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Origin of the word \"street\"

Dave Stroman
Dave Stroman Member Posts: 764
Here is another one, where did the word "street" come from, as in "street elbow".
Dave Stroman

Comments

  • In the good old days...

    when oak stave mains were the primary means of transporting water, they would drill a hole in the top of the main to tap a branch in.

    The fitting they used was male by female 90. The male portion was screwed into the oak main and eliminated the need for a nipple. It also held a real close radius to the main so that it didn't stick up too much above the oak stave main.

    Fire plug got its name from the same old good ol' days. When there was a fire, the fire department would tap into the usually shallow main, and put out the fire. Once the fire was out, they'd take their tap out and plug the hole with a wooden tapered plug, hence the term fire plug.

    What does the P in P trap stand for?

    ME
  • Bob_19
    Bob_19 Member Posts: 94
    I Thought

    because it looks like a "P"
  • Don_4
    Don_4 Member Posts: 36
    P trap

    Its shape is a P when laying down.
  • Dave Stroman
    Dave Stroman Member Posts: 764
    P U trap

    I thought it was from what you said when you smelled what cames out of the drain when you don't use one.
    Dave Stroman
  • Jim_22
    Jim_22 Member Posts: 53
    O.K. Then,

    Since we're on terminology, how did a slip joint trap adapter become known as a "disanco"? Or is this discription just common to this area, western NY.

    Jim
  • Mad Dog
    Mad Dog Member Posts: 2,595
    Never heard that term, but

    it is probably regional....like in NYC water disribution lines in a bldg are called "crotons"...out of town plumbers don't know what the hell were talkin about. The name comes from one of the main supply reservoirs for NYC - The Croton. Very cool ME.....when we went thru our Local #2 apprenticeship, we got to see some of the old wood mains.....in fact, a water dept crew founf a still working old wood main in lower manmhattan in the early 80s MDMad Dog

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  • John Abbott
    John Abbott Member Posts: 356
    Desanco

    > Since we're on terminology, how did a slip joint

    > trap adapter become known as a "disanco"? Or is

    > this discription just common to this area,

    > western NY.

    >

    > Jim



  • John Abbott
    John Abbott Member Posts: 356
    Desanco

    Desanco is the commonly used term for a pvc X slip joint adapter. I am old enough to recall the wysco fitting which was the same fitting except copper by slip joint.

    John

  • bill clinton_3
    bill clinton_3 Member Posts: 111
    Thanks, guys,

    You have no idea how many nights I have lain awake trying to work this stuff out. Now I know I can go to my final reward content that I have learned all the important stuff this world can teach me.

    Bill
  • ScottMP
    ScottMP Member Posts: 5,884
    Don't leave just yet Bill

    We did'nt get all the answers!

    My first thought was a P trap was due to its shape, But it may stand for patented. The P.O. asmb (lav drains - Pop up ) actually stands for patented overflow, so maybe thats the P for p-trap. Or is it a Philadelphia Trap ? I know there are Washington traps, and NY traps ( does it have an additude ? :)).

    Now Desanco is one that allways got me. Thats actually pretty common around here.

    How about a manoff sleeve ? Mr. manoff ?

    Esterbrook fitting ?

    Scott

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  • chuck shaw
    chuck shaw Member Posts: 584
    what about a

    Bailey Bend? You know what that is?

    Chuck
  • Wayco Wayne
    Wayco Wayne Member Posts: 615
    I want to be clear

    Is it called a street elbow because it was drilled into a main out in the street?

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  • more questions than answers

    Natick hangers?
    Milford hangers?
    Resnor hooks?
    Denver cross?
  • Jim_22
    Jim_22 Member Posts: 53
    Don't forget

    Don't forget the L.A. Trap! What exactly does that stand for?

    And does the water in the drain really spin the opposite direction below the equator?

    Oww! My head is spinning!


    Jim
  • la trap

    the LA trap is the los angeles city code trap. (former san diegan)
  • It's cuz...

    thats what my pappy tol' me, an' he never lied to me that I'm aware of...:-)

    Actually, it's cuz it was the first fitting to come off the the main in the street, hence the term "street el."

    If they could have had a male by male elbow, they'd have rather, but no one ever produced a male X male elbow.

    What would you call that, double street el?!?

    I'd call it a street corp cock el, cuz thats what it'd be.

