With an antenna connected to the top grid, ground to bottom grid, and a key in the DC input line it would put out a nice fat, buzzy mcw signal near (all around) the frequency your antenna wire is a quarter wave.
I can remember my mother routinely using one of those pendant plugs for her clothes iron during the 60's. When I asked about the green wire sticking out of it, my older brother informed me "Oh, you don't need that one".
Along with the 'multi' bayonets, with switch on the side, so you could have the light and the iron on at the same time. My grandmother had one permanently installed with a long 'catinerary' wire running across the ceiling mounted clothes lift/rack down the side of the window to her radio.
@@barrieshepherd7694 Yes we had them too, now that you mention it. I should have also mentioned the house, built in the early 50's, originally only had 2 sockets. 15A round pin jobs, one in the kitchen and one in the sitting room and a two way NDZ fuse board for power and lights.
@@gerrybvr My grandmothers lived 4 miles apart but each had a different main power outlet, one a round centre earth pin with a vertical L and horizontal N rectangular pin in a line (a bit like I O - ) and the other similar but with all the pins in the same orientation but offset ( - O _ ) Both plugs could only connect in a similar way but appliances could not be moved from house to house!
At the time, households had light bulbs screwed in a lamp holder with no provisions made for other electrical appliances. Therefore, any electrical device which wasn't a light bulb, had a socket mimicking the screw part of a light bulb, to pick up electricity from the only connection present...
As someone who lives on the coast of the Irish sea, i can smell it from my house. And now the phrase plankton fart will forever be etched in my brain. Thanks, Clive.
@@JackHudler Actually (phyto)plankton fart is most likely O2. High concentrations of O2 can smell like O3. There is more phytoplankton than there is zooplankton (which produce CO2) so... Well you get it right?
6:00 I love how Clive suddenly sounds like his voice is coming off an old shellac record once it turns on. If it doesn't cause everything in the house to stop working, sometimes even permanently, then it isn't vintage (DANGEROUS) enough, and no fun.
I remember my Dad getting the house rewired in the late 60s. All the old wiring was lead sheathed, rubber insulated stuff, and decidedly dodgy. Round pin sockets in the kitchen and living room, and bugger all anywhere else. I spent hours stripping cable, to make fishing weights from the lead. All the new sockets were a luxury. I got to have a bedside light and a _wireless!_ Not long after that, we got double glazing and central heating. No more Jack Frost on the windows, no going out for more coal in the rain, no more emptying the grate. Kids today... 😉
This is what always makes me smile when kids say ‘you had it so easy back then when houses were so cheap’, yes, but by todays standards they were also barely functional. We first lived in a rural area in a farmhouse. Things have changed so much so fast over my years it’s beyond comprehension to anyone under 30 that a 50-something English guy could’ve experienced this as a child, they think such things happened over a century ago or something, but: Every week day during winter, I emptied out the ashes and relit the coal fire every morning, which melted the ice that formed inside the single-glazed wooden framed windows (that needed painting every summer), and as well as the house the fire slowly heated the hot water tank, so we were washing in freezing cold water every morning, me still in my bed socks because otherwise the draught under the bathroom door froze my toes on the already cold tiles, then we all helped Mum mop up the puddles forming on the sills before changing out of our heavy night wear and dressing for school under the bed covers. Every time it rained we’d get water seeping in through the cracks around the ill fitting windows and doors, especially if it was windy too, and we’d get a leak in the roof at least every other year, which Dad fixed when the weather allowed. We never had fitted carpets or wallpaper because they’d only rot, if needed, Mum dried the damp out of the rugs and mats in front of the dying fire overnight, and redecorating in summer was painting directly onto the flaking plaster and wood to cover up the water stains and mould. Living by candlelight was common due to a dodgy electrical supply and frequent strikes, and it always went off during a thunderstorm. As we didn’t have gas we’d cook on the coal fire then. We mostly lived off stews & soups in winter because they were relatively easy to make, but I liked hot malted milk and buttered toast the best. Lastly, we didn’t get an inside loo fitted until the mid to late 70s, it was decreed we had to and the council made huge holes in the walls and garden for the outside plumbing, I was about 6 or 7 I think and I recall that my Mum thought it was most unsanitary and was convinced it would leak from beneath it. Now people think a fast food chain running out of gravy is a news worthy crisis.
