When the first power lines were pulled to a certain place, there was already a lot of trouble. While it was sensational that people no longer had to carry lanterns, candles, and torches around, and that they no longer had to fiddle with torches that filled rooms with smoke and posed a fire hazard, electricity was not always an ideal solution either.
For example, some places burned down because of this one incident, and soon there were fires on the roofs as well. Because of this, they try to reasonably explain to people who have just lost their property that it was their fault! For example, that I should not have replaced the fuses with nails to cut costs, that I should not have spread dry straw directly under light fixtures that I had no guarantee would not burst, that I should not have run electrical lines through areas where flammable materials were prevalent, etc.
Time has moved on since those days, progress has not stopped for a moment, and we are in a very different situation than we were then. We already have much safer wiring protected by much better insulating materials, we have circuit breakers or at least much better fuses, we have impeccable switches, sockets, splitters, and extension cords. And even the appliances we connect to electricity at home are more complete and filled with all kinds of fuses in case of emergency. And we have lots of instruction manuals and official regulations that say we should be safe.
Yet we often find ourselves in trouble somewhere, big or small. Sometimes it is fate, sometimes it is an unexpected malfunction, but most of the time we humans are solely responsible.
Because you know how it is: …… Even if teenagers and stupid children are told not to touch a power line on the ground, they will still go and touch it. And if no such power lines have fallen, they will calmly climb onto the roofs of the station cars and before you know it, they will be serving as grounding for thousands of volts. There are housewives who talk about putting out the kettle or keeping an eye on the hot iron, but when they light the kettle to boil tea and half an hour later the kettle starts to catch fire, they rush to put out the fire and leave the hot iron on the handkerchief that they have just ironed. Another clumsy man who calls himself the breadwinner of the family convinces his wife that he would not call an electrician if her husband could easily change outlets and switches by himself.
There are many such and similar cases! People are incredibly unteachable. I could go on for a long time about these fools. But now is not the time. [17] I\’m about to take a bath with a hair dryer. …… [18].