Mar 13, 2016 3 min read

Dan Harbaugh, the photographer who made this picture sometime before his studio closed in 1951, did a good bit of work in the factories and mills around Washington. Many of his photos of workers at Jessop Steel found their way into the Observer-Reporter archives. And some strange photos like this one ended up there, too. Some of those images were of what appear to be defective or worn-out parts.

We asked our readers to search their memories and imaginations to determine what this strange block and cylinder might be and where they might have been made. Some of the answers were as strange as the picture.

We’re quite sure this is not, as one reader suggested, a cigarette lighter.

And we are just as sure it is not a camera, as three others guessed. The only resemblance the unknown object has to a pinhole camera – or camera obscura – is its shape and the fact it has a hole in it.

A camera obscura is a box or room with a tiny hole on one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced, inverted but with color and perspective preserved. Some art historians believe Old Masters from Caravaggio to Vermeer used the device to produce paintings that were remarkably ahead of their time.

The object in the mystery photo is a highly unlikely candidate for a camera obscura. The hole is entirely too large, and the box, in relation, way too small. Furthermore, the block appears to be solid, or at least very thick, and made of concrete, stone or some metal alloy. And what artistic purpose would the cylinder have?

A greater number of readers proposed the photo is of a birdhouse. This also seems unlikely, for some of the same reasons. The hole is of appropriate relative size for a bird, but the perch, as some called it, is massive in comparison, and too large for a bird to grasp with its feet. A more likely place for a perch would be a small peg jutting out from just below the hole in the block.

And certainly, there must be easier ways to build a birdhouse than to carve it from granite or hardened steel.

That leaves just one other explanation offered by our readers. A Greene County resident called the device a “dynamite blaster” and said her father had one just like it. If the thought was that the items resemble the plunger that sends a spark to ignite explosives, we have serious doubts. And a search on the Internet for anything else resembling these items used with dynamite came up empty.

Write this one up as another unsolved mystery.

Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.