Very Dangerous (looking back)

I remember as a child, I discovered that my Lego motor lead


fitted perfectly into the figure of eight end of the mains lead of my mother's tape recorder.

I can remember connecting the two together, switching on & marveling at the sparks produced when I offered the live prongs at the other end up to the input prongs of the tape recorder.

I hope they have changed the design.

That said, I have a feeling my Lego pre-dated the little moulding between the pins & therefore seated all the way home into potential doom.

As a kid I was very experimental, having seen adults wedge open the earth part of sockets (so they could bodge in 2 pin plugs) with matches the world was my oyster.

Open live and neutrals at a socket in a 60's time frame meant a little boy could (with the switch turned off) could push the copper wire from a small coil in to the socket run it off to lamps, batteries and battery toys.

Then turn on

Best ever was a 10 ft run of fine wire than had a cotton covering, it glowed red, melted within seconds and blew the centre of the socket.

There were a few times of holding the cable when doing such experiments that resulted in shock.

When we were 12 or 13 on a bored summers day about 8 of us took turns to stick a wet finger in a table lamp with the bulb removed- then some one would turn it on

(at the time spy movies, comics and the like all had stories of war / cold war interrogation via electrics- so our mentality was to try it !)


RCD's have ruined all that fun

Similarly, an IEC C7 connector
will fit very nicely onto pins 1 & 2 of a 3-pin male XLR connector, such as found on a pro microphone

I have heard tales of certain people doing this, as that is how they presumed is the correct way to plug in a mic.

Karaoke our place, New Year's Eve anyone???

Two dangerous things from my youth in the 1950's

[1]
A nice old lady wanted to have a telephone as her son who lived some way away now had a phone ( for his work ) and it would be nice to be able to talk to him. But there was a long waiting list for residential phones where she lived.

Then in an ex army surplus shop window she saw telephones for sale so she bought one. She knew they "were electric" so she fitted a plug on the end of the lead. The lead had nice round eyelets that made fitting the plug very easy as they fitted nicely on the terminal in a 15 amp plug. She worked out that the eyelet bound in green thread must be the earth, the one with red would be the live. the blue one must be the black, perhaps they had run out of black thread when they made the lead.

When she plugged it in the bell rang. continuously... This suprised her as she had no yet given her number to anyone ( her number was printed on the label in the centre of the dial ). The bell circuit was able to cope with the 230 volts live to earth.

But when she picked the receiver up the speech circuit could not cope with 230 volt live to neutral and the phone caught fire. She complained to the GPO.

She had a real phone installed within days.

[2] My father asked me to look at a neigbhour's washing machine that was not working and was giving electric shocks. I was about 10 years old but had a volt meter. The machine had been "liberated" from Germany by a returning soldier and was wired to a pre war German standard which used a red lead for the earth. The neighbour had naturally fitted the red lead to the live pin in the plug.

two from my youth in the 80's

1/ in a physics lesson we decided to try plugging the banana jacks of a 12v lamp into the mains, the sockets were MK with the rotary shutter so fairly easy to push the jacks in, the bulb exploded with a mighty crack

2/. Aged 8 I was facinated by all things electrical, My schoolteacher Mr Milton gave me a broken Baird TV from the school to take apart, my dad carted it home for me and soon I learnt all about the HT circuit

childhood was great looking back, we did all sorts of stupid things like building a treehouse out of chipboard in the winter and ending up with a load of weetabix, climbing up on the asbestos roof of a dutch barn and ending up in a haystack below and harvesting acid from old car batteries and for scientific experminentation, trying to turn a conical fire extinguisher into a rocket... ah the whimsy of youth

tonyelectric said:

childhood was great looking back, we did all sorts of stupid things

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Yes we did. Some very stupid things in those great days of discovery but most of those young experimenters survived without serious injury.

Some close shaves but we learnt a lot.

Today the nanny state has taken all the educational fun out of children's life in order to keep them safe from harm.

my next door neighbours kid in the early 80'z was a war nut. he went looking for bullets and stuff in the woods and so on.

one day he found a big lump of metal - bomb like - took it home and cleaned it.....

his mum came out and called the police of course............

he made the papers 'boy finds ww2 incendiary bomb (and the best bit at the bottom of the garden' maybe there was more of a story to it, as how it came to be sticking out of the bank at the end of our drive is a mystery, but there were some factories about half a mile away,

We had a similar thing with bulbs. Were I worked all 230v were BA22d and 110v were E27 but of course some one brought in a lamp from home.
At home my wife when the bulb went decided to hunt for one in garage and screwed a SON lamp into the fitting and said it went pop. Pity it was my last spare SON. I even have a lamp in garage 24v and sure that bulb would really pop if used with 230v.

