HOWTO electrocute yourself -- slideshow from Vienna's Technisches museum
Fabulous Maker and rogue photographer Bre Pettis paid a visit to the Technisches museum and snapped their "30 Ways to Die of Electrocution" exhibit. I like the emphasis on urine and pranks in the list.
the latest
latest episodes
it disturbs me I recognize a crystal set.
Tee hee. We had a mouse kill itself across the 480V 3 phase input of our radio telescope's antenna drive controller box. I suppose the mouse failed to read this list.
the signal has been sent to the Mouse Overlords of Rigel. Your insolence is noted.
Those are great. Quite entertaining, but be careful, electricity is no joke!
I especially liked the 'Don't wear an iPod and iron"
Hey Takuan, by crystal set, are you referring to a Germanium diode radio? indeed you may be fast approaching fossilization.
Now concerning water related electrocution, years of experience with my arms between shoulder and elbow deep in high voltage control panels exposed to the elements I would note that 440 conducts much better in dirty water than it does in clean rainwater.
I especially like the picture of the baby with one wire in the mouth and the other in hand. Which is surprisingly easier to do than you may think when you have both hands full of wires and relays and need to hold onto one more wire. I probably should have offered to hold that extra wire for Terry or maybe even find the disconnect switch but at the time, I was laughing too hard.
Is it just me, or do a huge number of those involve Really shoddy electronics?
Yeah, you'd think German engineering would've eliminated all of these potential hazards. Did the concept of breakers, fuses, GFIs not exist then? They obviously understand the principle of grounding but it just didn't occur to anyone to build it in to the outlets and appliances apparently. But for the sake of our laughter and the intarwebs, I'm glad they didn't!
I and others had a good time in the comments. Do enjoy. (I'm Kevbo there at flickr too, obviously).
My sad thought is that someone somewhere expired as a result of each of the situations depicted.
Knowledge has a high cost, sometimes...good thing that we learn from each others' mistakes, eh?
I'm no electrician, but it seems to me that a good number of those scenarios would be difficult or impossible to achieve with modern electronics. They're either grounded or isolated well enough that flesh is not the path of least resistance.
They don't make hairdryer casings out of metal anymore for a good reason.
The drawings are reminiscent of Charles Burns.
Therefore, I like them.
I have made crystal sets for the kids using a diode from a cast off gadget, but I remember as a kid using some kind of stone to make a diode, and the earpiece from a western electric telephone. Wish I still had that science book.
#8: Maybe german enginerring is that good, but Austrian engineering? Not so very much.
Not MONTY Burns, Charles Burns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Burns_(cartoonist)
Though I am a fan of both.
Or Lake Geneva & Lake Zurich! No comparison!
Btw: "Technisches" is not a name in and of itself, so "Technisches Museum" (big M) would be more correct.
a short explanation is in order here:
this exhibition at the Technische Museum is a special exhibition that shows a minuscle part of the collection of the Elektropathologische Museum of Vienna, which is a private museum owned by the association of austrian electrical engineers - and which shows the myriad ways people have managed to kill themselves by electricity
the Elektropathologische Museum is quite old .. iirc it was founded in 1910 .. and so many of the machines and methods shown are a bit dated
but rest assured - human ingenuity still manges to kill itself with electricity ... despite all modern safety systems, which are of course mandatory in Austria as well as in Germany
the arms race between idiot proofing and idiots still contiunes unabated
I like that they used the red current lines to show that electrocution requires two points of contact, and to show that some situations don't involve any harm to the human at all (e.g. the person whose vacuum cleaner shorts out a hot wire on the floor).
at @12: all you need is an old razor blade and a pencil lead
http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/radio/homemade_radio.html
(the seashell loudspeaker sounds like a must-try!)
After watching this, there's no way I'm gonna hang Christmas lights!
The thing I liked most about my sign shop apprenticeship was working with neons; wiring, repairing, servicing, installing, etc. I got bit many times by transformer juice (amp free), but learned early to beware of feed lines. Even then, a jolt cleared the sinuses and could calm a case of the jitters. I suppose it was a sort of electroshock therapy for my adolescent angst.
On second thought, it's a wonder I didn't kill myself.
In fact austrian engineering is considered to be as good as, if not better than german engineering.
