The Tingle Factor Box

What Is It? Ceramic Fuse

Imagine you are living in the mid 20th century, in a modern house with all modern conveniences. You have a new electric oven, a refrigerator, an inside lavatory (bliss), and of course, you have electricity. It is wonderful to have so many modern appliances, and electricity is such a wonder. You know many people have had it for years, but the old neighbourhood you lived in was not electrified, so it is still a marvel to you. The only thing which does make you nervous is that apparently, if you don’t have the correct fuses, and don’t know how to look after them, electricity can be very dangerous. You have an electrician coming to check things over for you and teach you about them today though, so that will be wonderful.

When I showed the children this ceramic fuse holder and fuse, they had no idea at all what it could be. Of course, the children know about fuses, on a basic level, with their parents occasionally telling them that ‘I have to fix the fuse’ or ‘the fuse has blown’, but most have never seen a fuse. Even those who had seen a fuse did not recognise this one though, as it is an old fashioned type made of ceramic and is much larger than the household fuses we use. In fact, there were parents who did not recognise it! The fuse did intrigue the children though as they had never thought of electricity being old enough to have evolved so much. It is also a huge fuse, much bigger than fuses which would be used in a home. It is far more likely to have been used in a factory, or perhaps even on the railways.

The history of fuses is, perhaps unsurprisingly, closely tied to the history of electricity. However, electricity actually has a longer history than many realise. The oldest and most natural of all electrical sources is lightning, and this has, of course, been around since time immemorial. The ancients knew about static electricity, and about lightning, but this was not created by man. As early as 1660 though, people were experimenting with creating electricity. In this year Otto Von Guericke created the first electric generator. He used his machine to show that electricity could be conducted over a substantial distance (several feet) along wet string. In the 1700s several English scientists conducted experiments with electricity and this was also the era when Ben Franklins famous kite experiment was conducted. In 1752, just as a storm was beginning to break out, he flew a kite with a metal key attached to the end. The key was hung close to a jar and, although there was not yet any lightening, electricity was conducted along the wet kite string, through the key and sparks were seen jumping into the jar until eventually the jar could not carry any more charge. This experiment proved that lightening and electricity were the same thing.

It was not until 1800 though until Alessandro Volta created the first ‘battery’. At the time it was called the voltaic pile and it was made up of a stack of zinc, copper and acid or salt soaked disks which could store electricity. Volta knew the electric cell worked, but he didn’t know why. None the less, he was an important figure in the history of electricity and the volt is named after him. It was Charles Edison who brought electricity to the world though, when he created the electric lightbulb in 1879. He wanted to bring electric light to every home and he built the first electric generating station which provided electricity to one square mile of New York City in 1882.

So what is a fuse and why do we use them? Fuses are essentially a safety mechanism, placed in an electrical circuit to control and limit the flow of electricity. If too much electricity is passing through the fuse the fuse will break (blow) and the flow will stop which makes electricity much safer. Essentially, they are designed to be the weakest link in the flow of electricity. Today there are many different sorts of fuses (though ceramic ones are pretty unusual, and this one would not have wire inside it), but they all serve essentially the same purpose, to make electricity safe. Today we have 'safety switches' which make using electrictity safer still, but we also still use fuses and most people still keep some fuse wire in their fuse box!

If anybody knows any more about this fuse, please let us know!

Wouldn't The Bread Burn? Early Toaster

Imagine you are a housewife living in the 1940s. You have a large family to feed, and they have to be fed quickly in the morning so that you can send your husband to work and your children to school. Thank goodness for your new, electric toaster! You can make two slices of toast at a time, quickly and easily, so that you can just keep churning out pieces of toast until everybody is fed, ready to go and out the door. Then, when the house is quiet, you love to make your own toast, sit down with a cup of tea and relax before a day of housework and cooking.

When I showed the children this toaster, their immediate guess as to what it was was both amusing and understandable. All of the children immediately told me ‘I know what that is, it’s a heater what’s so interesting about that?' When they realised it opened on both sides though, they became a little unsure about their guess, deciding that it must be something else. None managed to guess the real purpose of the little machine though, as it bears no resemblance at all to toasters they are familiar with. When I told them what it was though, they thought it was interesting, but possibly unsafe. As one child put it ‘the outside would be so hot, and the toast is so close to the heating bit, it might catch fire!’

