Electricity

Anybody coming to Britain from the USA for the first time has to be impressed by the size of the electric plugs. For normal, everyday use, these plugs must be the biggest in the world. I’m not exaggerating; the extension cord in the photo with four plugs in it is about a foot long. The reason for super-size electrical stuff is a little obscure and probably historical as well. This is England after all. At first I thought it had to do with the 240 volt current in the UK, like those big plugs on electric ovens in the States that use 220 volts.

But that can’t be right. In continental Europe the normal household current is 220 volts and that’s now the standard in the UK as well. The second picture shows the charger for our German electric toothbrush. The plug is about an inch accost the widest part. So what’s going on here? My theory is that there is a disproportionate fear of electricity in this country. The reason the plugs a so big is what’s on the inside. All the regular plugs have the capacity for connecting for three wires: hot, neutral and ground or earth as it’s called here. Furthermore, they’re all fused internally for 13 Amps. The extension cord is also fused, the wall outlet is fused and there is, of course, a circuit breaker in the main electric service box. That’s four fuses between me and the electricity company.

Fear of electricity? In the UK it’s prohibited to have anything electric in the bathroom. Maybe sometime in the early days of household electricity thousands of unsuspecting souls were dispatched when they took live toasters with themselves into the bathtub.  For that reason the charger for our electric toothbrush is in the kitchen rather than the bathroom. In fairness, I should mention that it’s okay to have a special outlet for electric shavers because it uses a lower voltage.

I’m guessing here, but it’s feasible that at some point people wanted to get rid of candles in the bathroom and replace them with the same electric lights they had in the rest of the house. But there was an obvious conflict with the no-electric-stuff rules. The clever solution was to allow electric lights in the bathroom provided there was no switch. But, since always-on and always-off were both less than desirable, another way had to be found. And those cunning early British regulators came up with the solution: if the switch was on the ceiling where nobody in the bathtub could reach it, the chance of electrocution was pretty much nil. Now here’s the really impressive part: as no one could reach the switch in the ceiling, why not tie a piece of string to it. That way anyone standing in the bath could pull the cord and turn on the light, but since the string in not a conductor of electricity, everybody is safe. In our bathroom today there is a light switch on the ceiling with a string hanging from it and it works. I’ve yet to be electrocuted in our bathroom.