If you think lead sheathed, rubber-insulated wiring was old . . . I know of a house in my village that still has some early-20th-century silk-wrapped, ceramic-beads shrouded wiring and old-style "really turn" on and off switches. I repaired one of those, that's how I know.
@@Lumibear.Houses were way cheaper ten and twenty years ago. None of us are complaining about how cheap they were in the bloody neolithic period. Don't get it twisted.
@@Lumibear. Better a shitty house than no house at all. But also, remember that people who complain about their parents having housing already in their early 20s, they're talking about people who had their first house around 1970 or so. While there were still plenty of dilapidated 19th century houses out there, it also was the big apartment block boom and those 1950s-1970s built apartments were terribly isolated to modern standards - but generally safe, well heatable thanks to pre-oil crisis fuel prices, and most of all very affordable. Finally, even if you have a crappy drafty leaky house, you can do things about it. Isolation is pretty affordable. You just have to put some of your own labor into it and enough people are very willing to DIY if that means they'll have a house of their own.
The woodwork craft in that box is wonderful; finger jointed corners, mortised hinges, roundover molding routed into the top, all solid wood. There's less actual wood in most contemporary $1,500 coffee tables sold these days at "Chic Du Jour" trendy furniture house.
Funny you should mention the cabinetry. I was just chatting with friends about a 1923 Crosley model XJ TRF medium wave radio set. The radio cost $65 which is the equivalent of $1,536 US in 2023. The wood cabinet was optional and cost $16 which is the the equivalent of $285 now. So for at least Crosley, the craftsmanship came with a considerable price tag.
I have an old Edison portable cylinder phonograph which was made about 1910. The cabinet on that thing is a similar work of art with a domed wood cover. The mechanism is also hand decorated. The Edison still plays cylinders well and as far as I can tell everything including the leather belt and sapphire stylus is original. I doubt many devices made today will still be working without modifications 113 years from now. Batteries not included … because it doesn’t need them.
But then there's the crudely cut out hole in the top panel for the air duct. It looks like they took an existing box made for something else and repurposed it.
1920 likely would have been 100VDC or 200VDC, with power provided by a nice big mercury arc rectifier at the substation down the street. The substation is across the park from me, with the rooms still there, just empty, that held the mercury arc rectifier, and the second room that held the transformer that provided traction power, using the rectifiers, for the trolley car system that used to run in the city. You still find bits of the special rails in use as mountings for crash barriers, or used as mounting poles, with the cable still in the street as well, too hard to dig up, though a lot got repurposed for AC use, as they used a regular 4 core paper insulated cable already in use in volume, and simply used 2 conductors in parallel for the DC power rail.
You are a man beyond your years, Clive. I spent a goodly amount of my years, repairing elevators from as early as 1908. There were no schematics, and it took common sense and seat of the pants , digging, to make essential things work. You made a real nice schematic from a mechanical circuit board.😄
I worked in a building with a very old elevator - it had a wheel with brass contacts to detect when the floors of the building were level with the lift floor. Except when pigeons in the building attic shat on the mechanism, leaving the lift stopping about a foot too high. So the lowest ranking office worker was on call for "pigeon duties".
Years ago out at a flea market in the country I saw a beautiful vintage electroshock therapy unit. It came with all the accessories, wires and electrodes, and a lovely instruction manual describing how to treat mania and hysteria with the device. Sometimes I wish that I had bought it, but at the time I didn't trust myself not to try it out on someone. Probably a good choice.
Fantastic Clive, more videos like this please. BTW, as a kid, our house was full of dangerously overloaded lighting sockets, with bakelite plugs. I'd had several potent shocks by the age of ten
I got a rather nasty zing off my grandmother's electric alarm clock plug at the ripe old age of two. And Clive was right. Something about being nearly killed by electricity as a child drove my interest in it through the roof later in life.