The history of toast is really quite surprising. You might imagine that toast is as old as bread itself, but this is not strictly the case. Bread has been around for thousands of years in various versions (some of which were really quite different to what we think of as bread today). Even the cave men made their own basic bread. Toast as we know it though is a reasonably recent invention in comparison. Toasting probably came about because stale bread is hard and unpleasant to eat and somehow, somebody discovered that if the bread was held in the fire briefly, it became crisp and pleasant. However, this could, according to some food historians, not happen until bread could be sliced. Torn bread would have burned in the fire because it had rough edges. We do know though that the Ancient Romans and other civilisations at that time were familiar with toast, and indeed the word comes from the Latin Toastum which means torching or burning!

As time went by, people began to look for better ways to prepare toast. At first forks or sticks were used, but soon wire frames which the bread could be put into were invented. These frames could then be held near the fire. Forks or cages were the toasting technology of choice for centuries, with really no alternative way of making real toast coming about until electricity was invented. The first electric toasters started to be sold in Britain shortly before the turn of the 20^th century and became available in America in 1909. The toaster only toasted one side of the bread at a time, and the operator of the toaster therefore had to flip the toast over. In 1919 Charles Strite created the first modern, pop up toaster, but the original format, single side toaster, like the one I showed the children, remained popular for many years. Toasters did not really surge in popularity until about 1930 though, when Wonder Bread introduced the first ‘sliced bread’. Suddenly toasters became a must have item and sales surged. Today, almost all, if not every household would have this humble device in the kitchen.

It's 2013. We have driers - Clothes Horse

Imagine you are a housewife living in the 1950s. It is washing day, but the rain is pelting down and if you hang things out in this weather they will never dry. Luckily you have a wonderful clothes horse which your husband purchased for you. You need to make sure the washing is done, but at least you can hang the washing inside, near the fire so that it dries!

When I showed the children this old clothes horse, they had absolutely no idea what it could be. They had never seen a clothes horse like this one, with most clothes horses today being plastic or metal and rectangular or square in shape. Moreover, several of the children told me that they didn’t use a clothes horse at home anyway, with one explaining ‘it’s 2013, we have driers’. This old, wooden, round clothes horse was beyond their experience!

In days gone by, before gas or electric driers were created, the only way to dry clothes was on a clothesline or clothes horse, in the sun. For many years, laundry day was a social occasion, with women hanging their washing in tiny, adjoining backyards, or from pulley clotheslines strung up in laneways and alleys. Today, if it rains people simply postpone washing day, or dry their clothes in a clothes drier, but in these early days, in rainy weather the only other option was often to hang clothing inside, near the fire. As time went by, racks were created to make hanging washing inside easier. All clotheslines were straight lines though, and so were all racks. Nobody had thought of hanging clothes in a circle to save space . . .

. . . Until Gilbert Toyne. Toyne was an Australian and in 1926 he invented the worlds first round clothesline. His design was similar to an umbrella, with a central support holding up the ‘canopy’ of clotheslines. Four arms stretch out from the centre post and between them lines are strung for hanging clothes. These arms can even be collapsed, just like an umbrella! Many say the Hills Hoist company invented the clothes line, but it would be 20 years before the Hills Hoist began to be marketed, though it is today the most popular Australian clothesline and there are similar clotheslines in backyards all over the world. It is likely the clotheshorse I showed the children is based on Toyne’s original idea for an ‘umbrella like’ clothesline with the same basic structure but many more arms radiating out, on which the clothes are simply hung. Of course, on non-washing days, with the aid of a couple of sheets this clothes horse made a fantastic cubby house!

They Don't Look Too Tasty - Wartime Recipes

Imagine you are housewife living during the Second World War. Your eldest son is off fighting and you dread the mailman arriving in case he brings bad news. Feeding your husband and other children is also very difficult. Food is rationed, and everything has to be made to last. Thank goodness for the Wartime Recipes booklet you have received. The recipes are very frugal and easy to make, but they still taste good. Hopefully there might even be something which you can make for your daughters coming birthday!

When I showed the children this ‘Wartime Recipes’ booklet, prepared by the Australian Dried Fruits Association and the Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy, their reactions were very funny. Several of the children enjoy cooking, but they had never seen recipes like those in this booklet. The recipes use very little sugar and often dripping (fat) is used in place of butter. They weren’t at all sure the food prepared according to these recipes would be at all nice, but I can assure them that the recipes not only work (though we use butter instead of dripping), but they are quite tasty! Come back on Friday and Roy will show you how to cook one of his favourites from this book.

