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

Not for the sake of it.

I have been able to buy UK appliances via Amazon to use here, knowing that they would work fine.

In that case, I won't be able to hit the blinkers, either.

Tell that to the regulators.

Cartagena.

Nope.

If manufacturers want to cope with different voltages and frequencies they can. Or not, if they dont.

I am fairly sure that one of my guitar amplifiers has an SMPSU that can cope from 110V AC or DC to 240VAC or DC.

I haven't read the replies.... So you can't turn them on by accident?

We never lost them. In most places, the usual voltage is still around

That depends on the transmission frequency wavelength; e.g. if the antenna was shorted from 1/2 wave to 1/4 wave, it will likely not substantially change the transmission range (depending on the frequency).

That would explain the Soviet style apartment blocks I see in British films. Some attempt to dress up the poured concrete construction with limited success. Almost all new construction in this area is platform framed wood construction, sheathed with OSB, wrapped in Tyvek, and some sort of decorative siding applied. The exception is multistory commercial buildings.

Hardly a fair comparision given the abysmally low population density in "your area".

There were plenty of those concrete monstrosities built in the large cities of the american east as well as the UK during the 1950/60s.

I never had a Meccano motor, but the first shock I got, I didn't get.

The Lionel train transformer broke and my mother bought a new, bigger better one. It has 2 levers, one of which blew the whistle on the engine except my engine had no whistle or horn.

I thought I should try to fix the old one and I took it apart, and after an hour of fiddling with it, I noticed I hadn't gotten a shock, even though it was STILL plugged in. Stupid, stupid. All it needed was a new plug where the factory permanent plug had broken wires.

I did get a tingle when the plastic case had a piece broken out, from our Emerson table radio which sat on a metal table with holes designed in it. At the time, made in early 1950s, formica counters had metal front edges. If I touched the table and the front edge I got a tingle.

More interesting was my father's crystal radio, that he bought for emergencies (we never had one). All plastic, shaped like a hockey puck, with a rubber band to go around your head and hold the puck up to your ear, and with a wire and an alligator clip. No instructions so I clipped it to the rabbit ears of the tv, for a better signal. I got a whopping shock that way. I guess there shouldn't be 110 in the antenna, but I think there was. The forced air heating duct grill was involved somehow. It was brown, with holes to hear the sound from the crystal inside, and a clear plastic tuning know, but it only got one station, the strongest one in town. Eventually it didn't get that and I broke it open. It only had one or two parts so I couldn't fix it.

And just in the last month I started wearing a new brand of sneakers. Everlast brand, that makes the boxing trunks. I have synthetic carpeting at home but at the grocery I keep getting shocks from the metal shelves. I've worn 5 or 10 kinds of sneakers before and never gotten shocks before.

In the 1930s, any record player with a built-in transmitter would certainly be illegal in the UK. [USA rules might well have allowed it, as (I believe) they still do.] The transmitter would almost certainly be on the medium wave, and would be intended for short-range reception around the house. The aerial, and best, would probably only have been a couple of feet of wire, and there would have been no question of it being anything like a quarterwave or halfwave long!

I never heard of a Meccano until today. I'm 76 and live in the USA.

I was given by a friend an Erector Set motor that he had burned out iirc.

When it was all done, it actually worked, but instead of wrapping it in cotton cloth, i'd used friction tape, cloth tape with adhesive, the precursor to vinyl electric tape. and after 30 seconds the adhesive got hot and started to smoke iirc. I knew it would just get worse so I unplugged it. And I didn't try to recover it because I figured the adhesive had melted and was now stuck to the windings.

The thought of buying new wire in the first place never entered my mind. We had a nice house on an enormous yard, but no spare money for things like that. I got presents once a year and that was enough. No money for projects.

I also had no real use for the motor.

I thought about that too. Even if he had been *given* it, why not give it to someone else when you're done with it, or offer it back.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

When I bought my house I told the owner he didn't have to empty it. That anything he left behind I would keep and use, give to Goodwill (a thrift, second-hand shop, a charity, profit goes to training the handicapped), or take to the dump if it truly couldn't be used.

He left lots of good stuff. It was great. Books on gardening, garden tools, a sledge hammer (I never thought I'd own a sledge hammer but I've used it for several things), other stuff. I wanted almost all of it, and the rest I took to Goodwill. He didn't leave any trash behind.

Are you in NY or is that just your name?

People don't understand the meaning of loan or lend.

"Would you loan me a piece of paper" kids say in school. They don't plan to give it back. I think this sets the stage for the rest of their lives.

Like refute, obviously, gentleman, i.e., e.g., all words or phrases that are now used incorrectly more often than correctly.

The word you're looking for is brutalism. It was/is a style:

It's about how this country was settled: plenty of timber, no restrictions on cutting it on your own property; easy for the yeoman-farmer to build with, especially since there were all those felled trees left from clearing the virgin forest.

It's not a bad material. The oldest surviving timber-frame house in the U.S. was built in about 1640.

My parents used to own a holiday home in Northern France. It was a stone building, about 250 years old and the walls were 2'6" thick. During the summer it was significantly cooler inside than out. However, after being empty for months, it took days (and a lot of money) to warm it up if staying there over Christmas.