View Single Post
Old 6th Jan 2019, 6:21 pm   #34
G6Tanuki
Dekatron
 
G6Tanuki's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
Posts: 13,998
Default Re: Is Ever Ready still a part of your life?

There was another Ever Ready battery I recall from the 150s/1960s.

A fat, metal-cased one about 2 inches diameter and 4 inches long. 1.5V - the top of it had a coarse thread on the outside and a central contact.

On to the coarse thread screwed a chromed housing with a push-to-make switch, and a protruding metal tube about six inches long. On the end of the tube was a fitment that contained a small, exposed coil of wire.

Press the button and after a second or so the wire glowed red - you then used it to light your gas-cooker.

While this worked just fine with old-fashioned town-gas, it seemed that natural gas was rather more reluctant to be ignited this way because these lighters faded from significance rapidly after we were all Natural-Gas-ized, to be replaced by much more-compact 'sparker' devices powered by a couple of "C" batteries.

These in turn became obsolete with the introduction of cookers with auto-ignition.
G6Tanuki is offline