I’m plain and simple a chicken about electricity. In response to that statement, in David Simmon’sIt’s a catastrofe (which I didn’t want to hijack from discussions of flouresence) Johnny L.A. writes:
Heh. Fun with electricity? I’m guessin’ there’s plenty many Dopers with more stories to tell.
Back in the 80s, I roughnecked on drilling rigs during the summer to make money for school. This was East Texas triples that had two levels of open superstructure beneath to accomodate the large BOPs. It was in such a superstructure one day that I was looking around for some piece of equipment. I well remember walking over to a large iron grate about two feet off the ground and leaning up against it as I reached for something or another. Immediately my leg, specifically the calf, started bouncing up and down as if the muscles were exhausted and starting to spasm. Mistakenly, I thought it was exactly that, tired muscles.
I then hopped up on top of the grate and, holding a large 48" pipe wrench, leaned over toward the superstructure to place it on a beam. That’s when it hit me. My rubber soled shoes had protected me from the grate which, unbeknownst to me had a large, unwrapped cable leaning against it that came from one of the Caterpillar diesel powerplants. That cable continued further to the sub. When my pipe wrench hit it I reconnected with the electric loop that’d first given me a hint as to it’s power thru my pant leg to my calf. Now there was just me and however many volts in an intimate embrace.
Gettin’ electrocuted is one strange feeling. Never have experienced anything else remotely like it so it’s hard to compare it to any other tangible sensation. All I can say is just that it does pretty much get your attention and while it’s happening time does indeed seem to slow to a very energetic crawl.
We had a friend who was an electrician apprentice and he was installing a new circuit breaker for us. He also took a look at our ceiling fan that was doing weird stuff (spinning at a gajillion mph, for starters). He’d hold both the wires in his hands and get a jolt. “It’s good for the heart”, he’d say.
When I was a kid, we’d go to Riverview amusement park in Chicago. I was once called out of the audience to “assist” the electrical lady in the freak show. I held a fluorescent bulb and she touched me and it lit up. I was amazed and thrilled…just like the carney man said I’d be!
[ul][li]When I was a kid (probably around six) I tried to pull a plug from the outlet. It was stiff, so I grasped it with my fist – touching both of the prongs on the plug.[/li][li]Around the same age I experimented with a light bulb. I got an electrical cord and stripped the ends. Not being clear on the concept, I plugged it in and touched both bits of wire to the bottom of the bulb. Blew a circuit breaker.[/li]One of my favourite things at Disneyland is in the Penny Arcade. It’s a machine with an electrical coil inside and two metal handles outside. The game is to hold on as long as you can until the large dial reaches its maximum. I’d play it over and over until my upper arms were tingling. (This is not one of the modern safe ones that simulate electricity by vibrating the handles.)[/ul]
If you do the above and grab the wire at exactly the right moment during your heartbeat, you can put your heart into ventricular fibrillation. It’s not likely to occur, but if it does, your heart doesn’t tend to want to go back into a normal rythmn all by itself. Basically, if someone isn’t standing next to you with a portable defib unit handy, you’re screwed.
Ok, my stupid electrical stories! I grew up in a house with a father who is an electrical engineer for a major subway line, he tended to be a bit casual with electricity, and that (bad) habit transfered somewhat to me.
High school summer job repairing power supplies for some sort of computer equipment (no clue what it was, I only ever saw the HUGE power supplies). I discharged my arm across a 10,000 uF capacitor charged to 13V DC. It’s enough power to weld a screwdriver across the terminals. My arm hurt for the rest of the day.
