Living dangerously
A lot of changes took place in the century before my birth. That means that I was not a witness but I lived with the technology advances. And because people become accustomed to technology they take shortcuts. Ones that involve safety. Our home had a fuse box with those round screw in fuses that would burn out in case of something going wrong. Of course none of us understood the why so if a fuse burned out we went to her pants pocket and pulled out a penny. Turns out that a penny does a proper job of bridging a burnt out fuse. The problem goes away and to those on site it all seems normal again. I lived in the period where asbestos was a common building material. We put the stuff on our roofs and all the walls of our home another floors and anytime insulation was needed we could always find a bag a fibers. No idea of what was going to happen going forward. In fact I can remember picking up broken asbestos shingles and cracking them in half because to a 10 year old boy they seem like a cheap substitute for a knife. Go figure. We heated our homes in part with oil and putting in proper pipes seemed like overkill so we had a funny drip system where a gallon of fuel oil simply dripped away into the pan below and made it to the stove. Not something you can do anymore I imagine. Getting back to electricity plugs coming from the companies sometimes had a third prong. We did not know why and so faced with a plug that only had two holds we remove that third problem it worked and the problem was solved. Actually I have seen someone jury rig an automobile to drip fuel into the carburetor when the pump stopped working. Nothing exploded but it certainly could have. I can probably find other examples but this serves as a starting point. A reminder that in my day we lived dangerously.
