Power Lines - 1944 British Council Film Collection - CharlieDeanArchives / Archival Footage
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ก.ย. 2024
- An amusing and informative introduction to the manufacture of power cables, set to an jaunty musical score.
'The manufacture of cables for transmitting electric power is shown. Copper bars are rolled and drawn into wire, which is twisted into strands, and covered for insulation and protection with layers of rubber, lead, cloth and paper. The completed cables are then given high-voltage tests before being dispatched from the factory.'
(Films of Britain - British Council Film Department Catalogue - 1946)
This film has been made available for non-commercial research and educational purposes courtesy the British Council Film Collection. . The British Council Film Collection consists of 120 short documentaries made by the British Council during the 1940s designed to show the world how Britain lived, worked and played.
View, download and play with the Collection at www.britishcouncil.org/film .
CharlieDeanArchives - Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
Having worked as a Meter reader for 34 years, starting with the old YEB- Yorkshire Electricity Board - I found this absolutely fascinating and superbly made. Notice how all the workers are portrayed with great dignity and not condescended to as they would be today. The manufacturing process demonstrated great expertise. Robin Witting
You read electric metres for 34 years all for paper!, what a boring life.
@@obviouslytwo4u And I suppose you are a Formula One driver .
I find the "man on the street" narrator so condescending that this is just unwatchable. Tastes vary.
@@obviouslytwo4u Boring at times yes, but not so boring when you're wrongly arrested and de-arrested by the police, not so boring when you're perched on the A-frame of a trailer being attacked by three dogs, not so boring when you're being held in the house by customers, not so boring when you're holding a sachet with mammoth fur in it, not so boring when you're reading the electricity meter of Desperate Dan's blacksmith (I kid you not), not so boring when you're speaking to war veterans, not so boring when a woman with a Zimmer frame is coming on to you. Humble as the job was I turned out in all weather's to provide for my family. They come first. I have spoken with street cleaners and shown them due respect. Robin Witting
@@johnofypres Thank you, Robin Witting
Without history there can be no future, love these films.
@MichaelKingsfordGray What? No hyphen?
So very true
Wonderful. It is not wildly different now and some of the machines seen are still in use today. As an industry I love everything about it. Great little film. Thanks.
The National Grid is one of the forgotten heroes of WW2. The first national supply system was completed just in time for WW2 and allowed electricity to be supplied even when a local distribution centre was damaged and out of action by re-routing the electricity.
it was also never meant to be. it was a group of engineers who said "I wonder what would happen" and one night just tried it
@@simpleNomadUK funny, but no it was meant to be. It all came out of a need to unify all the local electricity supply system in the UK in WW1.
It was astonishing the technology we evolved to make cables like this.
Great film! So many great features, especially for the time.
I expect much of this was filmed at the huge Pirelli General Cable Works at Southampton and Eastleigh. The Southampton site was in operation between 1914 and 1990 and also manufactured PLUTO (PipeLine Under The Ocean) to supply fuel to allied forces fighting in Normandy.
I think with all the fantastic technology and amazing smelting and chemical processes they got to a point where they said" How are we going to solve this?" "Oh throw a tree in there, that might help!"
British Council discovered the "oddly satisfying" genre of videos more than half a century before the advent of TH-cam
This was filmed during WW2. With V1 and V2 rockets dropped all over the place. They must have had crews working 24/7 making cable to repair damaged lines.
A British film using a Western Electric sound system, interesting!
They had the Patents!
All that spinning machinery is hypnotic and kinda scary! Of course today none of the cables are made of copper. Its all aluminim.
Some of the old stuff still out there though, particularly in substations, which you can always tell because all the conductors are bright green! It's amazing to think that some parts of the 132kv grid in this country is now more than 80 years old!
Very interesting...
Thanks for sharing.
Very scary open spinning machinery in use. And the baby at the end held in front of the UV lamp!!! OMG.
That first statement, “I am an engineer.”, scared the crap out of me. I work engineering so I know how we can be.
That set the tone of the film for me. "I am clever and understand these things". "You are not and we will try to explain it to you"
Alvar Lidell plays the part of the person in the street and is tutored by the clever engineer.
80 years old and still looks relevant today. Wonder how much of this proces is stil used now? BTW...shows that wars are not just won by bombs and bullets factories.
Pretty sure they're not throwing trees into the molten copper any more!
Ingenious stuff but a health & safety nightmare today.
Hmmm, dont know about this electricity thing, just like the internets it will never catch on...
The technology might be different bit the method is still the same amazing
Paper insulation and lead covering, much superior and considerably cheaper products used today. Although they did the job and with a greater safety margin than that today.
I just commented that i recently scrapped some pre-war cable. That insulation does not last. It becomes brittle over time and crumbles away.
It was amazing that the large amount of Copper could still be imported from Rhodesia considering World War Two had not yet ended.
''Power lines. A Merton park production.
Me imagining I'm Riffrax ''5 people died in Merton park due to broken power lines. May God bless their souls.''
Even then the music was horrible and intrusive and chased away viewers. Thanks for the video as it is quite informative.
Idiot remark.
i recently scrapped some pre-war electric cable. it was indeed wrapped in paper impregnated with something sticky with an outer layer of fabric. But it had aged pretty badly; very crumbly and very unsafe. Nice copper though ;)
That sticky substance would likely have been an inert, non conductive waterproof gum called Gutta-percha which was frequently used in electric cables and comes as a sap from from an Malaysian tree then polymerised.
Bizarrely I found it smeared on the back walls of my house to make them waterproof. Its the devils job to get it off. It was put on there in about 1850 and I was scraping it off in 2020!
