History And Design Of Floor Scales

Floor scales are the most popular design purchased by consumers for personal use at home. They come in many colors and styles giving the consumer the ability to match them to the rooms decor. You can still get the old style that spins around and lands on a number or you can purchase ones with digital read out. They now even have little memory banks installed in some models so you can see your last weight at a glance. You will probably find some version of these in every home you visit. People are obsessed with their weight and feel the need to track it constantly.

Sometime in 1885 a coin operated scale was brought to the United States from Germany. It was very big and weighed close to 200 pounds. You could put a penny in it and stand on it and it would give you your weight. This was indeed a novelty at the time. No one had ever seen or heard of such a device. Just a few years later the National Scale Company started offering a penny operated scale that was modeled after the one brought over from Germany.

In the 1920s until the end of the 1930s on just about every city corner you would find a penny operated scale from Peerless Scale Company. During these times people almost always had a penny on them even during the depression years and could weigh themselves on the coin operated scales. It was still a rather new and novel thing to weigh yourself at that time so for the owners of the scales this was good business.

If you had a scale in a prime location you could earn a lot of money within a month. At a penny a weigh that is a lot of weighing to add up to a months wages. By the time the mid-1930s rolled around there were about 750,000 scales across the United States. The popularity began to lessen around this time.

To keep interest up people tried to install gimmicks. Some were designed to print you out a ticket that told you your weight instead of showing it on the scale to provide some privacy. Then they started printing fortunes on the tickets followed by the images of movie stars.

You were encouraged to weigh yourself and collect the entire set of movie star photos.The movie stars themselves paid the companies that made the tickets to put their faces on them. Having their faces on the tickets promoted their names and increased their popularity.

Vast improvements were made in technology and smaller more inexpensive weighing devices were marketed for personal use at home. When these smaller versions became available in the 1940s the penny scale was made just about obsolete. In today's home you will probably find scales that are digital. The technology of load cells has made it possible to have very accurate scales even in our homes.

A patent was granted in 2004 for a bathroom scale that would be installed in the floor of the room. The weight information would be viewed on a display mounted on the wall or in the countertop. When weight was not being transmitted the display would read the time. This technology would be a big step forward in the advancement of floor scales since they have basically not changed in the last 50 years.