the potatoes are done.”

The New York Times‘ Pierre Franey mostly agreed. “The thing does in fact work,” he wrote in 1980. “The other evening as I cooked some potatoes using the prongs and some without them, there was no question but those on the prongs were cooked faster. It is my impression, however, that the manufacturer’s assertion that the prongs bake potatoes in half the usual time is inflated.”

Scientific American‘s conclusions in their June 1980 issue were more rigorous but just as mixed. They found that a full-size Thermo Pin reduced a potato’s baking time by 26%, but the potato baker’s vertical orientation canceled out the positive effects because a vertical potato exposed less surface area in the direction of the oven’s heating elements. “One might do better by placing the potato horizontally over the coils.” Potatoes with potato nails, incidentally, cooked no faster than those with no extra heating elements at all.

But the Freon that made the High-Speed Potato Baker effective would eventually make it illegal. The Montreal Protocol was signed by 198 countries on September 16, 1987. It stipulated a worldwide phase-out of the chemicals most responsible for ozone depletion. Chief among them were chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons, like most of the products sold as Freon.

Looked at one way, the High-Speed Potato Baker was a small, relatively affordable ($15, about $60 today) item that could cut at least a quarter off the time of one of the home cook’s slowest processes. Looked at another way, how many baked potatoes does one have to eat to make it worth 60 bucks to save 20 minutes on each one? The Freon ban made such calculations moot. The High-Speed Potato Baker is one Hammacher Schlemmer classic we won’t be reviving.

In the era of the three-martini lunch, nothing was more fun than drinking. That catalogue represents a high-seltzer-water mark for our range of cocktail accoutrements. No wonder “drinking gadgets for the men” was at the top of Queen Mother Elizabeth‘s shopping list when she visited us the year before. Our selection of barware was literally fit for a king.

Occupying a prominent position on the inside back cover, we find the Rol-a-Bar, “ideal gift for those who have ‘everything’”. Two and a half feet tall, resplendent in “attractive plastic bamboo covering”, you can roll out this barrel and turn any room into a barroom. Note the clever way a second layer of shelves is revealed when opened, to enlarge the bartop. I’m intoxicated already.

A less glamorous but more practical option is the Servel Wonderbar, “for home or office”. It’s what you and I might call a mini-fridge, but the door opens downward to provide a surface for pouring. It’s also available with casters, and its “silent operation” means that once you close your office door for some focus time, it’s nobody else’s business whence inspiration strikes.

Moderation is the soul of… well, something or other. So the savvy booze-hound will deploy these clever portion-enforcing gizmos. The Say-When Dispensers (above left) release only a set amount of the indicated liquor to prevent those “accidental” big pours that can push tipsy into blotto. This is probably the “whisky decanter with an automatic pourer” that the Queen Mother picked up. Meanwhile, Mist-er Martini (above right) makes sure you’re not adulterating your martini with excess vermouth by atomizing it into a fine mist. They also serve who only stand and spray.

Of course, the seasoned cocktailist stands ever ready for festivities to break out anywhere. A couple of on-the-go kits ensure that house calls won’t go unanswered. This Travel Bar (above left) includes six tumblers, compartments for three bottles, and all the essential implements, along with the all-important lock. A lighter-weight option, simply titled Bar Set, contains only the tools in a leatherette case. Preparedness is next to drunkenness.

All that is just a sip of the extensive range of glassware, utensils, shakers, decanters, and other ethylated paraphernalia in our 1955 Gifts catalog. Whether they wound up in Buckingham Palace or Bucks County, we’re sure our barware collection enabled many a jolly time during the Eisenhower years.

And when it came time to sober up, our Coffee Cooler ensured you wouldn’t doze off before the coffee was ready to drink. All it is is an aluminum cylinder that “absorbs heat in seconds”. Does it work? By this point, I’m hardly in any state to judge. Here’s mud in your eye!

Nobody regrets more than I that we don’t sell these products anymore. But I’ll muddle through somehow with the likes of The Bar-Grade Slushie Maker and The Unbreakable German Glassware.

