A friend wonders what this device is, found in an alcove in a corridor of his workplace:
- posted
13 years ago
A friend wonders what this device is, found in an alcove in a corridor of his workplace:
Firstly, it's upside-down. It's a gas ring of the type used to boil a bucket of water, or watering can full of pitch...
In message , Stephen Gower writes
Its for underfloor heating - ha ha
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Stephen Gower saying something like:
Could be for anything. Perhaps there was a need at one time for a large heated container of water /soup /tar /who knows.
you folks are just too young.
That's simply an upside down COAL gas ring (I reckon) that probably used to simply heat a kettle and keep the tea warm.
Before central heating you didn't want to get up and go to the freezing cold kitchen and crack the ice on the milk bottle and come back to the one room you could afford to heat, (to the point where undervest, shirt, v-necked waistcoat pullover, a rug over your knees and a jacket and blanket round your shoulders and fingerless gloves could just about avoid hypothermia*). So a little gas ring by the Radio, listening to Hancock's Half Hour, and some Tetley tea bags, and milk in a jug, with plenty of sugar lumps, made the evening survivable.
*it was known as dying of cold then, and a lot of people did.snip
Are you sure tea bags were sold in those days? I'm now 64 and I don't remember tea bags until much later. I remember the bloody cold and frozen insides of windows though :-(
Dave
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:
Yes, and? It's at his mate's place of work, not his house. Perfectly feasible it was used for tea - I recall plenty of places where a gas ring was in constant use for tea, instead of its installed-for purpose of heating up tar, soup, dishwater, etc.
you are probably right. IIRC teabags were in in the late 50's
here you go
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