This unusual set of dentures was made in the 1940s by a California miner named George Washington Hancock, who couldn't afford conventional dental care. He needed teeth, so he made them. Hancock fashioned the bases himself by heating celluloid toothbrush handles and pressing them into denture-shaped molds. Real teeth went into those molds, but not the kind you'd expect.
They're coyote canines. Hancock lived in California, where coyotes are plentiful, and he pressed the canine teeth straight into the mold. A local dentist named Douglas Dyer was impressed enough that he traded Hancock a real pair of dentures for the coyote-tooth oddity. The original set later landed in the collection of the Eastern California Museum, where it remains today.
Celluloid is an early plastic, common in toothbrush handles before modern materials took over. It softened with heat for shaping, but it was also flammable and tricky to work with safely. Hancock got the result he needed without burning down the apartment or setting himself on fire.
As the History Feels post that surfaced the dentures back up puts it:
It is one of those artifacts that feels almost unbelievable, but it tells a very real story about poverty, frontier improvisation, and the lengths people once went to solve basic medical problems.
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