When Did You First See.....?


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So.. instead of us all droning on about how we haven't seen a proper Chimney Sweep, Chestnut Vendor or Hurdy Gurdy Man for ages... I thought it might be interesting to discuss when we FIRST saw things.  So.. anything you like that is now 'normal', but had to start sometime..  I'm thinking household appliances, products, services, etc...

 

For starters.. When did you first see Washing Up Liquid?  As I recall washing soda was still about when I was a kid.  Also, my Mum used to save up all old bits of soap and make it into a sort of jelly, which she used for washing clothes.  I first saw washing up liquid as 'Squeezy' in a plastic bottle which had a mostly black label.  Fairy Liquid came later... to us at least.  Also out there was 'Stergene'..which Mum used for hand washing clothes.. and Stardrops.. which we didn't have.

 

I first saw a Microwave Oven about 1969-70.  They had one at the Picadilly Club in Highbury Vale, because you could get a late pint..if you had something to eat.  They would shove an anaemic looking pie in it and it would come out the same colour, but warm.  I don't recall too clearly, but I think the may have also provided peas..beans or somesuch.  'Adequate'... is probably over generous....

 

Saw my first TV before the Queen's Coronation in 1953... so probs about 1952...possibly even '51.  A neighbour let me in to watch Andy Pandy...  A very dubious program about a puppet, a female doll and a bear..all co-habiting in a basket..  There would be nothing so shocking until 'Man About The House' 20 years later...

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Does the first time I saw my wife count. There used to be an triangular area of ground near my house in Radford sandwiched between the bottom of Kingsford Avenue and the river Leen. It was narrow at the entrance, widening as it followed the Leen on one side with steep banks on the other 2 rising to the gardens of houses on Woodstock Avenue. We always referred to it as the Woodward but the time I knew it there were a few small corrugated iron sheds with a few car repairing garages and a paint spraying place. The remainder was used as part scrap yard and haulage yard. The owner was a local man called Pilkington. He knew that we played there and the understanding was if we didn’t get in the way or cause damage it was fine. One day when I’d be about 13 I noticed a girl standing by the gates. She had brown flared trousers and a pink polo neck jumper and sunglasses. I thought she looked lovely. She asked me if her brother was down there, Dave Flint. She was Jane Flint, Dave’s older sister. Dave was a regular down the woodyard so I went and fetched him. Later that week I bribed Dave with a go on my moped to ask his sister to go out with me. He did and she did. It would have been nice to say we met on a sun kissed beach with a sea like crushed sapphires lapping at our feet and palm trees silhouetted on the horizon but we’ve been married 47 years so it wasn’t so bad.

Having said this I’d actually seen Jane several years before. She was a jewel dancer and I was a street beggar in the Berridge School nativity play, Aladdin in 1964 and I remember being at the side of the stage as the 3 dancers did their bit but I didn’t know who she was. We must have been in the assembly and playground at the same time on many occasions at school.

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14 hours ago, DJ360 said:

Saw my first TV before the Queen's Coronation in 1953... so probs about 1952...

 

In those days television was a 405-line set where you could see two channels - BBC and ITV.

 

By the mid-60s BBC2 was available but you needed a 625-line set and a different aerial. First time I ever saw BBC2 was in 1968-69 when we had a new set at home. It was only black and white, not colour, but it had BBC2 and I didn't know anyone else in our area who had one at the time. It was a talking point for people who came to our house.

 

Now everyone has hundreds of channels, and most of them aren't very interesting.

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The first time I ever saw stereo headphones was in a record shop that sold other electrical gear. That was back in 1966. The shop was on Mansfield Road, Sherwood , next door down from the Garden Gate pub ( I think). We happened to be looking in the window and the shop owner came out and invited us in to take a 'proper' look. When he showed me some posh looking headphones and plugged them into a music centre and I couldn't believe what I was hearing, music coming from both sides of my head. Couldn't afford them at that time.

Another amazement was at Holme Pierrepont water sports centre. Nipped in the watermens restroom for a quick cuppa. That's where I saw this 'thing'  on the table. Something called a "Microwave oven".The men were having lunch and explained what it did and I thought they were winding me up, until they demonstrated with cold apple Crumble and custard. AMAZING !! that was as late as 1978. All true, honest.

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The first fridge we had at home was powered by gas. My then wife to be took some convincing it was not electric but eventually accepted it was true after reading the manual -  she never did quite believe me though when I said the TV was also gas...

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The first time I saw a coffin was when I was five years old. It was my grandfather's funeral. I was in the dining room with my mum when the coffin was brought down the stairs. It had blue flowers on. Everyone was silent when I asked "is that my granddad in that box?" Mum just said "yes" and all was silent again. I stayed at the house in Harrington Drive with a relative while everyone else went to the funeral. I missed being able to talk to him and I wish I could have asked him to tell me about his early life. I was too young. My other grandfather died when I was 14 and so from him I heard lots of stories about growing up in Yorkshire and working in the mill, with endless funny stories!

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On 10/19/2021 at 9:33 AM, Cliff Ton said:

In those days television was a 405-line set where you could see two channels - BBC and ITV.

 

Close Kev.. but ITV did not start until 1955.  You could often tell if locals had it as there was a different aerial.  As kids in the street, we would say 'Have you got 'Commercial'?'

We didn't have it early on.  There was some sort of converter box, but it never worked with our old 1952 Ferguson 12" telly.  We were without TV completely for a couple of years after that died. 

