On 2014-02-18, technomaNge wrote:
On 02/17/2014 07:50 PM, wrote:
Somebody here must know the answer. Last Sunday we had some friends
over for brunch and one of the guys, a wood worker, told me about an
old house he worked on that was built before electricity was available
here on the island. He said there was a large steel tank sunk into the
ground and that "carbide" was poured into this tank to make

[ ... ]

though I'd ask the experts here if anyone has heard of "carbide
batteries".
Thanks,
Eric

My 2 cents (when did they take the "cent" sign off keyboards?)

When they switched from typewriters to ASCII keyboards for
computers. They needed too many other weird characters for computer
languages -- and even used the '$' as the lead-in character to certain
variable types instead of for money. :-)

(However, the cents sign '¢' (Does this show up on your terminal as
a cents sign? On mine it is a backslash followed by "242", indicating
that it is a character which my selected ISO-8859-15 won't/can't
display, or my editor can't display) is present on some mainframe
computers, which use EBCDIC instead of ASCII. (Also some other weird
symbols, including one like a square with the borders made of parens like
this ") (" (with two more above and below).

FWIW -- I typed the above character as "COMPOSE-c-/", just as I get 'ñ'
with "COMPOSE-N-~", It seemed like a likely code for that. A check on
another window shows that it does produce a cents sign -- on a Sun Unix
computer, at lest. :-)

Never heard of carbide electrical stuff. I usta play with
my dad's old carbide headlamp many moons ago, he was a coal
miner in his youth.

There was someone in this group about a year ago talking about
refurbishing old batteries which used a steel (or perhaps cast iron)
tank. I forget what the anode was. And I think that it used NaOH
(Sodium Hydroxide) as the electrolyte -- lye instead of carbide.
Perhaps this is what the tank was.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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