Those were the days

When I was boy, one of our family friends was a cobbler. His multi function grinder/ sander/polisher was driven by an electric motor with exposed brushes and commutator.(!) Apparently it dated from when the local power supply was DC, and was still running happily, (as you might expect) from the "new" AC mains supply!

Perhaps, strangely, no one got any shocks off it, because we all knew the dangers, (This was before the days of multiple warning notices, interlocks, and H& S courses) and behaved accordingly.

Howard

I was at a Vide Grenier (Car boot sale) last weekend and saw a rheumatism treatment coil and pads complete in a nice wooden box. The "battery" was made up of 3 lead troughs with what looked like a brass paddle in the centre of each. A collection of wires were there with 'croc' clips. The battery cells were activated with some white crystals dissolved in water. Would the crystals have been "Sel a ammoniac" ?
BobH

I have to complain Howard! Your post expresses an opinion, not a fact. You give a sample of one that's logically flawed. For example, how do you know rather than believe that 'no-one got any shocks off it', and how do you know that the reason was ' because we all knew the dangers', rather than, for example, a beneficent deity.

In cases like this you are much better off looking at the statistics. So, how does 'common sense' explain this graph from the US? It shows, roughly, that electrical fatalities in the US fell steadily by about half over a 20 year period.

'Common Sense' theory would explain this by saying that Americans started with a low level of common sense and it's somehow improving. This doesn't match with the British experience, where apparently 'common sense' used to be at a high-level in 'Those were the days' , but has now been destroyed by the Nanny State.

A much more likely explanation is that the US and UK are both developed nations with similar standards of education and electrical expertise. In both countries experience has shown that accident prevention is effective. Both countries have progressively made it technically harder for people to come into contact with electricity. The counter-measures, such as shutters on sockets, do not rely on 'common sense' because there is no such thing as 'common sense'. What people think of as common sense is actually a random mix of native wit, experience, emotion, and education. Visitors, the very young and very old may lack it entirely.

Being a dumbo myself, I'm happy to know that my survival doesn't rely on common sense: mine is full of holes!

Nasty example of common sense killing someone. A chap I knew got on his motorbike after an evening meal and, in the dark, immediately collided head on with a lorry on a bend. Killed instantly, not speeding, no drugs or alcohol, nothing wrong with his bike or the lorry. He had reverted to driving on the left whilst on holiday in France...

Dave

Hmm, I left the USA to return to living in Australia in 1992, the year SOD's graph starts. Coincidence? Common sense has been improving ever since??

Or could it be that American industry has all but dried up and blown away in the years covered by the graph? Hence fewer people working in electricity-ridden industrial environments?

I know the Americans were very casual about electrical safety compared with UK and Australia, perhaps because they only have 110 volts in the US. Street wiring from pole to pole and into houses etc and for traffic lights etc in the US often looked like something from India with wires going all directions. And on the job, as a mechanical fitter in hospital maintenence, I got to work on electrical equipment all the time, ranging from industrial dishwashing machines to the main building central HVAC machinery etc, which would have been electricians only here in Australia, and I'm sure the UK.

The OP showing lathe plugged into a light socket and with the switch right behind the chuck does not surprise me at all. One thing about the Yanks, they will "Git 'er done" while the rest of us stand around and agonize over the fine points.

I have some alternative theories for the downward trend in electrical fatalities.. either folk too obese/lazy to plug/unplug any appliance or simply an evolutionary trend culling the electricity-danger ignorant - perhaps a trend worth encouraging.

I recall an australian neurosurgeon once pointing out that car accidents and head injuries lead to swelling of the brain and compression injury within the skull. He suggested a spike be fitted above the drivers head so they would experience an instant craniotomy on impact to reduce the secondary damage. I always felt that driving about with a large spike pointing at ones head would indeed lead to more cautious motoring.

We all need protection from the 'brainf@rt' injury - that moment of inattention - but total mollycoddleing will lead to greater recklessness on the assumption everything is safe.

I had a Great Aunt that used those to run her radio back in 1960 as electicity had not got any nearer to her house than the main road at the end of her lane. There was a house there that charged them for her.

Without wanting to start an argument.

My post expressed the facts, as available to me, but no hard feelings, I hope.

