Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?

More shocks doesn't mean more deaths. You jump more at 240V, so are more likely to let go. Try touching a 6000V electric fence and you'll see what I mean.

The ratings in the UK are wrong. If I run the exact rating of a wire, in free air, it will get to just over body temperature. Now put that in the attic with insulation....

No they're started by shorts under the floor or in the walls where you don't notice them. Or a wire that's been damaged by a rat etc and become thinner. It will not get hot at the rating of the breaker. The breaker is no longer preventing a fire. More current - more heat - more fire.

Extension cords in the UK have something called a fuse in the plug. I know, a novel concept for Merkins, we actually have something to stop each individual appliance/extension cord overheating. The cord can be thinner than the circuit the breaker is "protecting", and the fuse will blow if you overload it.

That's stupidity and irrespective of whether you have fuses or breakers.

I still have those in my house and don't intend to change them. They're far less fussy about a surge than a breaker. I switched on 7 computers at once on a 32A circuit, and the breaker tripped. I changed it back to a fuse and it let them boot up. They only use 16A once running. The breaker couldn't handle the inrush current to charge up the bulk capacitors in the power supplies.

And if a breaker does that, you slot in a bigger breaker. How is this anything to do with the advantage of fuses/breakers?

Then you were using the wrong type of breaker.

I seem to remember something about "son of a gun".

In about 1980 I lived on Hemphill street in Fort Worth. A lot op people would say it without the middle "h".

That's just what I was thinking would be a good idea.

"touch the brake lightly" when you need to do it hard?

Will you promise to keep the fire from spreading?

No they didn't. The reference simply changed to 230V, so that 220V and

I suppose this assumes that the tracks do not bend, vertically or horizontally, or some of the wheels could loose pressure, as there are no springs on the loco wheels (but the wagons do have them, so there must be imperfections on the tracks).

Sailor Talk - "Kissing the Gunner's Daughter" and "Sucking the ... Old Salt Blog

I know it because there is a novel by Ruth Rendell:

Well, hopefully you are alert and keeping distances and you see the danger with ample time :-D

You can hit the brakes hard, but intermittently - very uncomfortable on passengers.

In cities? In my city I don't remember seeing a single wood house. On some beaches, yes. For political reasons:

It is very difficult to get a building permit in some places, so people plant a prefab instead.

Because high voltage electric fences, except military fences, have a resistor in series, or fed from a limited sized capacitor, so that the voltage drops fast when a body touches them.

how easy or dificult was it to obtain things to work on it? A different voltage on a city would mean a bulb factory dedicated to that city, no?

I remember in the late sixties visiting my mother village (Spain). They had _some_ electricity, and paid by the number of bulbs in the house. It was not metered.

What was the name for the far more gruesome (and fatal) punishment in which an offender was tied over the *mouth* of the loaded cannon which was then fired?

I knew that mains was sometimes DC, but I didn't know that it was sometimes as low as 120 V. I that, AC or DC, it was always around 240 V (actual for DC, or RMS for AC).

Here it did change. We had 220 and they changed silently to 230 without telling us anything. I just noticed that when I measured it I read 230 on a digital multimeter (so there was no error, and I measured in more than one house/city), and when I bought bulbs they also said 230.

They had changed silently the contracts, too. They said we had to renew with some unrelated excuse, and the fine print said 230.