During the Second World War, there was a huge shortage of people to do essential jobs for the war effort. Accompanying this shortage of workers, was a shortage in essential supplies like clothing, petrol and food. All of these things were rationed by the government meaning that each person was allowed a specific quantity of each thing. Rationing certainly made life tougher than it had been in peace time, but most Australians supported the rationing as it helped the war effort, but also meant that everybody had a fair access to essential supplies. However, there were runs on certain items before rationing was officially introduced. For example, there were rumours of match shortages or rationing, so people purchased thousands of them to ensure they would not go without.

One of the most important things which was rationed was food. Every person received a set number of ration coupons for the year which were used in shops instead of money and different things cost different numbers of coupons. Once the coupons were spent, people had to wait until the next year before getting new coupons. For men, living on the coupons was not too hard, but for women with large families things could be very difficult. Classes were established and books were released to help women cope with the rationing. These showed women how to substitute cheap or even free items for more expensive ingredients. One of the most common substitutions was dripping (which was the fat from cooked meat and was therefore ‘free’) for butter. The books, like the Wartime Recipes booklet I showed the children, also provided women with recipes which used less in the way of expensive, rationed ingredients like sugar yet still produced something tasty.

It's Such A Sad Story - Willow Pattern

Imagine, you are wandering through the remains of one of Australia’s famous gold fields. There isn’t much to see, the buildings are long gone and so are the miners, but there is plenty of evidence of people once living and working in the area. The ground is covered with little pieces of broken pottery, and you notice that many of them are blue and white. You stop to look more closely at the pottery and see that you recognise the pattern on many of the blue and white pieces, in fact you own a few pieces yourself! Amazing to think you can buy the same pattern 150 years later!

When I showed these shards of Willow Pattern Plate to the children, their reactions were interesting, and varied. To many of the children the plates were rubbish, thrown away because it was broken (and in many cases they would have been right!) The idea of actually wanting somebody’s rubbish was ‘just plain weird’. For other children though, seeing the pattern on the plates was very interesting and several recognised it from plates ‘my Grandma has’ or even from pieces owned by their parents. The idea that the same pattern is still being made today fascinated them.

Blue and white china and porcelain has been popular for many years. It was first created in China and shards of china with the blue and white colouring have been found dating right back to ancient times. China produced the highest quality porcelain and china, and by the 1700s were exporting pieces like tea sets to Britain where they were extremely popular. Of course, with the blue and white china being so popular, British manufacturers soon wanted to create their own versions. The Willow Pattern was one of these. The pattern was first introduced to the world in 1780 by the Turner pottery. Turner had specialised in Chinese inspired designs and the Willow Pattern was engraved (and quite probably created) for him by Thomas Minton who would later become a famous potter himself. In 1784 the pattern was introduced into the Spode pottery and it went on to be included in pieces by Adams, Wedgewood, Devenport, Clews and other famous pottery factories. It became the most popular design and is still manufactured today. In fact it was so popular that different qualities of china showing the pattern were made, with thick, crude china for poorer people and fine, bone china for the rich.

The Willow Pattern design is not only beautiful though, it has a story associated with it. Some suggest the story has a basis in a Chinese fable, but most think it is of English origin. According to the story, the plate depicts two faithful lovers, one the daughter of a rich man and the other the rich mans secretary. The rich man promised his daughters hand in marriage to a rich viceroy and when he discovered the lovers, he locked his daughter in a house in an orchard. The daughter escaped though with her lover and they ran to the bridge by the willow tree, being chased by the girls father. Usually you can see the three on the bridge in the pattern. The lovers escaped, for a time, but eventually were killed by the man who the daughter was supposed to marry. The gods took pity on the lovers though and made them into immortal doves. You can see the doves at the top of the plate. If you would like to read a more detailed version of the Willow Pattern story (and there are several versions) click here.

Note: If you are on the gold fields, relics like these shards are protected. You cannot collect them. These shards are from a legal source.

