Hi Ady 1

Can you imagine that happening today? Do nabours even talk to each other anymore? And what about the dreaded H/SE? ARHaaaaaaaaaaaa !

Remember seeing mother ironing on the kitchen table with the flex plugged into one of those two-way adaptors that was itself plugged into the light socket. All swinging about on some ropey silk-covered twisted twin.

Mike

Hi Watford I remember that too and sometimes even an electric fire !! Happy days,eat your heart out H/SE !

As child, during WW2, I remember mum ironing with a lead into a two way bayonet lamp socket. Dad even wired a 5 am two pin socket, so that the radio could be run off the mains, rather than batteries, again tapped into a lighting circuit!

How did we all survive this long before H & S? Maybe Common Sense was much more common in those days!

Howard

Slightly O/T, does anyone else here remember valve radios being supplied with mains dropper cables? Where the mains cable was of a specified length and of high resistance that dropped the mains voltage down to about 80 volts and I think they were insulated with an asbestos covering of some sort. I recall that it did get quite warm but not hot although there must have been instances of unwary owners letting the cable become coiled and covered with a copy of the Radio Times! I suppose there must have been some instances of a fire developing as a result of careless use.

Not quite sure what H&S would make of that.

Phil

I had one when I was a boy and it was far from new then, made about 1950 or so. Being interested I took it apart. If I remember correctly, it had a 4 core cable, Live, Neutral, and another Live pair made of Resistance Wire. Inside the radio the Live went via a fuse and a switch straight to a diode rectifier valve. The heaters of about 5 (or 6?) valves and a couple of torch bulbs were connected in series. The live resistance wire connected to that and dropped about 150V so the valve heaters & bulbs could run straight off the mains.

Was it dangerous? An 11 year old inside a mains powered radio with no earth, no transformer, a hot power lead, and a metal chassis? All this in a wooden box with a cardboard back with ventilating holes in it.? Absolutely NO. Small boys are famous for inbuilt common sense and that's all you need to be completely safe in any risky situation whatever.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 02/08/2017 17:45:28

The original French mains power was just provided for a single light in the kitchen, and you were charged for that. Then adaptors came on the market, so you could have lights "Everywhere" for the same price (No meter in the house). Then a 1 bar radiator – and you can imagine how things developed until the invention of the electricity meter. The house opposite me has no earth wire and 2 fuses, 1 on the live and one on the neutral. For an unknown reason, many systems switch the neutral and not the live. Changing a lightbulb can be "electric"
Of course we do not have fused plugs like the UK, and most of the spur systems are rated at 16 amps – can't see the logic in that either – but we love it here.
BobH

When I was a young lad growing up in 1950s London our power was DC at about 230v (I think), supplied from one of the many local power stations.

Dad used to charge his car batteries on the Kitchen Table, using one of the aformentioned lampholder plugs with a couple of wires to the battery, the voltage drop was achieved by putting a lamp bulb in series on the + lead. We were given strict instructions not to touch anything around it.

The sash window was wedged open a bit to get rid of the gasses, Mum used to complain bitterly about this going on in 'her' Kitchen.

All this came to an end when the wide spread conversion to AC power came about.

If my memory serves me correctly, the adapters for connecting to light sockets came in two and three way units (apart from single plugs), the luxury versions even had a push button operated switch built in for part switching.

There were also some widely used methods for getting around lighting circuit fuses that blew regularly, but I will not go into that!

All of this madness seemed to work, but I think in reality it was probably something of a miracle that so many of us survived the days gone by.

Edited By V8Eng on 02/08/2017 19:37:42

Edited By V8Eng on 02/08/2017 19:41:10

Edited By V8Eng on 02/08/2017 19:46:14

I still use dad's Solon. I also rember reading of battery chaging being done from the DC mains with a voltage dropper cable.

Ian S C

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 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