Yes, everyone loves Ellie Kemper - except, she worried, the one person she most wanted to: David Letterman. Kemper wrote in the New York Times that “Since high school, I have — and I need to say this carefully, because I am now married — deeply admired David Letterman. Every weeknight, my sister Carrie and I would meet in the kitchen to eat ice cream and let this goofball genius and fellow Midwesterner shape our worldview. This crush wasn’t complicated: Dave just made us laugh.”

When Kemper herself ascended to stardom and was invited onto Letterman’s show, she was haunted by the fear that she’d commit “the worst crime… being boring”, like the “chatterbox starlets whose stories went nowhere.” After two appearances which Kemper is far too hard on herself about - she said they were “fine” and “B-plus”, but she was charming as always - she was offered a spot during the run-up to Letterman’s retirement in 2015.

“For my final appearance on his show, I wanted to do something memorable,” she wrote in the Times. “This idea rested in the pages of an old Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.”

“Seized by an uncharacteristic decisiveness,” she ordered The Selfie Toaster. This bygone Hammacher product included two custom-made heating elements in the shape of whatever portraits you uploaded. Kemper chose Letterman and his bandleader Paul Shaffer, and brought the toaster on the show.

“He plopped the toaster on his desk, and I inserted two slices of potato bread,” Kemper writes. “As Paul played some light piano accompaniment, Dave and I watched the toaster for a good two and a half minutes. That was precisely the idea: to waste several minutes of national airtime watching bread toast.

“Miraculously, when the toast popped out, you could make out Dave’s and Paul’s faces. Dave offered some jam and butter, and the three of us ate the most delicious meal of my life.”

Letterman, of course, has his own history with Hammacher Schlemmer. We sent representatives onto his NBC show several times in the early ‘80s to demonstrate some of the more peculiar contrivances in our inventory at the time. I’m currently trying to track down clips of those appearances - watch this space for more. (And if you can help, please email me.)

Which makes Kemper’s much later appearance a bookend of sorts. Making selfie toast with Letterman, Kemper told Vogue, was “like a dream. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.” After all the joy her performances have brought us, we’re delighted to return the favor. As for the toaster? “I will be making that toast every morning,” she said. “That’s not creepy, right?”

And if you like Gnomenclature, you should know about Shoddy Goods, Jason’s other newsletter. It tells similar stories about consumer culture and history, but drawn from the rest of the world outside Hammacher Schlemmer. It’s about as fun as your Inbox can get.

On November 11, less than a week after her husband’s victory in the election, Pat Nixon swung by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to begin figuratively measuring the drapes. Lady Bird Johnson showed her around the living quarters, which Pat hadn’t even visited when Richard Nixon was vice-president. “I have been here several times, but I have never seen the house as I have today,” Pat was quoted in an Associated Press wire-service story.

The AP also broke this massive scoop to a breathless public: “The tour brought out the first words that the White House closets were undergoing complete refurbishing by the New York firm of Hammacher Schlemmer as a gift to the nation.”

A Newsday article expanded on these Earth-shaking developments, quoting a Hammacher spokesman: “Many of the closets merely contained a shelf and a rod for hangers. Now we’re adding silk linings [and] fancy hangers, and moving rods and shelves to the side, and putting a mirror against the far wall to create spaciousness.”

In charging us with this mission, Lady Bird chose well. Way back in 1947, we’d started thinking of closets as a distinct space in the home with unique needs. The Closet Shop opened that year in our Manhattan store, headed by interior designers Kim Hoffmann and Steven Heidrich. The New York Times noted that we offered “suggestions and blueprints, as well as the actual execution of designs.”

In one display closet, a carousel-like rotating rack featured “three hanger rods arranged in a triangle about a center pole that revolves on ball bearing parts so that all the clothing is easily reached.” Hats, bags, and belts all had their own place, along with a shoe rack in the platform base.

That fixation on space efficiency, for “average homes and apartments where large walk-in closets are not the rule,” stood us in good stead when it came time to work on that most un-average of American homes. After all, the White House was completed in 1800. If you’ve ever lived in an old house, you can imagine how deficient the storage space must be.