It Looks Beautiful - Irish Lace Patterns

Imagine you are a mother living in Ireland during the 1840s. Times are really tough with not enough food to go around and your husband is having trouble finding work. You had to find some way to support the family, and when you heard that classes were being offered in lace making, for free, you decided to join up. You discovered you were quite good at lace making, with your small fingers being very nimble. You don’t make a lot of money, but with the lace you make and sell, you have enough to keep your family going.

That's Really Clever - Felix The Cat Wool Winder

Imagine it is the 1920s and you are a child. It is a very exciting day today because, as a reward for being well behaved and getting good grades at school, Mother and Father are taking you to the pictures. You are going to see a movie, something you have wanted to do for so long! You hear that the movie showing is about a black cat, Felix, and you know that he is very funny and popular. It will be such fun!

When I showed this wool winder with a picture of Felix the Cat on it to the children they were intrigued. I had only recently acquired the item and both the children and I were curious to know why Felix was missing his body. We decided to try wrapping wool around the winder to see what happened, and discovered that, if we wound the wool correctly, it made his body! The children were impressed by the thoughtful design – ‘it’s useful and fun’ as one child put it. The thing which intrigued them most though was that the Felix on the winder was not quite the same as the Felix they see today.

Felix the Cat made his first appearance in about 1919 in a short film called Feline Follies. The film was silent, but with his big black body and wide grin, Felix was very recognisable, easy to animate and an instant hit with audiences. He was created by an animator at the studio of Australian animator Pat Sullivan, but there is dispute about who actually created the cat. According to many, Pat Sullivan himself was responsible, and during his lifetime Sullivan certainly claimed to be the designer. Others suggest Sullivan’s lead animator, the American Otto Messmer was the real creator of the character, but the actual creator remains a mystery. We do know though that Felix went through a number of redesigns during his early career. The first ‘Felix’ was actually called Master Tom and he was not the rounded, friendly looking character we see today. He was more elongated, and much more like the Felix seen on the wool winder I showed the children.

Felix was wildly popular with audiences and soon a number of films had been made about the little cat. Indeed, he was so famous that Charles Lindbergh chose him to be his lucky mascot for his famous transatlantic flight. The first giant balloon made for the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade featured Felix and he began to appear in popular songs. There were toys, clocks, household items and a variety of other merchandise produced featuring Felix. Perhaps most intriguingly, Felix was one of, if not the first characters to be used in a television broadcast. In 1928 the RCA (Radio Corporation Of America) began an experiment with W2XBS (which later became WNBC). They were trying to transmit a picture, and needed an ‘actor’ who could withstand the heat from the lights needed, could work cheaply and, if possible, was the right colour – black and white. Felix fitted all of the criteria and they made a small paper mache figure of him, sat him on a phonograph turntable and began experimenting. Felix remained in this role for at least 10 years, as the images transmitted were tweaked and changed to make the transmission sharper and better quality.

It Sounds Really Dangerous! Flat Iron

Imagine you are living in the early 1900s and you are a housewife and mother. Life is good, but there is always so much to do. Washing, cooking, cleaning, looking after the family and your least favourite job, ironing. Today it is very hot, but you have to do the ironing, and you aren’t looking forward to it at all. You will have to stand near the hot stove, which is bad enough, but on hot days you also seem to become less careful – you are sure to get a burn or two.

When I showed the children this flat iron, they were stunned. Irons are something which (most of the children) recognize, and a few even proudly told me that they can iron their own clothes. Irons today though are very different to the flat iron I showed the children. As one child pointed out, it was all rusty and would make the clothes dirty, but agreed that it probably wouldn’t have been when it was first made. The thing which surprised the children most though was the weight of the iron. It is very heavy as it is solid, cast iron and the children couldn’t imagine having to iron with it, let alone having to heat it up on a fuel stove. They could well imagine getting burned.

Nobody knows exactly when people started trying to keep their clothing smooth and wrinkle free, but we do know that the Chinese were using heated metal to smooth clothes before anybody else. We know from paintings that over 1000 years ago the Chinese filled pots with hot coals and then, as the cloth was help taught by two people, one of them would also run the heated pot over the cloth to remove wrinkles. In Europe people used stones, glass and wood to iron their clothing, and these continued to be used in some areas of Northern Europe up until the 19^th century. Viking women were often buried with glass objects which we believe were linen smoothers, designed to remove creases from clothing, or add special creases called pleats. Similar smoothers, made of glass but with a handle were used in other areas of Europe, including the United Kingdom. As early as Medieval times there were also machines used to press linen (including some with rollers) but these were mainly used by the launderers of rich people.