@@brianthesnail3815interesting. not sure if it's the same... my gunk was easily crushed and removed. I also got some outdoor wire that was shielded in lead in that batch. good picking!
... well made mini documentary... despite the annoying camp second fiddle
When this film was made we were fighting the world war Britain was still barely hanging on.
I guess this was made before D-Day june1944. The fact that they ran cables across the channel not mentioned.
My father was in the Royal Signals during WW2 and was involved with the cable under the channel, he used to listen in to Winston Churchill's telephone conversations.
You could mention that a telephone cable was laid under the Atlantic 100 years earlier th-cam.com/video/yC6WOZ3FiZE/w-d-xo.html
5:06 Wouldn't want that job, one kick and you are wrapped up in red hot copper. However this fellow would have to make a brilliant cricket umpire.
7:07 No guards at all around these spindles. probably doing 400 rpm they would easily kill you if you stumbled into them.
8:49 No mention of the Asbestos that used to be mixed with the rubber to give it greater strength and heat resistance.
Ah well..........!
@@Ivorbiggin The dangers of Asbestos have been known of since the time of the Greeks. They found their slaves mining it lasted longer when given wet rags to cover their faces. But the comment was more of a practical warning to anyone working with the old style wire today.
Come with me
And you'll be
In a world
Of OSHA violations
@@whysosyria1 I read what you did there...
Wicked!
❤
if the Britons were already producing these "relaxed & positive newsreel" it means that they were aware that the fate of war turned to victory....moreover these men in their late 35/40 years and more enjoyed the immense advantage of not being on European or Asian battlefield
"You just can't describe the effect in words. Let the music do it."
Err - rather not, the music is mental.
Though still better than rap
I agree, I couldn't stand it!
turn audio off go sub titles no problem
I was fine with the music, but the idiotic "man-on-the-street" narrator made the video unwatchable for me.
"I am an engineer. I will narrate this video by saying useful things and explaining what's going on."
"I'm the man on the street. I'll just interrupt with stupid sh*t about coffee cups and how you can't describe it in words, even though the other guy just, you know, described it. In words."
How much that thick copper wire per metre today
to day variants of aluminum surfise lighter stays cooler equals more volts/amps
I invented these cables.
1944? I can't help but think that there was something more pressing going on than making films about wires.
I think it was intended more as a training / educational film for people working in the industry... Civilian life still went on....
I wonder why the film producers decide that the viewers need to be bombarded with music.
This anti music fashion is really tedious, just a new way to get some like's, shows that the net is really a retarded hive mind for co dependent moron's, I feel sorry for people who cannot listen to music and absorb information at the same time.
@@Kidraver555 Anti-music? The problem is the music is too loud as well as ill-suited to the subject matter. It was probably chosen by an overworked editor from a library on description alone. In 1944 ordinary people didn't have record players. They might have had access to a piano and sheet music. The plain fact is today's audience are far more educated in their tastes and you can't just slap any old music on a video.
You're joking, right? Most videos nowadays on TH-cam have pointless loud music dubbed over everything including people speaking so it's difficult to follow what they're saying. For the hard of hearing it's a total nightmare and totally irritating to many others. I'm waiting for the technology that gives you the ability to switch the dam thing off and just have the natural background sound.
@@Kidraver555 Well you're a breath of fresh air! By the way you left yourself out of your little list of defective people. Add Tiny minded to the edit.
beautieful clean coal....☺
Coal is still the main provider of the world's energy
"I'm The Man In The Street," remarks the second narrator, expertly rolling plumb over palate and thus indicating his superior breeding to other Men In The Street. Still, at least this was a change from the phony generic working class "Cor...fancy that then!" incredulity that was usually affected by voice wallahs in instructional films of that era.
Great film, but dreadful musical accompaniment...more appropriate to a circus !
1:59 "What romance lies there, in those tunnels underneath the streets on which we walk?"
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! None whatsoever. It's a bleeping cable conduit and you need to get overyourself.
in what universe did england have more wire criss crossing the land than any other country
This one.
@@trialen I'm a power lineman and building power lines has been my career for 26 years and there is no way England had more line miles than the US even during the war LA alone would have had more.
@@ottohoekstre9732 The British national grid was completed in 1932.
@@trialen this movie was made in 1944 the US grid was completed before the war
He said more miles per head of population, not simply more miles.
Do real people talk with that accent?
No, not nowadays! Many people nowadays can barely string two intelligible words together!
Start with Brief Encounter. Of course they were real, but the British class system was far more evident in those days. Being the war, commentators were expected to sound confident and encouraging. That’s the way it was.
But then compare with 4 Weddings and a Funeral. There you have a mix of commonised posh, refined posh, nouveau riche posh, socially merged with just a soupçon of working class. Oh, yes the system hasn’t gone away entirely.
@@josephinebennington7247 Informative answer, I had noticed that the new readers on BBC sound nothing like that. I was curious if that emoting or a real regional accent.
@@welcome741 Bbc TV and Radio presenters at serious News Level and Reporting are usually using Received Pronunciation. Clear, accurate and usually non-regional. However, on general consumption info, or music channels there is a great move to diversify accents and dialects and bring in regional or even foreign accents.
Apart from politicians like Rees Mogg who deliberately lay it on thick, you won’t hear a plumby accent theses days, but you might hear an Eton enthusiastic school boy voice like our Prime Minister’s
When Britain was called Great Britain..now it's the laughing stock of the universe
You'll find most people have better things to think about than whether a country is a laughing stock or not.