I was reading an old trade manual from the 70s and found out they used to add egg whites to the mix for a harder finish

Found this beat-up manual at a garage sale in Tacoma for two bucks. It was from 1975, and in the section on high-end interior floors, it literally said to add "the whites of six eggs per cubic yard" to the final mix for extra hardness and a smooth, almost polished look. My grandad, who was in the trade, said he remembered hearing about that but thought it was just a story. Has anyone actually tried this, or know why it worked? Seems wild compared to modern admixtures.

3 comments

3 Comments

the_julia1d ago

Wow, that egg thing is nuts. But it makes me wonder about the smell. Imagine a whole house floor curing for weeks with raw egg in the mix. That had to reek, like a weird sulfur smell stuck in the walls. We focus on how it worked, but forget the side effects. Those old tradesmen must have just gotten used to it, the same way people got used to the smell of old oil paints.

juliaa651d ago

It's funny how many old tricks used food... my grandma's paint had buttermilk in it for the same reason, to make it lay flat. You see it in old wood stains with coffee grounds or even animal blood in some really old recipes. They were just using what they had around to change how things dried... makes you wonder what we're doing now that'll seem just as strange in fifty years.

skyler_kelly691d ago

Seriously though, how weird is it gonna get? We're already putting plastic in everything and calling it a miracle. In fifty years they'll look back at our epoxy countertops and self-sealing driveways and just laugh. They'll say we were coating our lives in weird chemicals while acting like it was totally normal.