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On 10/19/2021 at 10:32 AM, Brew said:

The first fridge we had at home was powered by gas.

 

When we moved into this house as a 'new build' in 1976..the kitchen had two gas outlets... one for a cooker and the other for a fridge.  Neither of them have ever been used.

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The first fridge we had at our house in Clifton was gas, around 1966-67; we acquired it second-hand from relatives. 

 

I was fascinated because I'd never seen one before, couldn't understand how it could work, and never saw another at any time later.

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After literally minutes of research, I can confirm that 'gas' fridges are technically known as 'Absorption Refrigerators'.  The cooling process is purely based on chemistry and oddly, is driven by heat..which is where the gas comes in.  They have no moving parts, are less efficient than electric 'compression' refrigerators, but are still used in mobile homes etc.. and in situations where surplus industrial heat can be employed for refrigeration.

Below is a link to a simple explanation... so long as you have kept up with your chemistry and thermodynamics...:wacko:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator

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Caravans have a switch on the fridge to choose calor gas or electricity.  Gas  is obviously useful when the van is on a site with no electric!

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  • 8 months later...
On 10/19/2021 at 3:03 PM, loppylugs said:

Worked with an electrician who told his wife that if she went outside and looked she could see the tv pictures going into the aerial.  She did it!  He may have slept on the couch that night.

Reminds me of my sil on a visit to her village of birth. They had built a new fish pond and when she mentioned she’d seen the fish in it, my husband asked her were they wearing underpants ! She answered that she hadn’t noticed but then she went to look , came back to report they weren’t and realised it was a joke.

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In 1975, aged 13, my best mate bought one of the first digital watches for the Kings ransom of £30. It was the Sinclair Black Watch, which appeared to be completely black, no numbers or other detail visible, but when the case was pressed the red LED numbers appeared. Everyone wanted to have a go pressing the case in different places to activate the two different displays, hours & minutes or minutes & seconds. After a week or so of being constantly badgered to show it he got really peeved to the point where he flat out refused everyone.  As I understand it now they really were rubbish with the company having a two year backlog of customer complaints but in 1975, to us, this was cutting edge space age technology 

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I remember those watches; I had one in the mid-70s. At the time it seemed like the future had arrived until I eventually realised that having to press a button to see the time wasn't really a big step forward.

 

Everyone now has a phone which is almost the same size as those watches, and does a million more things.

 

 

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I still have my first digital watch, mine was a ruby red face and press a button lit leds up with the time date etc. Cost me about 30 quid too. I still have my first liquid crystal, it also had a small solar cell built into it, I don't recall the cost, but bought it in Sydney in 1980, lasted a few years until a piace of woof fell while I was working on our first house in Kelso, suburb of Bathurst NSW, cracking the face.. My present watch has a standard face with hands. An el cheapo as I'm pretty heavy on watches.

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DJ360    Did Muffin the Mule come out before watch with mother? 

 

The first time that I saw a mobile phone, was when a bulider came to do some work for us, the mobile phone was the size of a house brick,. I bet it was hard to fit into your pocket.

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First computer 1974 we were visiting from Canada. An old workmate of mine had this machine.  Not sure of the make.  It used a little b/w tv as a monitor and saved to a cassette deck.  He was writing programs on it.  The late mrs. L and I couldn't see much point in it.  Little did we know about how such things would go.

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They had the nickname "Bricks" TOO!!

The first mobile phones were even bigger, My wife was working for a builder developer as an Accountant in Oz, he had one of the big phones, but it was no use in Bathurst, but when he had to go down to Sydney he took it with him, we've come along way since then.

Not forgetting, there were satellite phones back then, cost a fortune and expensive phone calls from them back in the mid 70's.

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I got into computers around 1984 ish, Commadore 64. Back then they were expensive, we bought a dot matrix printer with it, colour monitor. My wife had done computer's and computer languages at university while studying for her BS in business.

I was coming along way with program debugging, wished I'd kept it up, I'd have been fluent in program writing.

At work, we had a group of us who swapped programs, damned things cost a fair bit back then too, and the stores photocopier did a roaring trade in copying the programs paperwork. We had a couple of guys who knew many at the local power station who had the Com64, so no shortage of programs being traded between us all.

My first REAL computer was a Texas Instrument tower, picked up at the bargain price of $600 around 1991, loaded a random Morse Code generator program into it, learned the code, got up to around 7 words per minute, and passed may ham radio test for novice, Technician and General in one sitting, plus the 5WPM code. Still needed to get my speed up to 13wpm, to be licensed to General though.

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DJ, my first fridge was an electric one that worked on the same principle, no compressor at all. Father In Law gave it to us when I married the first wife. Made it last for a long time, then retired it for an Italian make in the mid 70's. It had a small freezer at the top. I used to freeze orange juice for work, I worked at Boulby Mine then and the mine was very hot, so a quart of orange juice lasted all shift in the insulated food boxes the company provided in all the snap cabins.

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8 hours ago, Oztalgian said:

Not a digital but I bought a cheap knock off "Lolex" at the markets in Penang, still going strong after 30 years, just a battery now and then.

 

Similarly I bought @RadFordee a Gucci copy in Ensenada Mexico over 30 years ago which still runs. $8 as I recall

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  • Cliff Ton changed the title to When Did You First See.....?

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