A cast-iron stand mixer came across my bench last week, made around 1940, and it ran the first time I plugged it in. Nothing about that is unusual. Machines built in the first half of the last century tend to still run, and the ones that do not can mostly be brought back, because they were built to be opened in the first place.
Built to be opened
The screws sit where screws actually help, and they are slotted, and they back out under a driver. The castings have weight to spare, so a part that takes a knock will bend before it cracks and can often be bent back. Whatever wears is something a person can reach without special tools and without breaking two good parts to get at the one bad one. A machine of that age was built to be repaired. It was designed by people who expected it to be worth fixing, and sold for a price that only made sense if the buyer meant to keep it for thirty years.
What survives
The old machines still with us are not a fair sample of what once got made. Plenty of junk was made then too, and all of it went to the dump on schedule. What lasted was what got maintained, and what got maintained was what somebody valued enough to keep up over the years. A machine that turns up on a table has already passed a test most of its own kind failed. That is not nothing. It is not proof that everything was better made once, but it is good proof that this particular one was worth the trouble somebody took over it.
Off the household
A well-kept machine will outlast the household that bought it. That is ordinary, not remarkable. A stand mixer a young couple bought after the war runs one kitchen for fifty or sixty years, and then the couple is gone and the mixer is on a folding table in the garage with a paper tag looped on the cord. Sixty years of one family's baking is on it, in the wear on the beater shaft and the old grease gone to varnish in the gearcase, and none of that stops it working. It comes to me on a Saturday for a few dollars, and it will run another sixty years for whoever takes it home.
What I owe them on the page
When I write a machine that old into a story, I try to give it the history it would really have. A thing that has been in one family for two generations has a whole record in it, and a character who owns it inherits that record whether she ever reads it or not. The grandmother who bought it new. The daughter who kept it running. The bad repair somebody did in 1975 that a good eye can still find. In a mystery that difference does real work, because an object keeps the record of what was done to it and a person keeps the version she would rather tell.
That does not mean the machine remembers anything, because it does not. The marks are only marks, wear and heat and the one botched repair, and they stay as they were left. The remembering is mine to do, and the reader's, and that is the part of this work I would not give up. A thing that cannot revise its own past makes a better witness than the people who owned it, which is most of why I write about old machines at all.