What does the chrome lever do? What happens when you blow down the pipe ? does the rod on the opposite side of the pipe do anything?

It may have started out life as a pneumatic upper clamp for a tire hot-patch machine from the 1930's. We had one with a similar head in my grandfather's garage. The machine was like a drill press with a fixed lower anvil like the table of the drill press and your bit sliding up and down the column to enable fitting it over various size tires and tubes. hot patch was a tin of flammable stuff placed on the patch over the leak, and lit with a match. After it had burned the clamp was pressurized and clamped the heated patch to the heated tire or tube to bond it. The machine and the hot patch method had fallen out of use by the 1960's I think and the press didn't fit most modern tires by that time. Cold patches and cold core plugs for patching tires were very good very fast and commonly in use by the mid 1960's when I started hanging out at the garage as a kid, and most tires on cars were tubeless by then in North America. I do remember my grandfather using the old press and hot patch kits a few times on old car tires and still remember the smell of the huge cloud of smoke the tin of hot patch stuff made- a cross between burnt rubber and fireworks.