The same goes for beer of course. ;-)
From the second half of the 20th century until now much of germanys tech industrye has relied on austrian talent. One name that comes to mind is Ferdinand Porsche.
In the years before that, of course, Austria-Hungary has relied on the talent of its crown-coutries. (Nikola Tesla comes to my mind...)
In the 16th century England could beat the spanish armada because of their superior cannons, which were based on austrian casting technology. (http://www.arte.tv/de/Willkommen/abenteuer-arte/Mission-X/Das-Empire-schlaegt-zu/737604.html)
Some other names that you might reconize are Ludwig Boltzmann, Christian Andreas Doppler, Kurt Gödel, Ernst Mach, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Hedy Lamarr (Spread-spectrum telecommunications), Viktor Kaplan (Turbine), Siegfried Marcus (Automobile), Peter Mitterhofer (Typewriter), Alois Negrelli (Suez Canal), Josef Ressel (Propeller), Paul Schwarzkopf (Powder metallurgy), Alois Senefelder (Lithography)
so you made Jacob's Ladders?
Signs of The Times, Takuan.
Actually, the limning of these illustrations is quite similar to the way "Little Nemo" was inked; the characters, not the architecture. It's a "thick brush" technique that isn't used much these days. The anatomy isn't all that good, but the line is first-rate.
Here's one they missed... Electrocution by guitar and P.A.
In 1965 our band, The New Englanders, did a show at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. I played an electric guitar plugged into a Fender Band Master amplifier. The old Fender amps had two-prong plugs and a "ground" switch (common on most guitar and p.a. amps at the time) that basically changed the phase and killed the AC hum. All of this was pre-GFI.
I started singing The House of the Rising Sun and I bumped the auditorium's microphone with my lip and a huge spark lit up the stage. I jumped back and stood there stunned for a minute or two while the band kept going through the chord changes. Finally I regained composure and finished the song.
About a month later the Rolling Stones did a concert on the same stage and Keith Richards had a similar but near-fatal run-in with the microphone. He was rendered unconscious and hospitalized overnight. (A couple of years ago an 8mm film of the Richards mishap sold for $26k to a rock memorabilia collector.)
I later found out that the public address system (god, that sounds archaic!) was 220v and had no ground.
#19 hints at a point that occurred to me too:
While remaining very simple, these diagrams exhibit a fundamental difference from the modern red "X" type diagrams that are common today. They explain and teach instead of screaming, e.g. "open this casing and you will DIE DIE DIE!!!11".
This philosophy seems to be general trend in older-type documentation and one that modern manuals regrettably lack.
And all of these were made possible at American bases in Iraq by shoddy electrical installations paid for with tax dollars.
The crystal in a crystal set was galena. Using a fine spring loaded wire one would poke around to find a spot that would act as a diode.
When Edison was a telegraph operator he wired two strips of foil to the system battery and any cockroach bridging the strips would be vaporized.
The ground fault interrupter is about 50 years old and is generally required in bathrooms, kitchens, and garages/basements. It senses any imbalance between the amount of current in the hot and neutral wire that would indicate another path such as through your body to ground.
Shades of "Home Again, Home Again." :)
But I see there are no giant indoor oceans in the above slideshow.
galena, carborundum, iron pyrites or razor blade rust... must be more
It is all now explained to me.
In 1944 (I was 4 years old then ) in NYC, my mom from Germany gives me a bath in the Kitchen sink to conserve hot water,quickly I grabbed a teaspoon and put it into a live utility socket near the faucet.
She could have modeled for these illustrations.
68? I thought you were 97?
I remember getting a Rocket Radio for Christmas back in the 60's. If the ionosphere was just right I could listen to Detroit stations from Ottawa.
I also agree that electronics are much safer these days. My personal shock record is approx 15Kv DC. I was working on a TV monitor observing the "one hand behind your back" and "drain flyback capacitors" rules, but did not heed the "make sure the CRT ground strap is on right before touching the bare volume potentiometer" rule. After picking myself up of the floor, everything I looked at was blue for about 15 min.
All the images are missing a cowled and dancing Death figure. Well, next time.
BTW, "to die of electrocution" is redundant. To electrocute is to kill with electricity.