Injuries, per capita, should decline as we learn from our mistakes and those of others, and the developments in equipment. Witness my comment re exposed live components in the motor. Obviously, I would prefer them to have been shielded from any accidental or even deliberate contact with sentient life, or anything else!

Howard

My father was no good at mending things. When he tried to repair the iron for mother he played safe and got her to test it.

After my posting on this thread yesterday I was instructed by higher authority to change over two light fittings before the decorator arrived today, the fittings were one in an upstairs bedroom and the other on the upstairs landing. Well I switched off the power at the DB and removed both fittings and fitted said fitting on the landing, switched on the power, check all ok the light was working. Moved to the bedroom and made ready to fit the other light fitting, pulled down the wires from within the ceiling, wallop got an almighty belt and memory dawned had forgotten to go downstairs to isolate the power after checking the landing light. Unfortunately no RCD on the light circuit so my little belt managed to blow a 5 amp fuse and trip a 5 amp circuit breaker, so lucky no permanent damage except to my pride. Must remember to engage brain and common sense in future.

Dave

Experience is what allows you to spot the mistake,m the next time that you make it.

A colleague who came to electronics via commercial electrical installations told me" When you pull a fuse to isolate a circuit, put it in your pocket, so that no one can replace it when your back is turned" he'd learned that the hard way.

Now, with MCBs you are less able to do that, so is progress safer in all respects?

Howard

Common practice post-WW2. You could get a 3-way adapter to plug into the light, and it even had switching by a pull cord. In our house at the time we only had a lighting circuit, all cooking being done on a coal fired cast iron range. Hot water for bathing was produced in a cast iron copper, again coal fired. Needless to say, having a bath needed to be planned well ahead.

Listening to a 50 year old recording of "Educating Archie" (a radio comedy show which involved a ventriloquist, Peter Brough, and Archie was the dummy) on the radio the other day, the characters were going to do some ironing, so one climbed onto the kitchen table to plug in the iron to the ceiling light socket.

Edited By Robbo on 03/08/2017 15:56:40

When I bought my 1960's house it was rather run down and there were some jobs I needed to do immediately. One of them was to remove the doorbell, which was extremely loud as the previous owner of the house was very old and hard of hearing. I started unscrewing the push button on the the door jamb and there was a bang and a flash and all the lights went out. Yes, it was a mains-powered doorbell. My mistake was to assume that it would be low-voltage and/or battery-powered.

I wasn't hurt, but it reminded me not to make assumptions, and as a priority, I had the old fusebox professionally replaced with a modern RCD unit.

Regards,

John.

OldMetaller glad to see I am not the only who has problems with mains electric kerb.

Dave

One of them was to remove the doorbell, which was extremely loud as the previous owner of the house was very old and hard of hearing. I started unscrewing the push button on the the door jamb and there was a bang etc

A handy modern gizmo for non leccy people is an electric field detector, places like Lidl and TKmax have them in stock from time to time for around a tenner

Point it at a wire or appliance and the LED lights up if the target has a live wire present, you don't need it to touch any exposed wires to work, (this blue one for instance tells you if 100 to 250v is present)

Mine told me all my old storage heating sockets are still live (the heaters are long gone)

Also handy for finding a broken connection point in a cable, the detector light goes out at the break

Edited By Ady1 on 04/08/2017 09:42:52

+1
When I were a 7yo lad in Liverpool in 1951, one of my tasks was to take Gran's 'accumulators' glass-cased lead-acid cells, to the chemists shop for recharging.

And referring to the thread where someone wanted to do things in the 'old way', don't forget to do everything by gas light. I'm as guilty as the next for rose-tinted reminiscences from time to time but there is a reason the world was black and white in those days !
DaveD

Theres an interesting graph I found somewhere that perfectly demonstrated this trend, by showing how many emissions are being essentially "handed down" to developing nations, who do the industrial grunt work, and all the nastiness that comes with it and guess who topped the list?

yes, all the formerly great industrial nations. France, Germany, UK/US. We don't have to bear the guilt, because we can make all those misfortunates take it on for our money?

Michael W

We should be worried that we are defeating natural selection, the stupid should die so that the clever can breed and improve the species

Mike

They could start with all those Oxford and Cambridge grads..

Happy to help.

Having lived in Oxford for the last 50 years I have observed that being clever and having common sense do not necessarily go together and sometimes would seem to be mutually exclusive. Maybe I should have said those those with common sense rather than clever.

Mike