    ME
  • Yes it does...

    the real question is "What does it do on the equator? I spent a lot of time in the bathroom aboard a seagoing vessel that crossed the equator, and I can attest to spin on things... but I must have been sleeping when we crossed the equator. Guess I'll have to try again:-) Research...

    Heres a mind boggler. If you are on a train going north at 60 miles per hour, and on a flat bed car of the train you have a pitching machine headed south set for a 60 MPH pitch, and you press a button so that the machine launches the ball just as it going past you, standing on the ground, what does the ball do? Just spin there in outter space for a few seconds, then drop, or does it just drop like a rock.. THUD!

    Anybody got a flat bed rail car and a pitching machine?

    Just yanking your chain:-)

    ME
  • ScottMP
    ScottMP Member Posts: 5,884
    Mark

    If you where in a spacecraft going the speed of light, and you turned your head lights on ....

    would anything happen ?

    Happy yanking :)

    So how about that p-trap ?

    Scott

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  • Jim_22
    Jim_22 Member Posts: 53
    Speed of Light

    And, what is the Speed of Dark?

    Jim
  • Imagin

    If your knees bend the other way,What would a chair look like?
  • Mike T., Swampeast MO
    Mike T., Swampeast MO Member Posts: 6,928


    "Contrary to normal intuition, the Theory of Relativity tells us that light always travels at the same speed relative to some observer, no matter what the relative motion of the observer. Thus, light emitted from a moving airplane does not travel with the speed of light plus the speed of the airplane, it travels with the "speed of light", no matter what the speed of the airplane! In a vacuum, light always travels at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second, no matter how its speed is measured."

    By that measure if you were in a spacecraft going REALLY close to the speed of light and turned on a light that you could see, you would actually see it slowly project.
  • Mike T., Swampeast MO
    Mike T., Swampeast MO Member Posts: 6,928
    Always fun to ponder...

    The air above and around the bed of the flatbed would be moving unpredictably--but certainly NOT at the exact same speed and direction of the train. The speed of the air being dragged along would add to the speed of the train as far as the ball is concerned. If the air is moving 30mph in the direction of the 60mph train and the ball were fired it would appear to a fixed observer to be moving in the direction of train travel at 30mph.

    Were it a fully-enclosed boxcar (air moving at the same speed) with glass sides, it would appear fixed over a point until it impacted with the back of the car where it would bounce off that wall in the same manner as if the train weren't moving.

    Were it in a vacuum I don't believe the ball could make its way out of the barrel--or if thrown by an arm with a cup it would never leave the cup. (Sketchy on this one, but I think this would be the result.)

  • Mike T., Swampeast MO
    Mike T., Swampeast MO Member Posts: 6,928
    NO! NO! NO!

    Now that gets confusing! It would still be moving at the speed of light away from the spacecraft relative to the observer in the craft????
  • Mike T., Swampeast MO
    Mike T., Swampeast MO Member Posts: 6,928
    NO! NO! NO!

    Now that gets confusing! It would still be moving at the speed of light away from the spacecraft relative to the observer in the craft????
  • Mike T., Swampeast MO
    Mike T., Swampeast MO Member Posts: 6,928
    Some alien movie

    did that (Alien base somewhere on a Caribbean island--HUGE satellite dish???).

    Chair looked essentially the same! Since the hip swivels the alien sat facing the "back" of the chair.
  • BillW@honeywell
    BillW@honeywell Member Posts: 1,099
    The speed of light...

    It gets here too damn fast in the morning!
  • Art Pittaway
    Art Pittaway Member Posts: 230
    Hey, they sold those

    chairs in the '70's. Was supposed to be good for your posture if you could live through the leg cramps.
  • ScottMP
    ScottMP Member Posts: 5,884
    YA

    With Charlie Sheen, it was just on.

    They where going to raise the temperature of the earth so ......




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  • bruce pirger
    bruce pirger Member Posts: 111
    I can help!

    Hey Guys:

    FINALLY, something I can talk about here on the wall! In my day job, I'm an astronomer...its just at nights I build the house (unless I'm at the telescope...then it switches around!)

    Yes, if you are traveling near the speed of light, and turn on your lights, they'll go off as normal. You can't tell. What happens is...as you approach the speed of light...transformations takes place (called Lorentz transformation...time dilation, length contraction, etc). As the fellow on the space ship, you look out and would measure the distance between two objects differently than the fellow standing on the moon watching you streak by. Same thing happens with time...you've all heard about going away at the speed of light (or nearly) for a year and then returning to find eveyrone one Earth much older. True story. As you go faster, your clock on your ship will run slower compared to the one back on the moon.

