In Praise of...

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... the Mercury Arc Rectifier. Logically I should be posting a foodie piece as I've just been binge-watching some YouTube of some pretty impressive cooks making some equally impressive food. If you've been cooking as long as I have - nearly half-a-bloody-century [where does the time go?] - you know instinctively when someone is cooking up a culinary storm even on video. But I won't post cooking stuff until I've tried some of these recipes for myself: then I'll put something up. So, apropos of something I came across earlier today - on Pinterest [groan, I know...] - I decided that my topic for tonight's short [I'm hungry now] post would be the extraordinary if almost completely obsolete Mercury Arc Rectifier. Interesting, no? To most people I guess most definitely no, as I would figure that most people would not know what any sort of 'rectifier' was in the first place, let alone the decidedly spooky and slightly scary looking piece of apparatus pictured. I've mentioned several times in these pages about my love and absolute affection for the [original] Museum of Science & Industry in Birmingham, where I spent an inordinate amount of time in my early youth. Anyhow, one of the minor exhibits there was a working mercury arc rectifier, similar to the pictured apparatus, which I found utterly fascinating with its etherial blue/purple glow and dancing electrical arcs; despite not entirely grasping the point or the underlying physics of the thing at the time. Suffice to say I now know both how they work and why they were employed [some still are], but the magic of that glowing glassware has never left me, testament to a time when physical and electrical processes were visceral and obvious, rather than simply black-box tacit...

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