I remember my grandfather cleaning out the attic of old stuff, he found an old electric shaver with a lamp socket plug and screwed it in a socket to test it, the thing revved up higher than any shaver I've ever heard and every light in the house dimmed, the old electric motor blew itself apart before he could turn it off, all this happened in the space of about 3 seconds lmao
@@SUPRAMIKE18 might not have been standard 110 volt ac. could have even been for the old 25 cycle ac or even a lower voltage dc power. some of these motors would run on dc or ac. The dc fed into some homes was a much lower voltage.
The wonder to me isn't that this old gadget had an effect on your microphone circuit, but that it didn't completely knock that signal into the dirt. It's like 50 EMPs per second or whatever frequency the thing runs at. Modern circuits and error correction are solid af.
Ashamed to admit I had to look up "Wireless Accumulator". Apparently before houses were all hard-wired, it was common to have a lead-acid batttery or two for your home electrical needs that you'd take to a garage or hardware store to have charged.
In the mid 80s I used to visit my Great Uncle. His house was a throw back to the 1950s. The central light fitting had so many adapters it looked like it had bakelite and brass hemorrhoids. He still had a gas powered fridge.
The absorption type of fridge needs a heat source which can be gas, electricity or whatever. Electrolux fridges work on this principle and are popular in caravans because they are silent.@@zzoinks
Video went public 9 minutes ago... Woo-hoo, I'm nice and early to a Big Clive video! The wooden cabinet is a prime example of some unknown workers' craftsmanship; nice handmade joints, deep luscious lacquer. I doubt the builder had the slightest inkling that the device he handcrafted would still look fresh a century later!
It is always amazing to me what electrical stuff they were able to make before 1920. They only barely understood the basic components of resistors, capacitors, coils, and motors. They did a lot with very little. They didn’t really even understand radio communication yet.
See if you can lay a hand on an Ionofane tweeter, it was a plasmatweeter that also produced ozone ( besides the highest and very low distortion high sound frequencies). I had one in the eighties that I donated to a loudspeaker afficianado.
I disagree, Hertz had a decent understand of radio communication in the 1880s. By the 1920s, we have vacuum tubes, oscillators, tuned circuits, people understood antennæ, bandwidth considerations, magnetics, well enough to mass produce radio sets that worked well.
DC was prevalent at the time, a colleague from the seventies worked as an apprentice in the thirties and accidently switched 1000V DC (which was a supply for industry in Trafford Park) onto the domestic grid around Salford. The result was it burnt out all the radios in the area and cost his company a small fortune.
The equipment build in that era was almost a work of art in itself. Nothing was mass produced and even a medium sized city could support a local manufacturer.
My late aunt used to tell the story of when she was doing her teacher training in Eastbourne, she was out walking by the sea when she heard a holiday maker say "Ah yes, you can smell the ozone". What said holiday maker didn't know was that, in those days, Eastbourne discharged its sewage through a big pipe that ran down the beach and into the sea, the open end of which was exposed at low tide. They were stood right by it.
I'm an economist. The next time I have to use the expression "adjusting for inflation" I'll make sure to say "in relative terms to the current era". It just sounds way more majestic!
You can still buy those socket adapters in Canada. Screws into a light socket, with a socket for the bulb at the other end, and plug sockets on either side.
Back in the 1920's you would need to buy electrical devices rated for the voltage in your area! In Manchester UK we had a duct system in the pavement with 5 busbars all at different voltages so when you hooked up to them you chose the voltage from any two of the 5 to give the requested voltage! I have heard stories about repair teams walking the streets after some rain had wet the pavement looking for eather dry patches or steam to find where the busbars had warped after faults and were gently touching each other generating heat! They would mark the dry flags with crayon and a repair team would be dispatched. The times have changed a bit! ;o)
The reason for plugging it into the light socket was that in the early days, you were supplied with ONE light free, and almost everything had a light socket connecting plug, even electric irons had them. Fuses back then were not like todays fuses, and they would take a large enough current to be really dangerous.