    These are all real things...measured and used everyday in certain branches of physics and whatnot. This is all called Einstein's theory of Special Relativity...and the whole point is that things are relative based on were you are standing/how you are moving. In your own frame, you can't even tell this really...unless you can look outside and see things (like galaxies and all).

    So, with the baseball in the box car...yes, it would appear to be not moving laterally...but it would drop due to gravity. So it would be no different than if the guy on the ground dropped the ball towards his feet. If this happened in a vacuum, no difference...same thing. Only difference would be no chance for a curve ball, as there'd be no pressure difference because of the spin!

    And finally...Einstein also worked his theory of General Relativity which is different...it's basically all about gravity, and explains how "space-time" is actually warped by graviational fields. So in fact light, which has no mass, IS actually effected as it passes by huge gravitational potentials. When the sun eclispes a distant star, measurements actually show that the star appeaars to "move"...becuase the light coming from it is "bent". We also see numerous examples of gravitational lensing and whatnot...very distant galaxies are actually observed "thru" closer galaxies...and the light from the distant galaxies is bent...often creating multiple "copies" of the more distant galaxy.

    You just never know who's hanging out in these forums, eh?
  • Worse yet...

    what happens if your car is going backwards at the speed of light and you turn on your head lights.. CLUNK

    The P stands for pneumatic. Its funciton is to provide a pneumatic seal to avoid sewer gasses coming back into the home. Or so I was told...

    ME
  • HeavyP
    HeavyP Member Posts: 52


    Yeah mad dog, we say croton valves here in lower westchester too. Also use desanco fittings as well. You are right, I get odd looking glances when I say crotons. HP
  • Mike T., Swampeast MO
    Mike T., Swampeast MO Member Posts: 6,928
    Lorentz Transformation

    Hey Bruce,

    Is that what I remember from some sci-fi book I read as a kid?

    They were talking about a VERY fast-moving foot-long ruler passing an observer. Supposedly if it were moving at half the speed of light and you could somehow stop the motion for an instant to see the ruler it would appear significantly shorter (6 inches?). And it would appear ever shorter the closer the speed of the ruler came to that of light? Since it was a book about traveling to a distant star, it of course they explained that while you couldn't go faster than light you could (by attaining light speed and adding yet more energy) reduce the relative distance between objects? (Yes I know that thing about anything with mass being unable to even achieve light speed.)

    Now please try to explain to this dummy how a photon (particle of light) can be a "particle" when it has no mass... Maybe you can put it in terms of a BTU (which has no mass either) but seems much easier to "see".
  • bruce pirger
    bruce pirger Member Posts: 111


    Yep, that's the same Lorentz transformation...It's
    1 / sqrt( 1-v*v/c*c) where c is the speed of light and v is the velocity. So, as v gets closer and closer to c, the v*v/c*c gets very close to 1...so then the 1-v*v/c*c gets very small...and since its all 1/(all that stuff), the factor (called gamma typical) gets huge!

    And best of it...it is real...and before it was realized many things could not be understood.

    No, light (any radiation) is really neat in that it exhibits this "wave/particle duality" as it is called. Just like water ripples on a pond, if you throw two stones in the water, the waves will "interfer" with each other...causing either peaks or troughs or areas of flatness...even though the energy of the wave is moving through that region. Light does this too...it shows interference patters. If you take two coherent light sources, ie two slits in a "mask", the light will actually create an interference pattern...just like the ripples on the pond, the "waves" of light will interfere together and casue peaks/valleys/etc.

    Now light also shows phenomena that are best described by thinking of particles. The photo-electric affect is a good example. Light striking on certain materials will cause electrons to be "emitted" from the material. Sometimes maybe physically emitted, sometimes maybe just "freed" to move around the material. For example in Silicon, when light strikes with the suffcient energy, an electron is moved through the material. If you could arrange this silicon in say a 9um square pattern and count these electrons...you might have yourself a "digital camera"! It's exactly how they work.

    So anyways, in this case, one thinks of the light as particles, called photons, striking the material. For one photon in, one electron out. Of course the material is never perfect like that...so you have to characterize the material to understand how it works, udnerstand the noise issues, dark currents (that's signal that is generated even though there's no light present...from thermal excitation in the material itself).

