Today we had our biennial (I think that’s the right word. Once every two years. For some reason I find it impossible to get biennial and semiannual straight) CPR and AED training at work. You probably all know what CPR is. An AED is the defibrillating machine various institutions (including ours) keep available in case of emergency.
I was deeply embarrassed to realize I had only a vague recollection of the previous training. If somebody had dropped in front of me with a heart attack yesterday, I’d have been useless. Now I’m up to speed again (sort of) and the instructor told me where to look on YouTube for a refresher video.
Old dog. New tricks. It’s a challenge.
The term “light bill” came to my mind today. Do you young folks know what a light bill is?
When I was a kid, my dad used to talk about paying the light bill. He meant the electric bill. Because back when rural electification came in, in the wake of World War II, that’s what everybody called it. There was one main purpose for getting your house hooked up to the grid, and that was to run electric lights. No more oil lamps (I don’t think they used gas in the country. That was a city luxury) with their smudge and bother and fire risk. Suddenly you could bid the fair day linger a while indoors, and read into the night.
Even then they did other things with electricity, of course. I believe they had a radio before they got electric power, but now they could feed it off an outlet, rather than buying batteries. I’m not sure what else they would have run off electricity in the early days. Ice boxes kept food cold, and clothes washing was still done by hand, at least at first. Dr. Heppelmeyer’s Patent Miracle Nerve Panacea and Hair Growth Stimulator might have warranted a plug-in, at least until it turned the cat’s hair white.
My great-grandfather, whose farm was across the road from ours, was one of the first farmers in the area to have electric light (he was a strict pietist, but loved technology and innovation. This was not uncommon), but he ran his off a battery of batteries, kept up in the attic. When I showed the Norwegian relatives that house at Christmas, one of them asked how they recharged the batteries, and I hadn’t the faintest idea. Perhaps they had to refresh the acid periodically, or scrape off the lead plates. Probably it was something else.
The old house I grew up in, and in which my 93-year old Swedish grandpa was born in, had electricity by means of batteries. They had a generator out back they would run periodically to recharge the batteries. Some other families had little windmills on their houses that would slowly recharge the batteries.
I think my grandpa and family kept their batteries in the basement, however. Giant 2-volt batteries, which they would connect together in such a way as to have 12-volt electricity. We still have one of the wooden boxes they kept the batteries in.
I should clarify that that house now has rural electric power. The days of batteries are long past.
That all makes sense. The batteries provide long-term energy storage, so you don’t have to wastefully run the generator all the time.
My dad used to like to tell about the Indian who learned to be an electrician in the Navy. When he came home from the war REA had just brought electricity to his parent’s house. He ran a line to the outhouse and hooked up a light there. In doing so he made history as the first person ever to wire a Head for a Reservation.
That’s awful. Thank you.
Ha! There should be a warning on that comment, Greybeard.
You know, I think biennial can mean twice a year as well as once every two.
Will Rogers lived in a house with kerosene/oil lamps. On an overnight trip to the city, he almost died because of the gas lights. When it’s time to sleep with kerosene lamps, you blow them out and that’s that. He didn’t know that you had to close the valve on gas lights. He blew out the flame and went to sleep.
Not that anybody has offered a wager, but my money is on a wind charger to top of the batteries. In pre-REC rural North Dakota, that was common (as was the requisite wind).
Frank, I’m fairly sure I remember reading somewhere that there was a period in the late 19th C when it was so common to have to break down hotel doors to rescue guests from the situation you describe (country guests blowing out the gas lamps) that it was common practice for hotels to leave a hammer on each floor for the sole purpose of breaking the latches off the doors…
Possibly historical urban myth, but certainly Rogers wasn’t the only one who made that mistake…