And according to Willy Loman, *windshields *used to open, too!
Say, 'subs, how’d you know it was live?
Because I touched the uninsulated wire in his attic before he could stop me. :smack:
Not really an “appliance”, but Christmas tree lights predate receptacles. This first strings were designed to screw into light sockets (and only the rich could afford them, now you can by a string for a couple of bucks at Walmart).
I don’t have reliable soures handy, but IRC reading that for a brief time they would mount light sockets at receptacle height (with a flip cover), since people were starting to get appliances to screw in, and that NEMA plugs first appeared on Christmas lights.
Going forward for cars, as cheap as DC-DC converters and inverters are, it would probably be best to have NEMA receptacles for 110 volt AC, as well as a couple of USB, which seems to be the new de facto standard for low voltage power.
When I moved into the current house, at least 75 years old, there was still live knob and tube wiring in the attic and the basement. It was in a lot better shape than the two conductor insulated wire they ran through the rest of the house, but incredibly dangerous since it was all exposed.
My grandmother (and quite a few of her neighbors) in a tiny town in NE Pennsylvania first got electricity in 1960 when the iceman retired because his horse died.
She got a fixture with one light bulb and two sockets hanging from the kitchen ceiling; one of the sockets had an extension cord running to her new refrigerator and the other had a long extension cord running up the stairs to a lamp in her bedroom.
Lots of people there (like my aunts and uncles) who had gotten electricity in the 1920s and 30s had a single bulb hanging from the ceiling in each room; they attached the iron, toaster, whatever to a screw-in adapter.
My grandmother’s house, which was built in 1918, was the original family house when her parents brought the family from Russia. As her siblings got married and built their own houses through the 1920s and 30s most of them were wired with the single ceiling light per room set-up, although the oldest son didn’t electrify his house until the 1960 event. The youngest was quite scandalous; she had running water right in the kitchen (cold only – the pipe frequently froze in the winter and the hand-dug well went dry in the summer).
The original family house has been torn down but some of the houses of my grandmother’s siblings are still in the family; my cousins use them as summer houses. They all now have modern wiring and running water but some of them still have the toilet outside – flush outhouses.
I saw a silent movie on TV a few years ago that had Harold Lloyd — I think — trying to impress a girl with a snazzy car.
He was standing on a sidewalk next to it — a touring car, no roof — and pulled a cigarette lighter from the dash. As explained in your link, It was attached to a wire that that retracted when he put the lighter back.
I wondered whether the lighter was always hot, then decided it couldn’t have been or the battery would have gone dead in no time.
Then I wondered if the lighter would work only when the engine was running. Then I wondered if it had a switch, but if it did, how could Lloyd pull it from the dash and use it immediately? Then I wondered if the lighter was always on when the engine was running. Then I wondered that if that were so, how many car fires were started by always-on cigarette lighters. Then I wondered that if all that were true, Hollywood lied gasp by showing a wired cigarette lighter working when the car wasn’t running.
All this from a five-second scene in a movie made before talkies. That link finally answers those years-long questions, so thanks.
The easiest explanation is the movie omitted the part where Harold pushed the lighter in to start the heating cycle 30 seconds before he pulled it out. I guess that wouldn’t have impressed the girl as much.
On checking the link, it appears that wired lighters worked differently, and pulling them out of the socket started the cycle. Those were WAY before my time.
I bet I know which part of a new car in 1926 broke first.
I remember an old house that had remnants of knob-and-tube wiring, some rooms still had hemispherical wall switches about the size of half an apple; with a switch that looked like the end of a pencil eraser. IIRC teh sockets were the same, wall-mounted rather than flush. Although, they were a bit more recent because they used the dual-wire cloth-coverd conductor running down the wall or along the baseboard to odd shaped single-socket outlets.