Multiple shocks from standard 110V AC lines. Fixing a fan that I thought was unplugged… zap. Replacing an outside flood light with a motion sensing one (though I had turned the switch off, even checked it with a meter… on the wrong setting… ZAP (20ft up on a ladder too!) Replacing light switches (if you only work one wire at a time it’s “safe-ish”, but NOT RECOMMENDED. DO NOT DO THIS YOURSELF. I don’t any more)
Shorting (tripped the breakers) out an entire EE lab in college when I used the case as ground, and as a heat sink for some VERY large voltage regulators. Though I wasn’t zapped, large quantities of smoke were produced, I was pulling about 40 amps at the time through the circuit. (not for very long though)
Cutting through standard AC (110V) lines with a pair of lineman dykes (snicker) creates BIG sparks, and a noise that’s destined to scare you.
On another note, when I was a young pager salesman, when I sold to electricians I sold them a specialty pager that had no VIBE feature. Too many electricians fell off ladders when working on circuits and the pager went off in vibe mode. It simply scared them, thinking that they were getting shocked (except for the pain, it’s a similar feeling) Similar tale to Johnny LA’s story in the OP.
I’m sure there are more stories, but those are the ones that spring to mind quickly.
Dang Lieu…I got so excited when I saw your name on the new thread. I was all ready to have a nice belly laugh and then…nothing. Did you at least fart when the juice was surging through ya’?
I used to supervise relaymen whose job it was to do all of the control wiring in electric substations. Most people don’t know it but substations have banks of batteries which are used to control and operate switches, relays and power line circuit breakers. The battery banks were made up of rows 2 volt batteries each about the size of a typical car battery so the banks could provide a lot of current. The older sub banks had batteries supporting 48 volts DC, the newer had batteries supporting 128 volts DC. The relaymen had to work in tight quarters when working on the control equipment and occaisionally they got “zipped”.
One of the relaymen told me that typical house voltages 120VAC or 240VAC were nasty but not that bad. He also said that 48VDC was annoying but OK. He absolutely hated when he tangled with 128V DC. He said, “your muscles don’t shake like they do with AC, they just lock into place from the direct current and the only thing you can do is try to use the remaining muscles in your body that aren’t locked-up to pull you off of the contact points”.
Are you saying this machine is still in use? I can’t believe Disney would open themselves up to the lawsuit potential of anything other than the safe version.
It’s been three or four years since I last went. I don’t think the machine is really unsafe. They’ve had it there for decades. The shock isn’t that bad. IMO it would have to be twice as strong to hurt. But people don’t get shocked that often, so it surprises them. I’ll put coin after coin into it. Oh, and you can share it by having two people grasp one handle each and then hold hands.
They used to have two of the machines, but the last time I went only one of them was working.
Anyway, i had one of those screwdrivers that lights up when you touch a live wire, except someone had stripped the insulating sheath off the whole shaft. I found that by pulling a mains plug out of the socket slightly, I could reach the tip of the screwdriver around the back and touch the live pin.
Holding it as you do hold a screwdriver, with fingertips on the shaft, I touched it on the live terminal and WHAM! it was like someone had hit my fingers, end-on, with a mallet.
Undeterred, I continued to play with it, except the very next time I tried it, I pushed it in a little too far and it shorted out the live and neutral pins; FOOM! - a big puff of smoke, and a shower of sparks and droplets of molten steel.
As someone that has made their living working on electrical things, I have been shocked more times than I care to remember. 2 memorable zaps do come to mind. The first time happened when I was in the Navy. I was assigned to a Naval Air Station support unit, out job was to supply all the communications, radar, and other items needed to fly airplanes. I was working at the transmitter site and had just finished repair a radio. My co-worker said it was time to go to lunch so I turned off the radio and as a safety measure, reached over the open radio to unplug it. Anyone that knows electricity knows that capacitors can hold an electrical charge. This radio had a large capacitor. Just as I touch the power cord I was knocked backwards against a brick wall then fell on the ground. The guy I was working with, fearing that I was dead and my heart had stopped, punched me in the chest to restart my heart. My fairly new wedding band was vaporized, I had a pretty nasty burn to my left hand and suffered 2 cracked ribs. While in the hospital the next day, I was given a personalized electrical discharge wand.