The earliest irons as we know them were flat irons, like the one I showed the children and they started to be made by blacksmiths in the middle ages. The simple, metal irons would be heated on the stove or in the fire and then used to remove creases. The handle also heated up though and had to be held with a thick rag to stop people being burned. Later, wooden grips were added to some irons while others had removable handles which stayed cool while the iron was being heated. Later still, box irons were introduced which allowed hot coals to be placed in a compartment of the iron to keep the iron hot for longer. This combined the hot coals of the early Chinese irons with the arrow shape of the more modern ones. The problem with irons though was that they were hard work. Being made of cast iron they would rust, so they had to be kept in good condition. They needed to be regularly cleaned, sanded with sand paper and given a light coating of grease to stop the metal from rusting. Beeswax often needed to be applied to stop the iron sticking to starched cloths and, heating the iron on the stove or in the fire was risky. If the iron was too cool it would not iron properly, but it was not unusual for the iron to scorch cloth either if it was overheated!  

So Salt Is Actually Important? Salt Packet

Imagine you are the wife of a farmer living in Australia in the early 1900s. You are lucky, because you always have plenty of food available, but you are also lucky to have your Mothers recipes for pickles, preserves and salted meat because this year has seen lots of food which needed to be saved. You aren’t sure the garden has ever provided so much excess fruit and vegetables! You will have to go into town soon though because while you have plenty of vinegar still, you are almost out of sugar and have completely run out of salt. You can’t preserve anything without sugar and salt!

It's Huge! Records

Imagine you are living in the 1960s. You are going on a picnic today and everything is prepared, ready for your friends to pick you up. You have plenty of food prepared, drinks, a rug and you even have your new portable record player. You think the player is wonderful. Now you can take your music with you and enjoy it, even on a picnic! Of course, you have to be careful that the records don’t get too hot during the trip, or sitting in the sun, or they will melt and won’t be much good for anything!

When I showed these records to the children their first reaction was ‘they’re huge!’. They are used to music coming to them digitally, in a box small enough to hold in their hand like an iPod, or at the very most coming on a CD which is still only a little bigger than their hand. To see a record which was so large was stunning. Then they assumed that, being so big, it must be able to store huge amounts of music, but were surprised to realize there were only (relative to now) a few songs on it. When I told them that records were also renowned for melting in the sun and could easily be broken, they decided records were best left as part of history as ‘they don’t sound like they were much use’.

Although people tend to think of records as being a part of 20^th century history, their origins date back much further. The early history of, possibly successful, sound recording begins in 1806 when Thomas Young recorded the vibrations of a tuning fork on a wax cylinder. Wax cylinders would later be used, very successfully, to record sound for phonographs and gramophones, but at the time Young used the technology there was no machine to allow him to play the sound back. In 1857 Leon Scott de Martinville created ‘phonoautographs’, but again there was no machine to allow the sound to be played back. In 1877 Charles Cros designed a machine which would not only record sound but actually play it back, but couldn’t find anyone to finance building the machine and in 1881 another inventor, Charles Tainter, came up with a way to record sound (and these were possibly the first ‘records’ as we know them) but yet again he didn’t have a machine to play them back with.

The first to create a way to not only record sound but also play it back was Charles Edison. In 1877 he accidentally discovered a way to record and play back his voice, thereby creating the first, primitive phonograph. He updated his design in 1887. In 1885 Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter teamed up to create the gramophone, another successful machine, which at that time relied on wax cylinders and was popular for many years. In 1888 Emile Berliner created his own version of the gramophone which played actual records – 7 inch discs. For the first time hard rubber copies of the original disks were able to be mass produced and sold making listening to sound (it wasn’t always music) more readily available to the public. In 1896 Fred Gaisberg discovered that shellac was better for making records and in 1904 double sided discs become available. Edison hung on to his wax cylinder technology for many years but he finally gave up in 1913 when his company started to sell ‘Diamond Disc’ playing machines and records. In 1940 shellac was replaced by vinyl and this became the material of choice. Magnetic tape recording technology was actually discovered in 1939 but the technology was mainly used for film. In the 1960s ‘tapes’ started to emerge as a popular alternative to records and in 1980 CDs were created. It would not be until 1988 though that the CD took over as the sound recording device of choice.