To be fair the fuses used then are pretty much the fuses a lot of houses with a Wylex fuse box we’re using till the 1990s and a lot of house probably still have today
They used to plug electric irons into the light socket too! In a 1920's/30's house the lighting circuit was expected to deliver some serious current compared to the ultra efficient LED lights of today. I've still got an adaptor/splitter that allows you to plug things into the light socket, some of the "lighting adaptors/splitters" even had switches on them so an electrical appliance could be left plugged in (alongside the light bulb or "globe" as it was referred to back then) and switched on when required.
I love seeing these weird old pieces of history it's almost the equivalent of real life steampunk, electricity and complex circuitry all made in this wood handcrafted box.
I have vague memories of a Bakelite lampholder double adaptor in our (1960?) dining room overhead hanging lampfitting. We were using 2 lightbulbs in it at the time but I remember being puzzled when my Grandfather said that it used to be used for the iron. That memory probably reinforced by the room's only powerpoint subsequently being the source of my ... First Mains Zap...
@@zzoinks Well, zoinks, jinkies, in my case it was the plug of an alarm clock, which had two unsleeved round pins and plugged into an adapter which completely defeated the safety features of the common British plug and socket.
Nice unit! I have a vintage home 'tanning' lamp from the same sort of age that gives off alarmingly high levels of UVC and ozone. Certainly not safe for use in the home. (or anywhere else for that matter!) That ozone unit will work on DC, the wireless accumulator being a rechargeable battery. I have the remains of a 110V radio accumulator stored here somewhere.
In the 60's we had a 240V light string on the Christmas tree. The tree was tinsel mind you, one of those horrible silver things. I remember we had one of the light socket double adaptors but they were falling out of use by then.
Far more easier with the light switch, than bending down the side of the Christmas tree to the switched socket to turn on the fairy lights, nowadays it is done with; a 24h socket timer/a smart socket controlled by a smartphone, an artificial RGB LED tree/fairy lights controlled by a phone
The multi strand iron wire core was how they made laminated cores back then. Each strand is laminated, just like the plates in a modern transformer to insulate them. I've made a few replacment cores for old ignition coils, and one of the best things to use is pieces of laminated wire coat hanger. Usually the original is much smaller diameter wire though.
welding wire, preferably for oxy welding, and better yet... florists wire, often comes pre wrapped. and is about 0.5mm. the thinner the core wires the faster the field collapses. plates work but arent so good as they still suffer bad eddy current loss. magnetic field in collapsing cuts the length of the core, creating eddy currents in each strand, through its diameter. larger diameter, larger eddy current, and larger resultant lenz law opposing collapse. the plates of a normal transformer are good for 50-60hz. audio transformers get thinner laminations, but also run low flux densities as they want linearity. the induction coils about creating the largest magnetic field possible then "popping" it... ferrites are really good but the choice of material matters. and so does the geometry, there is an ideal length/diameter ratio.
Fascinating glimpse of 1920s life! It's amusing that high levels of ozone are harmful to the lungs and actually cause the very symptoms the device makers claimed it would treat.
Magnificent piece of machinery. Another one that I must hunt for. Its always super fun to see stuff from the old era. It fascinates me since it was only 100 years ago yet info from that era is so diluted.
Does it also banish "bad humours" and the "vapours"? 😂 If I remember correctly an ozone generator is great for removing the smell of erm... Jamaican organic materials.
You can hear the quality when it's running! It's doing something good, we can tell. 8^) For folks of the time, used to hand cranking cars and hearing them start, this was a familiar kind of feedback from an appliance / tool. Love it, but I am glad I am on this side of the monitor. (I've used up 7 or so of my lives tinkering with old 1930's - 1950's electric stuff already) Cheers! PS the buzzing would make a heck of a cell phone ringtone....
