Reply to post: Re: Do not speak of what thou knowest little....

Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Do not speak of what thou knowest little....

"Even with the set off, the CRT acted as a very efficient capacitor that retained this charge even after a couple of 'shorting to chassis with crossed screwdriver' attempts."

I'm going to be really pedantic here and note that the problem was that the system was an inefficient capacitor that couldn't discharge in a single hit. This was a big problem with early ceramic and paper capacitors too. I was actually involved in designing lightning strike simulation equipment for telecoms, and finding suitable capacitors at the voltages involved was quite difficult, as was designing the noninductive discharge circuitry.

I had several conversations with the then H&SI expert on these things, and what it really came down to was that, as with tobacco and alcohol, if the safety rules applicable at the time had been retrospectively applied to TV sets, they would never have been allowed into production. Our kit had to be designed so that opening the lid was guaranteed to discharge the capacitors before the technician could remove the insulation. You could take the back off a colour TV set while it was working - necessary because of the lack of safe remote controls for the stuff on the neck of the tube.

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