Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?

I never had a Meccano motor, but the first shock I got, I didn't get.

The Lionel train transformer broke and my mother bought a new, bigger better one. It has 2 levers, one of which blew the whistle on the engine except my engine had no whistle or horn.

I thought I should try to fix the old one and I took it apart, and after an hour of fiddling with it, I noticed I hadn't gotten a shock, even though it was STILL plugged in. Stupid, stupid. All it needed was a new plug where the factory permanent plug had broken wires.

I did get a tingle when the plastic case had a piece broken out, from our Emerson table radio which sat on a metal table with holes designed in it. At the time, made in early 1950s, formica counters had metal front edges. If I touched the table and the front edge I got a tingle.

More interesting was my father's crystal radio, that he bought for emergencies (we never had one). All plastic, shaped like a hockey puck, with a rubber band to go around your head and hold the puck up to your ear, and with a wire and an alligator clip. No instructions so I clipped it to the rabbit ears of the tv, for a better signal. I got a whopping shock that way. I guess there shouldn't be 110 in the antenna, but I think there was. The forced air heating duct grill was involved somehow. It was brown, with holes to hear the sound from the crystal inside, and a clear plastic tuning know, but it only got one station, the strongest one in town. Eventually it didn't get that and I broke it open. It only had one or two parts so I couldn't fix it.

And just in the last month I started wearing a new brand of sneakers. Everlast brand, that makes the boxing trunks. I have synthetic carpeting at home but at the grocery I keep getting shocks from the metal shelves. I've worn 5 or 10 kinds of sneakers before and never gotten shocks before.

In the 1930s, any record player with a built-in transmitter would certainly be illegal in the UK. [USA rules might well have allowed it, as (I believe) they still do.] The transmitter would almost certainly be on the medium wave, and would be intended for short-range reception around the house. The aerial, and best, would probably only have been a couple of feet of wire, and there would have been no question of it being anything like a quarterwave or halfwave long!

Ok, my mistake.

But can the wheels adjust independently? Or all of them in a block?

I have difficulties imagining they move independently, because there is a long beam (I don't know the correct English term, sorry) connecting all those wheels to the steam cylinder. Also there are a lot of metal tubings.

I never heard of a Meccano until today. I'm 76 and live in the USA.

I was given by a friend an Erector Set motor that he had burned out iirc.

When it was all done, it actually worked, but instead of wrapping it in cotton cloth, i'd used friction tape, cloth tape with adhesive, the precursor to vinyl electric tape. and after 30 seconds the adhesive got hot and started to smoke iirc. I knew it would just get worse so I unplugged it. And I didn't try to recover it because I figured the adhesive had melted and was now stuck to the windings.

The thought of buying new wire in the first place never entered my mind. We had a nice house on an enormous yard, but no spare money for things like that. I got presents once a year and that was enough. No money for projects.

I also had no real use for the motor.

Wow. I don't remember ever seeing that one. ¿How was the coal fed, maybe automatic? Wait, the article says the firebox is at the front, too. But the tender is behind. Weird.

I thought about that too. Even if he had been *given* it, why not give it to someone else when you're done with it, or offer it back.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

When I bought my house I told the owner he didn't have to empty it. That anything he left behind I would keep and use, give to Goodwill (a thrift, second-hand shop, a charity, profit goes to training the handicapped), or take to the dump if it truly couldn't be used.

He left lots of good stuff. It was great. Books on gardening, garden tools, a sledge hammer (I never thought I'd own a sledge hammer but I've used it for several things), other stuff. I wanted almost all of it, and the rest I took to Goodwill. He didn't leave any trash behind.

Are you in NY or is that just your name?

People don't understand the meaning of loan or lend.

"Would you loan me a piece of paper" kids say in school. They don't plan to give it back. I think this sets the stage for the rest of their lives.

Like refute, obviously, gentleman, i.e., e.g., all words or phrases that are now used incorrectly more often than correctly.

The word you're looking for is brutalism. It was/is a style:

It's about how this country was settled: plenty of timber, no restrictions on cutting it on your own property; easy for the yeoman-farmer to build with, especially since there were all those felled trees left from clearing the virgin forest.

It's not a bad material. The oldest surviving timber-frame house in the U.S. was built in about 1640.

My parents used to own a holiday home in Northern France. It was a stone building, about 250 years old and the walls were 2'6" thick. During the summer it was significantly cooler inside than out. However, after being empty for months, it took days (and a lot of money) to warm it up if staying there over Christmas.

But it is far easier for consumers (especially if buying from another country within the block), to just look for the 230V designation and not to have to look at other voltages and have to look up the technical specs and check the tolerances.

Back in the '90s, I used a (14-track IIRC) tape recorder for recording signals from vibration sensors on a 2.5MW 11kV ExP motor. The recorder was specified for 12 to 400V ac or dc!

Pretty well spot on 240V here whenever I have checked.

He is in Britain.

Unlikely his parents called him that.

And lady. Very few actually have a tiara.

You can always tell future Democrats.

The density in the city is about 2300 / square mile and has grown by 30% since 2000. apartments and single family dwellings are springing up like mushrooms after a rain.

The Taylor Apartments were a similar high rise design also built in the '50s. They finally started to demolish them last year.

Brick was the favored building material so we were spared the poured concrete style that look like they took the forms down and called it a day.

That's about right.

"Theodore Dalrymple, a British author, physician, and conservative political commentator, has written for City Journal that brutalist structures represent an artefact of European philosophical totalitarianism, a "spiritual, intellectual, and moral deformity." He called the buildings "cold-hearted", "inhuman", "hideous" and "monstrous". He stated that the reinforced concrete "does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays", which makes alternative building styles superior."

Several of my friends in college were aspiring architects who worshiped at the altars of Le Corbu and Mies (van der Rohe). Form follows function! I don't know which was worse, that or the inevitable pomo backlash.

The Hudson Valley was big on brick.

"In the 1900’s, in an attempt to solve the labor shortage, the Haverstraw brickyards sent representatives down to the southern states to recruit workers from African-American communities to work in the Haverstraw brickyards."