Oh I love 1920s home gadgets. Always crude in terms of build and incredibly optimistic from any sales people. Built to last, has to look like furniture but reassuringly potentionally lethal. All prerequisites for the modern 'housewife' of the era. Full mains voltage beauty-aids being the most common. My family had a 1920s toaster, meant to plug into the light socket (judging by the plug). We used it only briefly as all the elements were exposed but it looked fantastic.
Very nice! You should look into getting one of those shoe store fluoroscopes, from the 1950s and you can generate X-rays to go along with all that ozone.
I think the UK store Clarksons had those. The only machine they had left when I went there as a kid was their scary "automatic foot gauge". You put your foot into a recess and then metal plates would automatically slide in with a loud motor noise and the result was projected onto the top display. It was a bit scary. The first few times I snatched my foot out of it as it closed.
Called the "Dana Device". ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TayqGPwRhIw.html They still had one in the Durham branch of Clark's in the 90's. I loved it; it felt like stepping into the future when I was a kid.
And to think, in those days all they needed to do to simulate sea air was remove the arsenic laden wallpaper. It was later found the reason people felt so much better after being at the shore for a few days is because they were out of their houses with said wallpaper for a few days.
I love the idea of just plugging this into the light fitting. It reminds me of my mum's "travel iron" that could plug into a standard bayonet fitting (or, via an adapter, even one of those absurd Edison screw light fittings that foreigners sometimes used). Of course, there was an unswitched splitter that allowed you to use the original light bulb alongside the iron. This could also allow my dad to use his electric shaver while illuminating the hotel's room. I doubt that any consideration was given to supply voltage, never mind power factor.
My grandfather used to live in an old house (in the US) where ALL the electrical receptacles including the ones along the baseboards were Edison sockets that would fit a standard light bulb. There might have been safety covers, most were filled with adapters that would accept a standard 2 prong US plug. No grounding of course. I've not seen anything still wired like that since then.
@@darksu6947 You can read about the war of currents on wikipedia. It is well documented that edison electrocuted animals and advocated for using the electric chair as the main method of execution to scare the stupid american public from alternating current. edison was one of the most evil person who ever lived. Just ask any radical animal rights activist. Animals are much more important than humans.
These are the kind of things I love to pick up at flea markets. Me: So what is it? Seller: I have no idea, it's got a plug on it. Me: Hm, interesting. Well since we both don't know what it is and what it does I'll take the chance and give you €10 to find out. Seller: Okay, sold! I've bought several weird and medical devices over the years like that.
My cheapest violet ray unit came from a seller who had tried it out and copped a full-on electric shock as a result. Probably by using the metal rod electrode option.
Yes operates on DC as well as the advertisment said it would operate from a "Wireless Accumulator" . Accumulator (battery) for HT supply rail for radio typically arround 90-120 V DC.😏
has it got a CE mark?? 🤦♂🤣🤣🤣🤣 This nice bit of very early electrical equipment would really trigger the Karens out there. I remember my gran using an adaptor to plug in an iron and a light bulb at the same time. into the ceiling lamp holder ⚡ great video 2x👍
A fascinating little machine. It is scary how they did things back then. Sadly, it wasn't limited to back then. I saw an older home around the late 80's, I think, but I saw an outlet adapter screwed into a light socket with extension cords going in all directions. I couldn't believe it. I was stunned.
I wish you have a follow up video on such device and its effect in modern radio equipment. For some reasons, vintage electrical equipment looked creepy, even haunted.
The price might seem expensive, but when you look at the quality of that cabinet (solid wood, hand made dovetail joints, nicely trimmed, French polished) you'd be up around the same price just to make the box today.
Many houses in my youth did not have electrical sockets upstairs, but did have electric lights. We, like another has mentioned, had an adaptor so we could use the light at the same time as something else, like a kettle. I also remember buying WWII kit that was vibrator powered. It had a canister, like a big capacitor & contained a system such as in the one described. It was used to generate high voltages for valve equipment. For that reason I suspect the Thing was intended for DC.
You have to love the paper art portraying the "everything branched from the one light socket" period of electronics history before wall sockets were very useful and widely produced.
