Hah, cool. My Dad would always bring home stuff like this either from garage sales or stuff he came across buried in a field while working (he worked digging up old storage tanks for awhile), the whole family would fiddle with it and try to dream up what it possibly could have been for. (This was pre-internet, so we often had no idea what we had.)
I wouldn't have guessed this one, but I would have enjoyed playing with it, LOL.