Wow, you people were (are?) dangerous
.
Well, it's not that I never set anything alight or blew something up...
A friend and I had a time when we just had to set light to things. Mainly the Matchbox (no, Suki cars, the German equivalent) car collection I had inherited from my uncle - shame on me! We rigged them up with petrol + electric igniters and staged extensive accidents... Many a beautiful classic model car has been ruined by me
. Stupid kids...
My first experiments with mains voltage were not very succesfull. Flashes and bangs were quite common and then the telling off from my mum afterwards.
First 220V electric shock: Age 3. I put a knitting needle and a cork screw into a socket, I'm surprised im still alive after that
Funnily I can still remember that exactly.
When I was 9-10 years I used to take everything apart that had a plug on it and collected the pieces. I then tried to make something out of them. In those days I had not the slightest idea what I was doing so I used cardboard boxes as "project boxes". To stop the things inside from rattling about I stuffed the boxes with cotton, wool, cloth, paper whatever I could lay my hands on. One day I managed to hook a battery, a slider pot and a galvanometer up so that I could control the meter with the slider pot. It was fantastic!
There was just one snag: In the lowest position of the slider pot the pot would start smoking. No problemo, just don't slide it all the way down
. Somehow by accident I must have left it on a cushion on a garden chair and the pot started to heat up until the cardboard "project box" caught fire. My mum was inside and saw the blaze through the window.
That was one of the few times she actually hit me and locked me in my room
.