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Boing Boing

1940s miner crafted dentures from toothbrush handles and coyote teeth

Mark Frauenfelder
May 06, 2026
∙ Paid

Boing Boing / Google Gemini

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 …

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