Vintage lifehacks from cigarette packs

Many of these century-old lifehacks can still be super useful today

At the beginning of the twentieth century it was very common for cigarette manufacturers to place collectible cards inside the packs, kind of like cereal nowadays. You could find baseball cards, trivia questions or animal pictures in the cigarette packs to collect. Gallaher’s Cigarettes printed out a brilliant series of 100 how-to-do-its’, or lifehacks.

These vintage cards are now part of the George Arents Collection at the New York public library. The coolest part of this is that many of these century-old lifehacks can still be super useful today. You can learn many great things from them, like how to remove that tight ring from your finger or getting a splinter out of your hand. It also tells you how to create a fire extinguisher in a few quick steps .

How to make a fire-extinguisher