It should not actually damage anything unless its heating up due to
resistive or sparking effects, or if it happens to be an inductive load of
some kind which can make the sparking worse.
One of the most annoying times I encountered this was on one of those 4 way
socket bars where everything seems to have relied on riveting different
materials together or the actual sockets themselves relied on the spring
effect of the contacts to actually make contact with the bus bar inside.
Terrible design and tended to go intermittent if you screwed it to a
slightly non flat wall.
Brian

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"T i m" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 12 May 2021 18:43:38 +0100, Peter Able wrote:

On 12/05/2021 16:27, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
jon wrote:
On Wed, 12 May 2021 14:30:49 +0100, Commander Kinsey wrote:

What's the word for connecting something live and causing the
connection
to make and break several times rapidly, possibly damaging the
equipment?

Intermittent.

Yup.


Except that that is too general.

+1

The intermittency while actively
making or breaking a live connection is ...

The question ... ;-)

Can't think of the right term, but Contact Bounce (as per burry) is
probably the nearest !

But implies a contact, typically automatic like a relay, solenoid or
a set of points?

Cheers, T i m