electrical deaths

People have been known to ask for them in stores here because they don't want to take their christmas lights down and put them up again so that a plug instead of a socket is next to the power outlet. The usual response is that yes one could be made but not legally so no. Chainable light strings are common in North America so there is usually a socket on the other end to allow connection of another string of lights. I don't remember seeing that in Europe.

Or it's your Come-to-Jesus moment. Either way, Jesus is involved.

Joe Gwinn

I have a similar story, from a colleague who had worked at one of the big accelerators in the US Argonne National Lab in the 1960s. He worked in the powerhouse that provided 20,000 amps at 10 volts DC to the accelerator field coils (which were water-cooled copper then), delivered over a par of large copper bus-bars side by side. One day, he happened to drop a big steel wrench across the buss bars. The wrench evaporated with a bang, and the power system carried on. Startled but unhurt, he called the accelerator control room and asked

- they looked and saw no indication of that momentary short.

.

Joe Gwinn

A mains cable with a plug on each end. In this case plugged into a 4 way extension block under a rack full of electronics in a top physics lab!

So named because it gets you closer to God.

Google seems singularly unhelpful on this one...

I have. Some GenZer used a long USB extension so she could use her phone in the bathtub. The counterfeit-US approved had nil line isolation and it killed her.

I once went into radio shack in the US and asked for an extension mains lead. I got a blank look, so I pointed to what I wanted and learned that I should have said power cord.

Some references to jesus cord turn up here:

Electric snowblowers are a joke here given the limits of ~2KW. If we had 30A/240, they could 5.7KW that would actually kick butt. It's one of few things I envy the British about.

traffic death and serious traffic injuries, is somewhere between half and a third of what they were just 20 years ago

A mere 100A? A telco Central Office battery plant will supply thousands through a short. See the screwdriver turn orange,

All tools were taped up in case they were dropped across the terminals. I recall when TI first made plastic LED watches. Power craft guys LOVED them because with plastic bands, they were safe to wear.

This crazy English guy shorts out 50,000 Amps for a bit of fun!

I find DC shocks are much worse than AC. With AC I sense the tingle increasing over several seconds (at 240V) which gives me plenty of time to react, but with DC it's an *instant* ZAP!

Not surprising. Much traffic these days is standing still or crawling along at walking speed.

Jeroen Belleman

Jesus!

Yes, I have seen them. On 220 volts. They were used for transformers, those that had 120 on one side, 220 on the other, both being female sockets, so you needed a cable with two male plugs to connect them to the wall.

We don't see such transformers anymore, but when I was a kid they were common, because although most houses were 220 volts, some were 125, so we had gadgets of both voltages.

Darwin award :-(

Not from the charts I see. Not really much of a change in the Us.

I've seen them used between two houses, when one had the power shut off.

Ah yes. Rocket Science.

Yes I've had to replace the fuse a few times. Parallel rather than serial topology is rocket science to some people.

Ah yes the lights in the trees. Then I'm asked to connect the power and I find a socket on the ground.

!!!

Cool. I wonder is there is a market for 10,000 amp pulse generators. Sounds interesting.