I have just done my electrical safety refresher course and when I was changing yet another blown light bulb in our house I began thinking about the safety of the actual sockets.

All sorts of work, backed up by regulations, is done to make things as electrically safe as possible, such as doing periodic safety checks, limitations on who can do what, insulating sleeves around the live and neutral on mains plugs, a protruding shroud on extension cord sockets, prohibition of the sale of some second hand electrical goods, to name just a few.

So then why is it that it so easy to stick your finger into a live lamp socket? Sure, most lamp sockets are on the ceiling but there are plenty of desk lamps, bedside lamps, wall mounted lamps etc from which you can get zapped. On a technical point, and I don’t want anyone to test this, the shock received would only be across a couple of centimetres of skin so it may not be fatal.  The fatal electric shocks are those where the electricity passes though the chest area where the heart is located.