We’d love to show you exactly what we accomplished. Alas, detailed photos of the Executive Residence are thin on the ground. I suppose it wouldn’t do to share too much public knowledge of the quarters where the president and family sleep at night. But we’re sure our organizing wizards conjured new dimensions inside those cramped 18th-century closets, carousel or no.

Today, of course, custom closets make up an ever-booming industry unto itself, worth some $63 billion annually. The best-seller list is cluttered with sermons about the life-changing magic of clear plastic bins. All we can say is, what took everyone so long? Well before California Closets or The Closet Factory, some 40 years before Marie Kondo was even born, our Closet Shop was helping American families tame their unruly cupboards and cabinets - all the way up to the First Family.

Ye Olde Hammacher Closet Shop is closed, but we’re still well-stocked with organizers, racks, and other stress-reducing space-savers.

And if you like Gnomenclature, you should know about Shoddy Goods, Jason’s other newsletter. It tells similar stories about consumer culture and history, but drawn from the rest of the world outside Hammacher Schlemmer. It’s about as fun as your Inbox can get.

Buried treasure… lies in the voluminous Hammacher Schlemmer archive at Duke University. Our researcher recently opened a slim folder to discover four original ink drawings of our trademark gnomes. Yellowed with age and showing pre-production corrections in a couple of spots, they’re the first original artifact of our demihuman mascots that we’ve yet found. Even more exciting, we haven’t seen them in any of the catalogs or ads that we’ve digitized thus far.

They’re excellent examples of commercial illustration, rich with detail, redolent with charm. The gnomes tidy up, have tea, and cook a game bird over a campfire. Their little dog accompanies them all the way, sniffing curiously at the bird, barking at the vacuum cleaner.

There’s no other documentation with the folder. It’s listed in the archive guide as “’Gnomes’ art, 1920s”. That seems about right. They’re in a similar style to the gnomes in our 1923 catalogue, for example. More we cannot say, including the thing we’d like to know the most: who is the artist?

First, we don’t think these are by the same artist as the 1923 examples we just mentioned (whose name we also don’t know). This artist renders ears very consistently across all these drawings, and they’re different from any of the published 1923 drawings. His noses are snubbier, his hands more detailed. The little dog is furrier and all white - the 1923 dogs have shorter hair and a spot or two.

It wouldn’t be a total shock if they were by the same artist, but most likely it was different artists working to the same style guide. But wait: these original drawings do offer one tantalizing clue not present on the others: a signature!

Even that has its own mystery: monogram conventions would usually indicate the initials were DSA, but we don’t really know; the A could be in any position. Whatever the case, that clue hasn’t borne fruit yet. I’ve combed reference guides to American artist signatures, pored over newspaper articles mentioning advertising agencies in New York in the 1920s, and paged through magazines of the time looking for that signature, or other illustration that bears this artist’s stamp. I haven’t found as much as one promising lead.

Retail history often hits such dead ends. Ephemera like this had so much presence in people’s daily lives, but was rarely considered worth documenting or preserving. But I’m betting that an illustrator of this quality left a mark somewhere (no pun intended).

So I’m turning to you, Gnomenclature readers, to help solve this hundred-year-old mystery. Anyone out there recognize your Grandpa Don’s signature? Anyone deeply knowledgeable about commercial artists working in New York in the early-mid 20th century? Anyone sitting on a cache of Hammacher Schlemmer accounts-payable invoices from the Calvin Coolidge administration? Comment below or email me. Let’s solve the Riddle of the Gnomes!

And if you like Gnomenclature, you should know about Shoddy Goods, Jason’s other newsletter. It tells similar stories about consumer culture and history, but drawn from the rest of the world outside Hammacher Schlemmer. It’s about as fun as your Inbox can get.