The second time was a few years ago while working on a power problem on a galley inside a 737. I had my hand in an access hold trying to remove a connector when my elbow touched a circuit breaker. Power on airplanes is the same as household power, 115 volts but it is 400 cycles per second, not 60. Because of this the shock tend to make your body do funny things like your heart racing and extremeties twitching to a little faster beat. I got to sit in my employers medical clinic for a couple hours watch TV while nurses monitered my vitals. Even my vision was affected, it took about half an hour before I could see straight again. Plus it killed my digital watch I had on at the time.
400Hz power on an airplane? Heh. I never knew, and I wonder why?
I digress. As a physics teacher, one of the best demos is the Van de Graaff generator, which can be charged up to ~50,000V (but with little energy) and deliver quite a nice shock. Last week, I found out that one of the other teachers (a chemist…) had been keeping one of the better generators in her room, and she just returned it to the stockroom. I snagged it, and set it up in my room. Normally, we cover electricity in the spring, but this year we wised up and decided to do it now, when the air is much drier, and static electricity is more easily demonstrated. Little did I know that the combination of these two effects (excellent generator, and dry air) would lead to such an interesting day.
In the first class, I did my standard demos, then had the whole class get up on their insulated desks to hold hands in one giant chain. I had one student put a hand on the generator, and then started it up. As they were all insulated, the charged just built up on all of them (without getting any shock). I guess I was a bit longwinded in my explanation of what was going on, but when I grabbed the metal table frame and the end person in the chain, “WHAM!!!” we got a giant shock. It was the biggest I’d received in many years, and I stumbled around a bit and dismissed the class. I was light-headed for about twenty minutes.
Later in the day, I demonstrated it again for another class, but I was determined to be more careful. I had one insulated student with two hands on the generator in order to demonstrate the classic “hair raising,” and she was enjoying it, as was the rest of the class. That was until one of the other students wanted her to see herself in a mirror and he walked over and handed her the mirror…they both got a pretty significant shock…
Not strictly electrical in the spirit of the thread, but my dad told me about something that happened aboard ship. Did it actually happen? Or was it a sea story? No way for me to find out now.
He didn’t give details, but I assume it was on USS Philippine Sea. The aircraft in the story might have been an AD-4 Skyraider, or an F4U Corsair. Anyway, according to dad, maintenance was being performed on the aircraft. The crewman needed to get from one side of the aircraft to the other. He was supposed to climb down the ladder, go to the other side, and climb up another ladder. Instead, he stepped over the rear of the fuselage straddling the antenna that ran from the vertical stabiliser to the cockpit. At just that moment the pilot keyed the mic. The power being put through the antenna jolted the crewman on his testicles.
Right. I know that radios put out power, and the power is transmitted through the antenna. But I don’t know enough about radios – especially early-1950s military aircraft radios – to know if the story is true, or if dad was pulling my leg.
Dad also said that he worked with radars at NAS North Island, and that operators would aim the dish at news photographers and give them a pulse that caused their flash bulbs to fire. Dad said that his work with radar didn’t have anything to do with it, but coincidentally I was not conceived until after he stopped working with them.
I got a pretty good jolt and shut the business down for a day when I used to work here.
I was the loader, the guy who pushed the buttons and directed the cars in. It was a wretchedly hot day in mid-summer. The only thing we had to cool us down as a fan right above our heads. I had been loading for about an hour and noticed the fan was off and the plug was unplugged. The outlet just happened to be right in the window to my left side. The whole area was soaked with water because of the car wash and the pressure washer I had in my hands. Well, I don’t care about no stinkin’ water so I went to plug in the fan. ZIPPPPP. I was thrown across the area into a car that was coming up for the wash. The power to the whole wash was cut out and we had to call Manny, the electrician in. yuck that did not feel too good.
Heh, electricity has never been my friend. Never had any mjaor incidents but a few anecdotes that have pretty much convinced me that the further I stay away from electricity, the better.
