On Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:04:22 +0100, Brian Gaff \(Sofa\) wrote:

Well the key is where you take the shock. It only takes a surprisingly
small current across the chest to kill you merely by stopping your
heart, that is why the one hand in your pocket advice is so useful.
Lots of us have had shocks, mine were usually thru the fingers of the
same
hand when delving inside a working piece of valve gear that had series
fed heaters across the mains.
Yes you get some expletives but not much else. The buzzing bruised
feeling
soon passes.

Remember in the past some dodgy practitioners thought shocks were
actually therapeutic, How they did not manage to kill most of their
patients is amazing. I'm also sure as kids we all made electric shock
machines All you needed was a small mains transformer a battery and
something like a mechanical buzzer. You wired the buzzer and secondary
in series with the battery and a switch, and asked your victim to hold
the ends of the primary.
I guess current was quite low, but when bridge rectifiers and small
high
voltage capacitors came along you could end up with something really
dangerous. What we used to do was charge up a capacitor and leave it on
a young ladies seat and watch what happened when she picked it up, Ahem,
Well it was fun at the time...
Brian

The radio room at Lyons where I did my apprenticeship had two door handles
that had to be operated simultaneously to gain entry.