The box looks suspiciously like a small phonograph. Whether it would've been AC or DC in those days really depended on your local power plant. A lot of plants in America and the UK were still running DC. 240v hadn't been standardized yet in the UK. Maybe not even in America. Early days of electricity indeed. Also, yes, MFD or MF stand for MicroFarad (uf).
Even frequencies were not standardized. North America had some 25 Hz power plants. The Ganz Works in Hungary used 42 Hz. And some other power plant supplied 40 Hz in Europe. Some even older carbon arc light circuits used 125 or 133 Hz.
Speaking of ham radio, that could easily serve as a spark gap transmitter. You'd be simultaneously pounced by every radio regulatory authority in the entire planet -- I think the Ofcom is headed your way now -- but in a pinch, it would work for Morse code. The preppers would be proud. 👍
Hi Clive! I suspect the switch that turns off the vibrator is for AC current not needing the impulses to run the device. Other than that, it reminds me of my attempt at ozone generation, and I still remember the pungent smell! Once was all I needed to know I didn't want it filling my room with it!
The first thing I saw when you lifted the cover were the prochronistic capacitors, haha! Real deal vintage electrical dodginess, looks like the dodgy Chinese stuff you get on Aliexpress has a century old tradition. Electrical safety my ass! On the other hand... it's built in a manner typical of 1920s electrical engineering, or like Glasslinger's retro radios, which is fine in my book. Reverse engineering wise, it's basically a more advanced version of Ruhmkorff's inductor with a separate vibrator relay and step-up transformer.
Its not a Ruhmkorff inductor. A Ruhmkorff inductor works like the igniton coil. This uses 2 resonant LC circuits, it a Tesla coil. I disagree with your comparison to aliexpress. This is everal orders of magnitude safer than most chinese phone chargers or extension cords sold cheaply.
Looking at the flyer at the beginning, it says Connect to electric light or 'wireless accumulator'. Clive, what is a wireless accumulator and why haven't you taken one apart yet?
The lamp socket reminded me of my grandmother using an electric iron plugged into the lamp socket! She even had a system where the upstairs lights had to be plugged into a socket downstairs (two round prongs of course, all bakelite) to get power. My grandad had wired the house when they first got electricity (100 vdc) from a local power station. This remained in situ until she died in the mid 90s!!! Amazing it never went on fire...
@@dennis-nz5im sadly not. The shop that sold those was long gone by the 80's and she always rented a TV from Radio Rentals. There was a big Murphy radiogram in the front room though.
I kind of did make one inadvertently. I made a "plasma globe" out of an incandescent light bulb and some high voltage, I had to try several clear bulbs to find one with the right gas in it, probably argon. I produced the high voltage using a DC power supply, an automotive ignition module, and a flyback transformer (aka line output transformer). It looks really good but produces too much ozone so I can't leave it on long.
He didm years ago. His design was essentially a diode-capacitor voltage multiplier pumped by the mains frequency . Very simple solid state design with no coils or transistors .
I remember my grandmother connecting her new fangled electric iron to the light socket. The smell of "ozone" at the seaside was probably rotting seaweed!
Almost exactly the same circuit as the “Violet Ray” device I bought at a flea market some years back. Only difference is that the high voltage transformer is built into a sort of fat wand with a heavy cloth wrapped rubber insulated cord going back to the vibrator and capacitor. It originally came with a set of single electrode gas filled tubes (which I don’t have) and it generates quite a bit of ozone.
Fascinating piece of kit! It sure seems to work well! When it comes to 100 year old electrical items, I will keep to my antique motors and refrigeration!
Having grown up by the coast and then moving to the Midlands I get a blast of nostalgia whenever there's a whiff of "ozone" (aka dimethyl sulphide) from a broken drain.
Does wooden casing equate to double insulation?😮. Lovely item, central core screen is very clever. Great video Clive, thanks for sharing. Best regards John
Cheerz Clive, a bit of a blast from the past. Still have my Ceiling Lamp Double Adapters. A lamp and clothing iron. But only arfter the 7 o'clock news on the old wireless. ;)
