Watching old Antique’s Road Show Episodes and…
The most bizarre thing I think I’ve seen so far popped up. A giant cradle for your cranky wife!
I found this great write up about it on Tumblr:
The Hen-Pecked Club’s Peace Box, a “patent cure for a cross wife”. The Hen-Pecked club was an organisation which encouraged men to do more household tasks to take some of the pressure off their wives. The ‘Peace Box’, also known as ‘the wife tamer’, was invented by a club member called Harry Tap in 1862. If a wife was nagging her husband too much, the husband could put her inside the box, which could be rocked like a child’s cot in order to send the wife to sleep. While she was sleeping the husband would perform all the chores then release his wife who would hopefully have calmed down.
— Write up via Victoria Fan Guide on Tumblr, and look at Fiona Bruce inside it in this old article about the Roadshow episode.