When we first moved into our
current house back in the 70's there was still a light
switch like this:
As it operated the basement lights and was in the stairwell it made sense installing the replacement
switch horizontally so you flick the
switch in the direction you are going as to whether you are turning the light on or off.
@mikefellh Continuing today's divergent swerves:
~40 miles down the highway from you in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, my grandmother's two story plus basement home was supplied by a a single pole solid
neutral 30 Amp fused main
switch feeding an open
porcelain block holding two screw-in "
plug" fuses. This would've been installed when her home was built in the 1800's; kitchen, dining room, living room just above
ground level with a sewing room (
manual treddle Singer of course) just off the dining room. By the time of my earliest recollections, running water had been added including an indoor 'privy' within the sewing room with a full washroom added directly above on the second floor to service the FOUR bedrooms. By sometime in the 1950's, my grandmother had added an enclosed sun porch on the rear where she had a used Gilson "Snowbird" brand commercial grade chest freezer installed some years after having sold her ice box and purchased her original
electric refrigerator, an early Crosley (Sp?) of course. The entire
house was heated by a coal fired furnace in the basement by convection via an approximately 3' x 3' square steel grate at
ground floor
level adjacent to the basement door and directly above the coal furnace. No ducts, none, just an exhaust hood and pipe into the brick chimney erected directly outside her walls. In the ceiling above the 3' square grate was a smaller grate cut in to heat the FOUR bedrooms. When her home was built her kitchen stove burned wood and refuse providing heat, four locations designated for pots, pans and kettles (to heat bath water that you carried upstairs) and a
flat top open griddle. Eventually she added a gas stove alongside her wood burner and had a threaded gas pipe added to
power an open-face
porcelain heater in the main washroom [Exhausting through a 90 degree elbow through a hole in sheet metal where a glass window pane had been replaced.]
Your porcelain rotary
switch brought this all back to me. Three such switches were originally installed in her front
hall across from the stairwell. None of the switches were 3-ways, of course not, but the middle
switch allowed you to turn on a light in the second floor's central
hall IF the series connected
switch upstairs was in its correct position. EVERYTHING was knob & tube, non-stranded,
asbestos of course. By the time of my earliest recollections, my grandparents had added four ornate
porcelain lamp sockets by pulling wiring through the non-structural hollowed wooden ceiling beams decorating their dining room ceiling. All ceilings were high with ornate 'plate rails' surrounding the dining room and master bedroom. When originally constructed the living room was lit by two large windows (with thin, single pane, non energy efficient, wavy glass) and four CANDLE BURNING wall sconces.
Leap ahead a couple of decades. By the time I was in my apprenticeship, I continually marvelled at how ALL of my grandmother's home ran from a two
wire, one hot and one
neutral, 30 Amp service. The Ontario Hydro
meter reader visited monthly to read the glass enclosed
KWH meter high on the wall inside the
ground floor stairwell. (An old
porcelain based, hard-wired,
meter NOT one of the new-fangled
plug in meters)
As a kid I never gave any of this a second thought, it was simply walking a few doors up our street to Grandma's and a chance to visit with two maiden aunts and their assortment of cats dogs, canaries, budgies and goldfish. I can remember being four or five and sitting on an army surplus munitions case in the
ground floor central
hall to warm myself and dry my winter boots on the 3' x 3' metal grill; as much as the dogs wanted to visit to be patted, you couldn't entice them to burn their paws on the hot steel grill if the furnace was burning. This was at the time in eastern Hamilton, roughly Kenilworth Avenue and Barton Street in general terms. [Of course the city's grown far, far east of there now a days]
Years later, I was in high school, my father had died and I'd scored a part time job working in commercial AM broadcasting. While in high school I'd noted
asbestos wiring pulled through gas pipes when electricity came to my high school. By the time I'd drifted into
amateur theatre I wasn't at all surprised to learn both the large
chandelier in the group's large central dining room and its smaller matching twin were
fed via
asbestos routed through the original threaded gas pipes. The group was, and is to this day, based in a two and a half story home in downtown Hamilton with a basement added at some
point and an annex added in the 1950's to accommodate a rehearsal
stage with scene shop and prop storage below. They used to perform in a 1,000 seat high school
auditorium then performed in a smaller 776 seat space when it opened in 1970 with a 45'
grid and 27 counter
balanced line sets.
One
insidious thing I learned the hard way
and will NEVER forget: In the days when electricity was being added to buildings originally lit by gas chandeliers, they'd install single pole dual latching push buttons or
your rotary switches in the
NEUTRAL supplying the
fixture rather than the hot. I can't tell you how 'shocked' this hot-shot young apprentice was when he made this discovery but I'm still breathing to attest to the fact I've never forgotten when, where and how I learned this important lesson.
More than enough of this divergent drivel. Thanks for the memories
@mikefellh
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.