Our reputation precedes us… If any given person knows one thing about Hammacher Schlemmer, it’s probably one of the over-the-top products that have graced the front cover of our catalogue, or garnered the spotlight on The Today Show, or “broken the Internet”, as the kids might still say. The Personal Submarine is a perennial favorite, as is The Golf Cart Hovercraft, and The Inflatable Irish Pub has its coterie of admirers.

But do you remember how much they cost? Test your memory - or your ability to value the invaluable - with our new Hammacher Schlemmer Classics price guessing game.

Can you really put a price on the magic of an authentic 1966 Batmobile, or The Wearable Tent, or The World’s Largest Crossword Puzzle? Yes. We’ve done it. Now you can, too, thanks to this digital plaything. It’s a bit like The Price is Right from an alternate and much sillier universe.

Some words to the pennywise: don’t assume everything in the game costs a king’s ransom. Our creative director Dave has curated past masterworks from up and down the pricing scale. But if you see something really, ludicrously amazing? Think of an absurd number. Then double it. We didn’t get where we are today by undervaluing ourselves.

If that’s too much pressure, take a leisurely browse through our Hammacher Schlemmer Classics gallery, where all of those attention-getters and more are assembled, complete with original photos, copy, and prices. None are currently available for purchase, but one never knows. A groundswell of renewed interest for The Barbecue Dining Boat or The Tranquility Pod could move us to blow the dust off those old blueprints and fire up the fabricators.

Of course, as we add more old classics to that virtual museum, the hunt for new classics never ends. Who can say which of our current favorites posterity will celebrate as premier exemplars of The Best, The Unique, and The Unexpected? Best of all, if something in our current range tickles your fancy, fear not - we tell you the price right up front.

And if you like Gnomenclature, you should know about Shoddy Goods, Jason’s other newsletter. It tells similar stories about consumer culture and history, but drawn from the rest of the world outside Hammacher Schlemmer. It’s about as fun as your Inbox can get.

Was this bespoke currency used as real money? Kind of. Or at least, up until 1864, it wasn’t specifically prohibited by law. Tokens like this were a widespread response by merchants to the shortage of small-denomination coins during the Civil War.

Imagine the shock in 1861, when the war started. Suddenly, after decades of peace in most of the country, stability couldn’t be taken for granted. In such times, people hoard precious metals. That’s what was happening to U.S. coins, many of which did, at the time, contain appreciable amounts of gold and silver. It wasn’t long before copper and nickel coins started vanishing from circulation, too.

This was a problem for merchants when it came to making change for their customers. So by 1862, they started minting their own pseudo-pennies, often called “store cards” by collectors, despite being, very visibly, coins and not cards. I’m calling them “tokens” because calling coins “cards” is more cognitive dissonance than a man my age should be expected to handle.

One of the first collector guides to store tokens, published in 1924 by George Hetrick and Julius Guttag, lists thousands of examples from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Designs ran the gamut from simple garland-and-text designs, like ours, to illustrations of the merchant’s products or patriotic symbolism. Ads and flags: my country, ‘tis of thee.

Along with hardware stores like us, the coiners included hotels, restaurants, bakeries, grocers, tobacconists, jewelers, dairies, haberdasheries, at least one sausage maker, and the City of New York itself. I’m not sure how customers felt about getting one of these instead of a real penny in change. But if there were no other coins to be had, and their other choice was nothing, I guess they made their peace with it.

Why wasn’t this counterfeiting? Because the tokens were officially just store credit, only redeemable for future purchases at that store, and of course merchants have the right to issue store credit. But the dearth of government coinage, and the general chaos of pre-industrial wartime society, meant merchant tokens inevitably leaked out into pockets that would never go near the store in question.

Which sometimes was by design. New York brewer Gustavus Lindenmueller issued a million store tokens (shown at left above) to advertise his beer, according to Hetrick and Guttag, which were widely accepted in the city for such transactions as train fares. But they say that when the Third Avenue Railroad tried to cash in the pile of Lindenmueller tokens they’d collected in their fare boxes, “this he laughingly refused to do. The railroad had no redress, and it is not improbable that incidents of this character forced the Government to put a stop to their issue.”