I recall reading once that England switched the type of socket for their appliances quite a while ago, and appliances there used to be sold with no plug - you buoght and attached the old or new plug to the bare wire depending on your house…
My grandfather was a self-made inventor, mostly of motor winding machines and heavy electrical equipment. When he designed and built his house in the 1930’s, he made sure it was ahead of its time electrically.
This meant many lights, switches and outlets. In larger rooms, each ceiling light cluster was on a separate toggle switch and most toggles were the push-push variety. He also put (2 blade) outlets next to the switch panels, and he made sure you could turn any light in the room on or off from any entrance. All closets had automatic switches in the door frame to turn on the closet light. Which meant you couldn’t leave the door ajar or the light would stay on.
At the front door were long rows of toggle switches with no labels, and since they were 2-way, you couldn’t tell if they were in the on or off position without trying them.
As you went downstairs, you could turn the lights on at the bottom or middle from the top; the lights halfway down from the top, bottom or middle, and the lights at the top from the bottom or middle.
Again, no labels. Who needs labels?
As a kid, I thought this was fantastic, but it drove my grandmother crazy. When she went to the basement, she took a flashlight instead.
And don’t get me started on the custom-designed roof…
People smoked a LOT back when. My father’s business was largely based on producing ash trays with commercial advertising. Put my oldest siblings through college - when I came along, that part of the business had dropped waaay off.
As recently as 1990 I was told they still had 4 different types of outlets in use. If there wasn’t a selection of cords to purchase with an appliance, you bought a cord seperately or used the old one. But I have heard they’ve standardized more since then.
Yes, my uncle live there in the 1980s and he had to attach a plug every time he bought an appliance. Right now BS 1363 is the clear standard. But there was the old standard of BS 546, which presumably hung around for a while in legacy installations, a Dorman and Smith connector, (which must have been fun because the fuse was one of the pins, and could unscrew from the plug leaving the live end in the outlet), a Wylex plug, and a clock connector.
Postwar UK plugs were designed delilberately to be incompatible with mainland plugs to prevent unfused mainland plugs from being used on UK receptacles. UK plugs can deliver an incredible amount of power compared to any other general purpose plug and for safety there must be fuses in any lightweight cords connected to them.
You guys have no fuse box or load center?
Any plug or conductor can carry current until it melts.
You are describing old wiring I presume.
UK houses do have a load center, but it’s apparently 30 or 32 amps at 240 volts, not 15 or 20amps at 120 volts like in the US, or 3 time the power available. (Mainland Europe is 10 or 16 amps at 240 volts). If someone decides to plug a bunch of stuff into a thin lamp cord a US breaker will blow before it gets hot, a UK breaker will not which is why cords have individual fuses.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to use two circuits instead of one (thinner wire and no need for individual plug fuses, which in the U.S. I have only ever seen on Christmas light strings), even if you needed two circuit breakers? On the other hand, I have seen people (on YouTube, e.g., running things like pole transformers off of wall outlets) taking advantage of the extra power available (up to 7.68 kW vs 1.8/2.4 kW); presumably, the outlets also need to be rated at the full current, although the U.S. NEC allows 15 amp outlets on a 20 amp circuit if there are more than one.
The UK practice is to wire outlets as part of a loop with both ends tied to the circuit breaker, a “ring main” so you can use lighter wire than what you’d originarily need for the same amperage since there’s two paths back to the breaker. I think that the idea was so you could plug several electric heaters into a circuit, unlike the US where if you plug a second in, or even turn on too many lights on the same circuit it blows.
Besides being fused the receptacles enforce polarity (unlike the German plug), and are shuttered so a kid can’t stick a fork in, and the plugs have insulated pins so it’s hard to get shocked by being careless or dumb, a good thing considering the voltage and amps available.
in the USA i’ve seen in-plug fuses in old slow cookers and one or two other old things that i don’t recall, not common.
I had a house, built in 1919 as part of one of the first planned communities, Craddock. It still had parts of the original wiring visible though disconnected in the utility porch. There were also a few scattered parts of the electrical system lurking in dark nooks and crannies of the crawl space and such.