These are horror stories indeed. I’ve had a few petty 240V when a kid (my father used to fix tv’s and was somewhat blasé about electrickery at times). The occasional shock from an old TV tube is a very steep learning curve for child!!
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Imagine how Prof Pieter van Musschenbroek felt when he received a shock of over 50,000 volts from a Leyden Jar.
It threw him across the room so fast he almost died and was later quoted as saying…
“I would not repeat the experiment if offered the Entire Kingdom of France”
Mathematics Teachers beware!
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As if…
Meanwhile …
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As I understand it, only a few milliamps is required to kill a person.
My first electric shock was when I was working on a high voltage power supply for a radio transmitter, we always worked on them live because turning them off meant hours of work retuning the transmitter.
This was in the days of valves and I was checking some components (I forget why - this was sixty years ago), one of the rectifiers had a cap on the top of the valve on which I occasionality rested my arm, as I had done a dozen times before.
A valve similar in design to this type - see the connection on the top
Unfortunately this valve’s insulated cap was cracked and my forearm also touched the frame as I was working, next thing I knew I was slammed against the wall. A painful lesson.
Unlike transistors, valves often use very high voltages sometimes in the thousands of volts. As @Dextrous63 pointed out a TV tube is nothing more than a very large valve
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Hi Bruce. You know I’m an old phart and I had some experience with triononic valves around 300V dc. One of my projects was to replace them with semiconductor thyristors. Life moves on…
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