It’s an amusing story, but I couldn’t find any mention of it in newspapers of the time. In any case, the U.S. government did indeed ban the practice in 1864. It probably helped that despite the war, production of real pennies was at an all-time high, peaking at 49.8 million pennies in 1863, helping relieve the shortage as they spread into circulation.

Thus ended our little foray into minting money. If we’d held on to some of those Tollner & Hammacher “Not One Cent” tokens, they’d each be worth $65 now. With that kind of return on a one-cent investment, we could get out of the store business altogether.

One cent won’t get you much at Hammacher Schlemmer these days, but you might be surprised how far your penny jar can take you in our Clearance section.

And if you like Gnomenclature, you should know about Shoddy Goods, Jason’s other newsletter. It tells similar stories about consumer culture and history, but drawn from the rest of the world outside Hammacher Schlemmer. It’s about as fun as your Inbox can get.

“Fearless and frank, it’s a parable about living life in a way that prepares you for death that feels almost absurdly welcome in the here and now,” as the Midwest Film Journal sums up the current consensus. My co-worker Dave considers it one of his favorite movies, reckoning he’s seen it at least ten times. It’s also notable as the first and weirdest on-screen pairing of the decade’s sweetheart couple, Meg Ryan (in three roles) and Tom Hanks (the titular Joe).

But on its release, neither critics nor mass audiences knew what to make of its absurdist, stylized, fable-like quality (Meg Ryan in three roles?). “Not since Howard the Duck has there been a big-budget comedy with feet as flat as those of Joe Versus the Volcano,” panned Vincent Canby of the New York Times, although Roger Ebert called it “new and fresh and not shy of taking chances… What’s strongest about the movie is that it does possess a philosophy, an idea about life.” There’s one category, though, in which Joe Versus the Volcano is Hollywood’s undisputed champion: Hammacher Schlemmer content.

We meet Joe working in one of cinema’s all-time great depressing workplaces, a medical supply company touted as “Home of the Rectal Probe”. It’s a nightmare of dripping walls, flickering fluorescent lights, and rancid coffee creamer. Off the clock, Joe learns that he’s such a hypochondriac, he’s given himself an incurably fatal “brain cloud”. A tycoon named Graynamore (a bug-eyed, wild-haired Lloyd Bridges) offers Joe a deal: if he agrees to throw himself into a volcano as a sacrifice for some Pacific Islanders that Lloyd wants to make nice with, Joe can otherwise live it up for his remaining time, funded by the manic mogul’s fortune.

After 39 minutes and 53 seconds of such Hammacher-free preamble, we finally get to the best part: us. Right after Hanks’s Joe gets his unfortunate indoor-soccer mullet shorn by Carol Kane, we see him approach our front door to stock up on gear for his South Pacific sojourn and a few indulgences for his final weeks. Naturally! Where else would you spend some Moneybags’s money bags?

It brings me no joy to report that I don’t think this exterior is really shot at the old Hammacher store at 147 East 57th Street. Joe enters via a green French door set in an alcove; all the images I can find of the real store show gold-tone metal and glass doors in a flat storefront. Also, the listed hours don’t say anything about Saturday. That’s the kind of detail you might miss on a movie set, but probably not at your actual place of business for decades.

Once inside, Joe first tries a portable putting green, which meets his liking. Then we cut to the checkout counter where his haul is laid out. “Swiss Army knife, world band travel radio, shaving kit, two brass Coleman lanterns, violin case bar,” says the Hammacher clerk, played by William Ward. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

Pan to a giant red and white umbrella, which snaps shut to reveal Joe behind it. He’ll take that, too. His imminent death and Graynamore’s blank check have set Joe free to indulge his tastes in oversize umbrellas. Again, this interior sadly doesn’t correspond any image of the real store I’ve been able to find.

That’s it. Thirty seconds after he entered, Joe is off to another stop on his pre-sacrifice shopping spree. As originally conceived, that wasn’t quite the end of the scene. At least one version of the script has Joe then notice a pair of water-walking shoes and add that to his order. Could they be the polystyrene Water Walkers we saw when we flipped through the Summer 1976 catalogue?

