-Brian Mendonça
A stitch in time, saves
nine.
English
Proverb*
I connected my laptop power cord to a
multiplug and put the multiplug into the socket in the wall. To the multiplug I
stuck in the two-pin plug for my light-emitting diode (LED) desk light – so the
light would shine on my keyboard. A few
minutes later we were startled by the sound of a small explosion.
The wire for the desk light had for
some days been recalcitrant. There was a loose contact somewhere. Whenever I
tried to plug it in, it sometimes refused to light up. I shrugged it off saying I would attend to it
later. Until this happened.
Frightened out of my wits, with the
light going off, I moaned the fact that my stylish appliance with its
‘minimalistic design’ had been damaged beyond repair. Why oh why had I let
matters deteriorate like this?
I soon discovered that the altar light
and a couple of other lights too were not working. When I called up the electrician, he calmly
asked me what the problem was. ‘Go to
the door,’ he said. ‘On your right is a fuse box. One of the fuses will be
down. Push it up and the lights will come on.’ I did that and the hall lights
were restored.
But my desk light still needed
attention.
When the electrician came he showed me
that the wires were partly frayed. When the current passed through, the circuit
was broken and the fuse tripped. The
circuit breaker immediately shut down the power supply for the connections to
that switch so that the rest of the wiring would not go up in smoke.
The electrician pulled out a rather
nasty knife out of nowhere and expertly sliced off the plastic coating on the
wire. He cut away the offending segment and proceeded to pin down the wires in
the crevice of a new two-pin plug I had procured. The lamp is working fine now.
My seven-year old son hastened to
inform me, to trip is to fall.
‘A circuit breaker is an
automatically operated electrical switch designed to protect an electrical
circuit from damage caused by overload or short circuit. Its basic function is
to detect a fault condition and interrupt current flow,’ notes SS Verma in his
blog post on electrical circuit breakers featured in the website
electricalindia.in
The circuit breaker was the brain
child of Thomas Alva Edison in 1879. ‘With
the installation of lighting in large cities, Edison realized that short
circuits that raised the current to very high levels could damage the filament
of the bulbs and destroy them. He explored a couple of options to mitigate
this.’ (Nathalie Gosset in sciencing.com)
Enterprising companies have devised
plastic supports which can be fixed on to the one inch or so of wire cord
emerging from the two-pin plug to prevent the wire from bending leading to
short circuit.
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*Thomas Fuller's Gnomologia,
Adagies and Proverbs, Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern,
Foreign and British, 1732. Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday, 6 May 2018. Pix courtesy dhGate.com
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