NY wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Brian Gaff wrote

Yes even in the 1970s you could by fairy lights all wired in series
across the mains, usually 20 bulbs with one fusible bulb which had
bayonet connector on one end.

Highly lethal, no double insulated wires and the sockets were just in
hard plastic mouldings.

But hardly anyone died.

I wonder how many deaths (or injuries such as falling off ladders etc due
to muscle convulsions caused by shock) would be needed to lift it out of
the "hardly any" category.

Certainly a lot more deaths than say one a year and there werent even that
many.

Same with little kids sticking their fingers into normal light
bulb sockets with the light turned on or sticking metal into
the older unshuttered power points with them turned on
or plugging leads that had been cut off appliances into
a power point and grabbing the bare wire ends.

I have had a mains shock in this situation where someone had cut and
rejoined one of the series wires using a terminal block. I made the
elementary, infantile mistake of thinking "there's only 12 V across each
of these bulbs, so it's safe", forgetting that as soon as you break the
circuit and replace the resistance of one bulb with the much higher
resistance of the human body, almost all the voltage drop is across the
body and only a small amount (proportional to lamp resistances relative to
the body's) is across the lamps. Ouch! Thanks goodness for the RCD
tripping...

I managed it myself, twice now. The first time when building the house,
doing
the pointing of the block work in the dark after a long day block laying. I
used
PAR38 flood lights on extension cords just lying on the wooden planks I had
on 44 gallon oil drums that I used instead of scaffolding. The PAR38 bulbs
didn’t like the vibration from walking on the planks much when running
turned on so the bulb life wasn’t brilliant. When one of them went out
again,
with me left in the dark, I ran my hand along the cord to get to the bulb to
replace it and ended up with bare wires in my hand. Turned out that the
cord had pulled right out of the bulb holder instead of a failed bulb.

Decades later I used to power the wifi repeater half way down my
back neighbours back yard from my place using long extension
cord that lay on the ground across my back gate. One of the high
school kids that used to hang around the back gate smoking
so the school wouldn’t see them there had cut that cord in spite
because I used to **** them off for smoking there.

My back neighbour had reported that the wifi repeater had
stopped again so I went out to see why and was talking to
him when I saw the cut cord and absent minded touched
the cut end of the cord while showing him that and got a
shock from that.

Don't have any RCDs here because the house was built in the very
early 70s by me. Didn’t get even a visible burn.