This bit functions as a nice little punchline to the Hammacher Schlemmer scene, taking us from the extravagant but practical items we just saw to something downright zany. Joe’s really breaking out of his uptight shell and going for it. Alas, the Water Walkers don’t appear in the finished film, robbing cinemagoers of the unforgettable sight of Tom Hanks striding the ocean blue on a pair of Styrofoam pontoons.

But in a mysterious twist, Hammacher may have provided a different flotation device. The next scene - one of the movie’s most memorable - finds Joe in an ultra-high-end luggage store (unnamed in the movie, referred to as J. Russ in the screenplay). Eagle-eyed watchers have noticed that the steamer trunk Joe purchases bears a strong resemblance to one we were selling at the time for $20,000.

Not quite identical, but the proximity of the two in the movie raises, as they say, intriguing questions. Is the one we see onscreen the Hammacher trunk with alterations to make it even fancier? Was writer-director Shanley merely inspired by ours? Or am I out on a shaky palm frond here?

The quick cut between the two stores, separated by just a few seconds of nonspecific aerial Manhattan footage, has led to confusion among some viewers (our Dave included) about whether it’s even supposed to be a different store. Was the original idea to have Joe buy luggage at Hammacher Schlemmer, too, before it was given its own separate locale? I tried to reach the writer-director to ask him all these questions, but esteemed show business professionals are rather difficult to get ahold of. Mr. Shanley, if you’re reading this, let me know.

In any event - spoiler alert - Hanks and one of Ryan’s characters use said trunks to float adrift on the ocean for much of the last quarter of the movie. Joe finally has time to enjoy his Hammacher purchases, shimmying to “Come Go with Me” on the world radio, pouring Ryan an eye-opener from the violin-case bar, giving himself a luxurious shave, and working on his short game with the putting green.

We won’t tell you how it all ends, but if you see only one movie where Tom Hanks covets a huge umbrella, make it Joe Versus the Volcano. Just one thing about our star turn rankles. Somehow we seem to be the only thing that appears in a ‘90s movie that has not been remade or rebooted. It’s been 36 years. The time is overripe. Hollywood, call our people.

And if you like Gnomenclature, you should know about Shoddy Goods, Jason’s other newsletter. It tellis similar stories about consumer culture but drawn from the rest of the world outside Hammacher Schlemmer. It’s about as fun as your Inbox can get.

Her Majesty’s whirlwind New York shopping spree drew the attention of Time Magazine and the New York Times, along with slackjawed locals gobsmacked by her unexpected royal presence. Our then-president Henry Broido squired her around the sales floor on this rainy Friday morning. While the Queen Mum also dropped a few bob at FAO Schwarz and Saks Fifth Avenue, it was her visit to Hammacher that prompted her to remark to Broido that it was “incredible you could get so many new and unusual things.”

And precisely what new and unusual things did the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon lug back to the Royal Lodge? In perhaps a glimpse into the leisure-time preferences of the House of Windsor, her selection skewed strongly toward barware, or as the Times put it, “Drinking Gadgets for the Men”. Various other odds and ends brought the total bill to $300 (about $3700 today).

News accounts are full of such intriguing references as “a ‘miraculous’ ice tapper”, “a star-engraved cocktail mixer,” and “a whisky decanter with an automatic pourer”, none of which we’ve been able to track down more details about. (As always, if you’re in possession of further information, kindly contact me forthwith.) But we did manage to locate original catalogue listings and ads for a handful of the items in Her Majesty’s trolley.

Our Apple Ice Tub ($16.95, about $211 today) was a boldly futuristic design for its time, and would still be striking today. The Windsors aren’t exactly known for their love of modern design, so it’s funny to think how alien this red chrome orb must have looked gleaming amid the fussy, fusty palace decor.

Mustn’t have rogue bottlecaps snagging on the royal carpets. This magnetized Bottle Opener ($3.50, about $43 today) keeps a good grip on the pried-off stopper, “to save tempers”, as our catalogue copy put it. Hmm, another sleek wave of futuristic chrome… was the Queen Mum the modernist in the family?