And this is not forcing items that really do not fit. I am still surprised at the shaver adaptor plugs which allow US flat prongs for 110v to be connected to our 230v supply.

12vdc is very poor with the coax power plugs seeming to have no standard as to if centre is positive or negative.

Down to education really. It has to start at school and the use of sub standard equipment in schools and colleges does not help either. Multi-meters with leads not complying with regulations too much metal showing and no figure guards so any teacher worth his salt can't use the equipment provided. So the demonstration we had is no longer done so kids just don't know danger.

There used to be an experiment we did at A level physics called the thoron experiment, the apparatus consisted of a squeezy bottle half filled with thorium dioxide (a radioactive substance), squeezing the bottle aggitated the powder freeing radon and forcing it through a tube to an ionizing chamber connected to an HT supply and a GM counter, the idea being to observe the decay curve of radon and prove that radiation depletes in halves. The problem with the experiment came when someone over zealously squeezed and blew the tube off spraying radioactive powder over everyone else - this is now banned!!!

Another good banned one was Farradays star, a star shaped copper wheel with a horsesho magnet around it and the lowest tip dipping in a pool of mercury, as current flows the star rotates and as the points enter and leave the mercury it arcs violently

Reminds me of when i was a kid and i decided to make an electro magnet, found a big steel bar in the garage that was bent into a U shape, and a roll of bell wire. Joined one end of the wire together and wrapped the lot around the bar, i go into the kitchen and switch the power off to the garage go back and shove the ends of the wire into a 240v socket, wedged in with a plug, back in the kitchen, power on.......BOOOOM!! there was bits of bell wire all over the shop and it blew half the roof off the garage

gman76 said:

I remember as a child, I discovered that my Lego motor lead fitted perfectly into the figure of eight end of the mains lead of my mother's tape recorder.

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You're not alone! Although I, aged about 11 or 12 and having recently read how to wire a mains plug in the encyclopedia, thought I'd do a proper job and wired my lego motor up to a 3-pin plug. Stuck it in the mains socket, turned it on and BANG!

Unfortunately mother was having a dinner party in the room next door and the big sliding doors were thrown right back to reveal me, sitting on the floor, bawling my eyes out while a mushroom cloud of black smoke was still blossoming towards the ceiling, to a crowd of very shocked and elegant people standing in groups holding wine glasses.

That lego motor stayed in the airing cupboard for a year or so afterwards, and I can distinctly recall getting the shakes every time I saw it.

Kids today, don't know they're born. They've got eyebrows and everything nowadays.

I remember in the very early 70's (probably 70 or 71) , our science teacher explaining to us about television and the dangerous voltages produced by the transformers in the back of them etc .
I took an old TV to bits and found the HT transformer. By connecting the LT sides to a 1.5v battery and repeatedly breaking the positive contact with the battery I could produce a smallish (about 1cm spark) across the open ends of the HT side. I then tried it connected to a 12v transformer for my Scalextric set. That produced a nice spark about an inch long. Next step Connect it directly to the mains, thinking this would produce lightning size sparks.

How was I to know that the transformer wasn't rated for 240v? Apparently the voltage to the LT side was already stepped down.
One almighty bang later and no sockets working in the house>
Had to wait till my dad came home off the afternoon shift to sort out the fuses.
I kid you not, I don't think I sat down for a week after he got home.

The school I attended in the 1950's was on a d.c. supply.

You could unscrew the lightswitch covers to access the terminals. With a couple of carbon rods from U2 batteries and rubber bungs from the chemi lab, we could draw an arc across the switch terminals. Moving the carbon rods apart increased the arc but we were never able to get the arc over the terminals themselves.

In the late 50's we moved to a new school. Managed to create a 13A rocket plug with 16G solder. With no connecting wire you could plug it in a socket and it would send sparks out of the cable hole. The idea was to yank the plug out of the socket when it started like a rocket. Of course there was a girl's blouse kid who was too scared to yank it out on his turn and the plug got welded in before the fuse blew.

ericmark said:

And this is not forcing items that really do not fit. I am still surprised at the shaver adaptor plugs which allow US flat prongs for 110v to be connected to our 230v supply.

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I work in hotel. If I had a pound for the amount of times I've been called because hair dryers/straighteners not working....