Being picky, he failed to blow the 5000A fuse with a 50,000A current. He provided such current for an instant, which blew the fuse partly. In a real application, the high current would continue flowing through the other elements of the fuse, a bigger current per element than rated, and the rest of the fuse elements would blow in cascade till not one would be left alive.
Right, the pulse was showy but short. In theory, a fuse blows from enough I^2T.
I don't think the back of our tube-based TV was ever on. While it was under warranty, service people seemed to arrive monthly. When it was out of warranty I learned a lot about the practical side of electronics. Eventually it ran reasonably reliably until the picture tube gave up so my father and myself replaced the A66-140X
Some of the earliest UK ones were all-valve, Decca made one that was an absolute monster. Because they were very expensive and novel, not many were made, so you may not have heard much about them. There were huge problems with stability of the convergence and regular de-gaussing was necessary (it wasn't automatic at switch-on until later).
What meant "weak"? Perhaps they had lost a bit of vacuum? Or a problem with the cathode?
I remember that we had a B/W TV, and the technician would come to our home now and then, and replace a tube or two. I was a kid at the time.
Also, the thing was VHF only. There was only one TV channel in Spain. At some point they created a second channel, on UHF. We had our TV upgraded, a second tuner control was sticking out on the side. For this operation they took our only TV to the repair shop for some days.
I think we had to install a new smaller antena for this channel to work. It had cartoons at about 20 hours, and sometimes there would be interferences and I would get mad because the only TV program I was allowed to watch was not working.
Usually bad cathode emission, sometimes gas, rarely a short.
CRT cathodes would get weak, and one could add a filament voltage booster thing to get a bit more lifetime out of a tube.
TVs used to have a flat glass plate over the rounded CRT. People smoked a lot and the electrostatics would create a film of crud between them. My uncle Sheldon was a rascal. He'd tell people they needed a new CRT, take it back to his shop, and Windex it.
We had great shows, better than most of the junk nowadays. PBS was "educational TV" with lots of science and documentaries. It's mostly murder mysteries now.
We (and I) had giant all-tube color TVs with three electron gun/shadow mask CRTs, power hogs and the color quality was poor. They had to be degaussed after installation.
It was fun to wave a magnet near the screen. If you got too close, it would leave a color distortion spot so degauss again.
We probably had great shows because where I lived we only had 5 channels. One was an educational one and another was very weak and some times not even watchable. Now with a couple of hundred channels they have to fill all that air time with something and we get quantify instead of quality.+
There were two shows that i really liked that do not seem to have an equal now. One growing up was Mr Wizard and the other was when computers were coming to the homes was The Computer Chronicles. It told how computers worked and history of hem.
Ernie Kovacs did a hilarious parody of Mr Wizard.
You'd think that competition would tend to make for better quality, but it doesn't work like that. The channels show what they think people want to see, and most people have primitive tastes.
Look at what kind of person was chosen to become your president: A TV show host, and a boorish one at that! Wretched!
Jeroen Belleman
We lived about halfway between two large cities, about 40 miles each way and used an outside antenna without a rotaor. The upper vhf antenna was pointed to one town that had the high channels and the lower vhf antenna was pointed to the othe town that was about 180 deg fromthe first one. To get one of the stations I had to go outside with a pipe wrench and turn the antenna pipe that was about 20 feet tall to get it.
I get somewhere around the same 60 to 70 channels on my tv with the outside antenna. Have to devide that by 3 or 4 as each station has that many sub channels. With the dish network I get about 200 more with the package we have. And like you say still s*it to watch unless you watch some of the older stuff from the 1950 to 1980 TV shows but before long all you get is reruns of them instead of more shows. One station runs the old Star Trek series off the origional and 3 off shoots of it over and over.
Should be fun.
Twice the line voltage makes a difference. Also, some countries such as Germany have non-polarized wall outlets which was a clear mistake on the part of the standards guys. Think toasters and forks.
Risk taking is probably the biggest contributor. Like the handyman who was standing on a metal ladder _in_ a public swimming pool, drilling a hole in the ceiling above using a 230V power drill. Far from the next outlet so multiple extension cords in a row and one of the couplings was down in the water.
There was a guy in our marina working on his boat, about waist deep in Lake Pontchartrain. He was drilling a hole using one of those old
2-wire aluminum-case drills. He died.Lake Pontchartrain is 630 square miles and is largely waist-deep. Some people claim parts hit 12 feet, but actually it just gets thicker as you go down.
In 6th grade, a guy came into our class with a lader to change a fluorescent tube. Miss Denton wisely decided to take the class for a walk. Before we were all out of the room, the giant fixture collapsed onto a row of desks. Kids would have been killed.
Even worse, some kid brough in a swolen can of something as some sort of science demo, and put it on a windowsill in the Louisiana sun. It exploded and splattered insanely putrid stuff, mostly on the Student Council President.
I live on the south-east of Spain. Back then, in summer, or maybe just before summer, we would get interference coming from Italy or Morocco, over the sea. I think it was on the VHF band.
There is that.
...
On fibre TV, on the other hand (we did not have cable TV till nearly year 2000, and when we did it was a different system), we have a new nuisance. To watch this or that serial that you possibly want, you have to subscribe to a new offering. Say Disney, Showtime, Skysomething, etc. You have to be rich to be able to choose the program of the moment.
:-O
How did he get to the ladder? Swimming?
(just one of many possible questions)
I'm wondering if using today a battery powered drill would be safe in that situation.
Gosh :-) I don't think these got translated and aired over my way (many cartoons were). On the other hand, maybe they would not be politically correct today :-P
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