We can’t be sure these are the “several plastic trays” mentioned in news reports of the Queen Mother’s visit. But the time - and, we see now, the style - is right. Again, the Server Table Tray ($9.95, about $124 today) would feel contemporary even now, cantilevered on its clever two-legged folding stand. Maybe we should bring this one back.

Finally, the lads back home weren’t the only ones who were going to have any fun. The Queen Mum treated herself to a copy of Deluxe Scrabble ($10, also about $124 today). “I am just learning to play,” the 54-year-old novice told Hammacher sales clerk Georgette Aurora, no doubt keenly anticipating vigorous Scrabble sessions during England’s long winter nights.

For her part, Aurora told the Times that the Queen Mother was “terribly enthusiastic about American gadgets. She said she was glad to see so many of them here, because men are so difficult to buy for.”

It just goes to show that not even the full might and fortune of the British Crown is enough to solve that eternal gift-giving quandary - at least, not without an assist from Hammacher Schlemmer. Speaking of which, you have gotten dear old Dad something from our Father’s Day Gadgets Gift Guide, right? Right?

Naturally, one of the earliest crossroads was in the pages of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. A pair of 1979 items are both of their time, in their rudimentary digital tech, and ahead of their time, anticipating the boom in wellness gadgetry we’re living through now.

First there was the Comus C-6 ($35 in 1979, about $160 today). It looks like a calculator, and it can work like a calculator - but flip the switch to DIET and it becomes a dedicated electronic diet coach. You tell it your SHAPE (sex, height, age, pounds, exercise routine) and the Comus C-6 tells you how many calories you’re allowed to eat - or tell it what you’ve eaten and “the computer will assign you enough exercise to work it off,” as the New York Times put it. “If your heart is set on a corned-beef sandwich, say, prepare for 30 minutes of cross-country skiing.”

More than half of the accompanying 40-page manual is a list of calorie counts for common foods; a few more pages are taken up by an “Activity Code Directory”, from “Sitting type activities” like office work and driving, up through “Military Marching w/Rifle & Pack”, “Agricultural Work (Manual)”, and “Disco Dancing”. The Times quotes one alleged customer in the Hammacher store complaining that “It says nothing about love-making,” which does seem like a curious oversight for the hedonistic ‘70s.

To port your computerized caloric allotment from plate to mouth, we also offered an innovative utensil called the Slenderfork ($12.95 in our catalogue, about $59 today). A former hairstylist named Joe Caruso invented it based on the principle that people start feeling full after about 20 minutes of eating. If you eat more slowly, you take in less food during that 20 minutes. So Caruso created a fork with a timer. The tech is simple: a green light that stays on for 6 seconds, during which you may eat, and a red light that stays on for 25, when you’re supposed to chew. Repeat until full.

Did it work? Caruso claimed to have gone from 310 pounds to 180 using it. The Slenderfork certainly captured the imagination of magazine editors, getting coverage everywhere from OMNI to Mademoiselle to Farm Show magazine. It helped that Caruso was handy with a quote, too, dropping bons mots like “I looked like a walking blimp… I was digging my grave with my own fork.”

At the time, we claimed to have sold thousands of Slenderforks. And yet, my search for one today, or even a clear photo of one, has thus far proven fruitless. If anybody out there still minds their waistline with the aid of a Slenderfork, please email me. The gnomes toiling in our underground archives pledge to do a festive dance in your honor.

Alas, though both the Comus and the Slenderfork heralded the fitness-tech future, neither would survive to be part of it. Both faded from the historical record by 1982 or so. But judging by the proliferation of ever-more-complex diet apps, the Comus was onto something. And decades later I would encounter a “smart fork” at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. Sigh… sometimes it doesn’t pay to be too far ahead of your time.

It’s not quite as small as the Comus or the Slenderfork, but when it comes to workout gear, The Compact 4-Piece Mini Fitness Stepper Set has a rather dainty footprint.