Anyone Else Have & Use a Clothes Valet / Valet Stand?

[Shangas]

Woah! That's not somethin' you see every day!

 

[Tomasso]

Very cool!

 

[hatsRme]

Woah! That's not somethin' you see every day!

But I DO see it every day!

 

[Treetopflyer]

That IS cool hatsRme. It would give me motivation to go to the gym every morning knowing that the scale was there when I was dressing.

 

[hatsRme]

That IS cool hatsRme. It would give me motivation to go to the gym every morning knowing that the scale was there when I was dressing.

This scale has watched me "rise and fall" more than once. But the best feature is that its maximum capacity is 350 lbs., giving lots of room for "growth..." Never max'd it out, though, thank goodness!

 

[Shangas]

Would you mind telling us how and where it was that you procured this interesting individual? I can't help but think that there's quite a story behind this thing.

 

[hatsRme]

Would you mind telling us how and where it was that you procured this interesting individual? I can't help but think that there's quite a story behind this thing.

Not all THAT interesting... but I'm always happy to share a story. It all began in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in the USA, circa 1830. It was then that Thaddeus Fairbanks invented the PLATFORM SCALE, the first improvement to weighing technology in over 1000 years (balance scales were the prior standard). A little-known fact, indeed, but should be remembered in case you're ever on a game show and they ask about it... Moreover, for a time Fairbanks was the most widely recognised company the world over, until the 1920's when Ford Motor Cars assumed the top spot.

My family first arrived in St. J. around 1915. We are still newcomers by local standards. My grandfather, an enterprising fellow, started a salvage business that was the seed of our existence for three generations My father and his brother carried on the operation which inclued collecting the industrial salvage (scrap metal, machinery, etc.) of many of the factories in the region. Fairbanks Morse was one of those factories.

Apparently in some type of bartered arrangement, (for which they were notorious) my father and his older brother each received one of these scales back around 1962, if memory serves. Seems like about second grade for me... That's how it came into my life. Eventually, as time passed I just evolved into the caretaker of the scale, as I was the one who seemed to be most concerned about how much I weighed.

I did find a couple of them as a result of a Google search, but other than this recent conversation the only other one I have ever seen is in the Fairbanks Museum of Natural History, in St. Johnsbury, of course.

I have always felt very fortunate to have such an unusual, functional thing-a-ma-bob such as this! Some day I plan on installing a mechanism that, when a certain weight is reached, a card will pop out to the person being weighed that says, "One at a time, please..."

 

[TomS]

cool stuff!

 

[Shangas]

Thanks, Tom. When I bought my stand, it occurred to me that there didn't seem to be a thread dedicated to this most golden-era of men's accessories. So I decided to threadify it

Anyone else owning a clothes valet is welcome to contribute it to the thread. Pictures are desirable, of course.

 

[hatsRme]

Here's one available on E.B.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-BRA...ltDomain_0&hash=item5af0262396#ht_5465wt_1164