When I was a kid my Dad took me & my brother to the Edison Tower in Edison NJ to look at the exhibits there & they supposedly had a light from Edison's time, possibly even made by Edison's lab. The explanation was that they kept it at very low voltage, just enough to glow, & it would last much longer that way.
The records referred to could easily exist, as the time the fire house was wired & the light installed would be a big deal mentioned in the logs & in the newspapers.
I like how they used it to find matches to light the kerosene lanterns.

The New Yorker had an article about 10 years ago about the second accident & the usefulness of the injuries sustained by the men present in studying what happens when you expose someone to high levels of radiation.
As far as what were they thinking, it was probably much the same as any of the folks over at Instructables, just with much more dangerous stuff. These ideas & this stuff was all so new & so rare & expensive, not to mention just plain interesting from a physics point of view, they were experimenting/playing with it.
Evil, in a sense, perhaps even more fascinating, in another sense.

A machine to blow farts & dust bunny chum over me as I sleep.
Somehow a ceiling fan seems to keep me cool, let me keep a sheet & a light blanket over me, & not be so ridiculous.

I looked through the Dangerous Book for Boys in about 3 minutes at a clients house & felt the only danger was to to ones cash flow. There's nothing even remotely dangerous in there as I recall & nothing that compares to the stuff we used to get out of the library as kids in the 60s & 70's. Instructables "no liability" section is much more fun & dangerous.
I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the neon light transformer I've got stashed in the recesses of my shop.
Peace
JJS

It's obvious they're fake, if they were real his asking price would be in good ole Murican dollars, fercrissake.

If you don't want to need cold weather gear, think June at the earliest. May if you are really hardy, not just think you are.
Peace
JJS

I believe the best solution comes from The Kid From Brooklyn, a clip of the full video is available here- http://www.thekidfrombrooklyn.com/video_disp_preview.asp?videoid=17

I wish her still had it up for free, or if anyone knows of a source for it. It is about the cops searching for weapons on bat day at Yankee Stadium. He figures that if you just issue a Louisville Slugger to each passenger as they board then security will be no problem.
I guess folks need to accept that giving up freedom to protect freedom is the fastest way to loose your freedom. I may not have to be willing to face the British on the local town square but I do have to be willing to accept some level of risk if I want to have a reasonable wait time at the airport. Or just have someone w/some brains that are not corned beef w/delusions of grandeur handle security. Every time I hear a report about the TSA/HS doing something stupid or killing some innocent person I here the mother from the Adam Sandler bit screeching "they'll laugh at you!!". Please other citizens of the world, if you come to visit & actually make it out onto the street, get to know some of us. We're not all that silly.
Peace
JJS

You also have to count in gravitational effects, if the flow is low enough. I was working in Chinhae Korea a few years back & thge water pressure was horrible, no mater what time you showered. When some else showered it got to be ridiculously bad, such a low flow I, not know for patience & tolerance, was greatly amused by how little water could actually flow out. The problem was worse when the shower in the adjoining room was used. I dropped the hand held unit at one point while Dave was using said shower & discovered that I got almost 100% flow. I then took all my showers sitting down, & never said a thing about my discovery.
Peace
JJS

A building code requiring handrails in this situation would do much to prevent easily preventable falls & the very real difficulty of another member of the family complaining endlessly about hand prints from folks descending the staircase & holding onto the walls for balance.
All the requirements dictated by building codes have been pushed through more from an insurance angle rather than a bank angle. Figure out why buildings collapse, flood, or burn, & build the next time so whatever the cause was it so it doesn't fail catastrophically, more than occasionally with a loss of life. I like building codes, having lived in several places w/uninspected or grandfathered doors or stairs that would give me a nasty knock of the head if I didn't duck. & I'm only 5'10".

A couple of things. First, the British list lays out the procedures that, if the American EPA protocol was more exacting about list all them, would make the EPA list just as long. Second, why breathe more mercury than you need to? Put on a mask, fer chrissakes. Lastly, the New Yorker has a rather interesting article on the use of to do lists being developed for ICU's & the amazing effect on infection, length of stay, & mortality. Sometimes a thorough protocol can save a huge amount of trouble.

The is the brace & bit, a larger drilling apparatus. As was said above, the hand drill is very old, I've several of them & got them as hand me downs from dad, & at flea markets. Good ones will go for $5.00 at a flea market, sometimes with a screw off cap on the end of the handle still holding drill bit. The Yankee screwdriver is another good one. It can install & remove screws.
Check out woodcentral.com for more info on old tools.

You could check John McPhee's "The Control of Nature". He talks about the fire & mudslide cycle in the San Gabriels & says that these round stones are what make make up the "mud slides". The theing to figure out is the divot in the top, I'd say.