The first real shock I remember getting was when I was about 13. I was helping out on a dairy farm over my summer vacation. Onr morning, I was particularly tired, so I helped hook up all the milkers and decided to go home. A couple of the farm dogs chased me (probably because they weren’t used to seeing me walk alone) and backed me into the fence. The electrical fence. Luckily it was pretty low power, and it was more a matter of me thinking “What is that weird buzzing sensation?” before I realized what I had done.
A week later, milking cows in the middle of a pretty decent storm, I was pushing the buttons to set the milkers when I got zapped by a pretty decent jolt of electricity. That was slightly more painful.
Then there’s the time I was mowing the lawn. The lawnmower had this stupid problemm where some cable (I want to say it was a battery cable… but do lawnmowers have batteries? I don’t think so) would disconnect. It would be fine until I let go of the handle bars that engaged the blade - once I let go of those, the stupid thing would turn off, which made it a pain in the ass when I needed to stop to pick something up. So I got the bright idea that I’d just not let go of the bar, and quickly seat the cable back the way it was supposed to be while the thing was still running.
That was pretty damn painful. I don’t know what kind of current was running through there, but it can’t have been much of one. All I know is I yelped, jumped back about 5 feet, and decided to leave lawnmowing for another day.
One of the most amusing (to me) was when I was about 16, and surreptitiously wiring a phone line into my room. I was very proud of myself, standing in the garage, swiping a connection from my mother’s room, wiring it across the ceiling and feeding it up through a hole in my closet floor. So, I was busily joining wires together (the green wires, I seem to recall) when my pinky started doing this amazing spasm. I was a little bewildered. Until the phone rang a second later. I almost fell off the ladder laughing at myself.
Slight hijack
Do you know why they use 400Hz instead of 60? Military equipment is the same way. When we run off commercial power we have to use a converter to go from 120VAC 60Hz to 120VAC 400Hz. I asked a few people here, but nobody knows why.
OK, now back to your reagularly scheduled posts.
I always say I don’t fear electricity, I have a great respect for it. I don’t have many shocking stories myself(well none that are impressive), but my dad, and brother on the other hand…
Back when I was 6 or 7 I remember my dad coming home in an ankle cast, and stitches in his head. He was working on some communications equipment mounted in a truck trailer. It was shift change time, and the guy that was working on it said “I already dischared the capacitors.” My dad believed him, and went to work on the equipment. Got knocked all the way from the front of the trailer out back onto the loading dock.
My dad again this time installing a celing fan. Using needle nose pliers to twist some cables together. Shorted something and blew the tips off the pliers, and almost knocked him through the floor of the attic into the living room.
My brother after getting a computer system working decided not to power down before screwing everything back together. The screw he decided to use to hold the power supply in was a little too long. Shorted on something inside the power supply. Got a nice show of sparks. Had to pull the power cord from the wall to make it stop. Never tripped the breaker.
Again my brother working on a computer monitor. You know how everyone says there is high voltage in those CRTs? Well my brother had the monitor on the floor facing down with the back off. He was using his multimeter to trace a circuit he thought was causing the problem with the monitor. He shorted something, Sparks shot to the 8’ celing and tripped the main breaker for the house. He did this in the living room with the entire family there watching TV. All my brother did was say “Oops” then went and flipped the breaker back on. When he got back he continued to work. Didn’t even blow the fuse in the multimeter.
After witnessing those two phycos work with electricity I respect it. I am not scared to work on electrical systems, but I am careful when I do.
I was about 16, playing electric guitar in my room. Decided to shift the amp. Guitar (earthed strings) in right hand, picked up the amp with left hand where my index finger gripped the bare contacts of the mains switch in the open back of the amp. 240 volts across the chest.
This threw me across the room, but unfortunately I was still connected. I can state that AC power does in fact lock your muscles in place. Since the current was only paralysing my upper body I managed to kick the amp away. I had time think I was going to die.