There's a knob - like a doorknob - attached to the wall on each side of the fireplace in my Victorian house. Anyone know what they were for? Attaching a fireguard perhaps?
The fireplace in Alice Through The Looking Glass has similar ones:
It would ring a bell in the servants quarters. Usually wire operated via 'bell cranks' . Bell would be mounted on a snail shaped spring so that it rang for a few seconds.
We actually bought some years ago but never got round to using them. I still have two brand new bells, pulleys and a 'pull'. From CH Byron, who now seem to have been subsumed into 'Smartwares' and don't do much of that any more.
Instead, we now use a conventional doorbell push which pulls an input on an Arduino, which in turn sends a signal to a daemon on the Asterisk box, which then queues immediate calls to ring all the phones in the house with a special cadence. Optionally, it can ring a bell in the garden (controlled by a star code). It's also possible to limit doorbell calls to the two teenagers' rooms for a fixed time (default 30 minutes) so that the 2 a.m. pizza deliveries don't wake us up.
I wouldn't have dreamed of this when we bought the mechanical bells in a fit of enthusiasm.
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