    I digress....sorry.

    BTU's are a measure of an amount of energy...right? One BTU by definition is how much energy it takes to raise one gallon of water 1 degree F. 8.3 BTU/s/gallon/degree F.

    So that energy could come from burning a fossil fuel...or it could come from light itself. The light from the sun obviously keeps this entire planet warm. So you could then think about how many particles of light, photons, it would take to heat 1 gallon of water 1 degree.

    The answer would be MANY! LOL So turns out the energy of a "photon", a particle of light, is E=h*frequency , where h is something called Planck's constant (which is basically the "standard" of all of quantum mechanics) and the frequency is the frequency of the light (the wavelength...the wave nature of light!) So here in this expression is the relationship between the wave characteristic and the particle energy...kinda neat.

    Let's see...run a few quick calculations...a HeNe laser photon has something like 3.4*10-19 Joules of energy...one BTU is 1,055 Joules...so one Joule requires some 3*10^18 photons from a HeNe laser! A standard little HeNe laser like in a pointer has something like 100 microwatts of power...so if it is one for 10,000 seconds, just under 3 hours, it will deliver about 1 Joule! So 1 BTU takes 1,055 Joules...or therefore over 3000 hours of laser time! And that's only 1/8 of a degree!! LOL So heating my DHW with a HeNe laser would lead to some very cold showers!

    Now, you hear of Star Wars type lasers and what...as in shooting down missiles...those are a whole different story.

    Finally...the photon is "required" to be massless by special relativity...otherwise since it does travel at the speed of light, it IS light, it's mass would become infinite...per the expression above when v=c! Hence the "requirement" that the photon is massless.

    And if you start thinking this is just some "mathematics" and may not be real...the next test of course was the experimental proof of the theory. All other aspects of Special Relativity hold and are experimental fact...so it is therefore accepted that photons are massless.

    NOW, many of course believe that maybe they do have a touch of mass...

    http://www.signaldisplay.com/relativity.html

    Here's one such link I believe. It's not my thing, so I don't know much about it. But as is always the case, folks are trying to think of new things and new ways to explain that which is not understood.

    Last thing...LOL. One of the neatest things in all of astronomy is the "missing mass" or dark matter. When we look at galaxies, we can determine based on their orbit dynamics what the mass of the galaxy must be. But in almost all cases...something very strange happens...and it appears that we only can observe about 10% of the actual mass! So from the dynamical properties, we KNOW using standard Keplerian mechanics (no relativity or anything) what the mass must be...but yet we can't see anything! SO this gives rise to the "missing mass" question...and it truely seems like we can only see some 10% of what MUST be there. Extremely interesting...So folks theorize from exotic sub-atomic particles to very dim stars to all sorts of wild exotic things to explain it. No one knows...

    One idea would be that photons DO have some mass...and if you tweak it around enough, maybe a considerable part of the "missing mass".

    It's fun! And maybe if I burn some of my books in the woodstove, I can keep my family warm during the winter! LOL Sometimes I think that's about all it is good for!
  • jerry_2
    jerry_2 Member Posts: 12
    the speed of light

    "I'm travelling in a rocket at the speed of light..."

    BANG, you are a whole bunch of photons, probably gamma rays. A big nuclear bomb looses only a fraction of an ounce of mass, so you would really light things up. Please be on the other side of the moon when you test this. :)

    Seriously, it was a question very similar to this that got Einstein started on what led to relativity.

    for a really fun introduction to relativity, check out Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland. George Gamow was one of the great physicists of the 20th century, and he leads you through a world where the speed of light isn't too fast (people riding bicycles contract...)

    Now I'm just another computer person in the silicon valley.

    jerry
  • Mike T., Swampeast MO
    Mike T., Swampeast MO Member Posts: 6,928
    Missing Mass

    Surely MANY have thought this but...

    ...since our view of galaxies (from our relative perspective) is a view back in time, why can't the mass that "should" be there have been converted to the very energy that allows us to "see" it now?
  • ScottMP
    ScottMP Member Posts: 5,884
    UH Guys .....

    It was a Joke !!!

    Actually stolen from Stephen Wright.

    " I have a decaffinated coffee table at home ...... you can't tell by looking at it ".

    Scott

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