Re: TOT thought for today

Roderick Stewart wrote:
|| On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:04:33 GMT, Bob Latham
|| <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
||
|||| and it was still necessary for someone to come round and fit it.
|||| Not like the case with almost any other piece of domestic
|||| electrical or electronic equipment, which you could just pick from
|||| hundreds in a shop and take home.
|||
||| Agreed but there were two reasons for that. Firstly the rules the
||| government made the GPO work under and secondly at that time
||| telephone bells were low impedance and wired in series in the UK
||| not parallel as they are now. The other phone circuits were
||| parallel and to be honest this would have been far too complex for
||| Mr. average to get right. This is also the reason why plug and
||| socket arrangements were less common, though they were around.
||
|| Whatever the reason, the telephone had been invented for the best
|| part of a century without any change to the concept of the user
|| device in the home being someone else's property. Meanwhile, just
|| about every other technical gadget in the home could be bought and
|| installed by the home owner, with the usual amount of choice that
|| results from commercial competitiion. How many decades should it
|| take to invent the notion of wiring things in parallel, fitting a
|| plug, and selling the result in a shop like everything else?
||


It always amazes me how something as potentially lethal as electricity was
ever allowed to be installed in people's home in the first place.

Especially in the early days of metal fittings and cotton covered wire, and
all those lethal contraptions such as open bar unearthed electric fires!

If H&S had been around back then, would it have ever been allowed to happen?



|| Rod.


.

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