It is three decades since one of the darker episodes in electrical engineering history took place in Dunedin. David Loughrey looks back to the 1980s with an excerpt from his soon-to-be-released book Hot Solder: The Andrew Hollison Story*, on the life of an enigmatic and controversial Dunedin electrical engineer.
I first met Andrew Hollison at a party in London St, Dunedin in 1985.
I was struck not so much by his activity - he was disassembling a component from a 6.6kV Reyrolle switchgear he said he had ''obtained'', while around him others were drinking and arguing about music - but by the barely controlled, frenzied energy he brought to his task.
His thin, trembling fingers almost manically untwisted tangled wires, leaving his fingertips red and raw, while the wall in front of his work desk smoked where beads of hot solder had flicked from his shaking soldering iron.
Thirty years later, that energy is still there, yet appears to have all but consumed the man said to be one of the city's brightest electrical engineers.
Many will remember Hollison's greatest and lowest moment, when an unauthorised 1986 experiment that was planned to prove his outlandish ideas ended with him receiving a serious electric shock, and parts of Dunedin's south being left without power for up to three days.
But few will know the background of a man some call a misunderstood visionary, and his dream of introducing what he called ''the human element'' into the city's electricity infrastructure.
That dream certainly almost killed Hollison, but as became clear during a series of interviews taped over the last two years during brief moments he was lucid enough to answer questions, it still consumes his thoughts.
• Few electrical engineers would talk on or off the record about Hollison's work, such is the heated debate his ideas still engender, and those who would, would not allow their names to be used.
But Hollison was described by those around at the time as ''a fool'', ''a maverick'' and a man who was ''terrible at soldering''.
''You shouldn't even use solder for high voltage cables - nobody does that,'' one said.
There was, perhaps, a grudging respect for his philosophies on the merging of man and electricity infrastructure.
For Hollison, his contemporaries were ''inconsequential A-grade morons''.
''I was never respected in the industry, but I knew more about electricity at 12 years old than those dunderheads knew on retirement.
''I could build a 7.5 megavolt ampere synchronous condenser from a ball of string, a mousetrap and a banana by the time I was 5.''
The reasons behind his sacking after six months with the Dunedin City Electricity Department are, to this day, unclear, though Hollison describes it as ''a difference in philosophy'' and denies his inability with a soldering iron had anything to do with it.
• In Hollison's words, the problem with electricity infrastructure was man's tendency to ''hook it up, and stand back''.
He became obsessed with the inefficiencies of ripple control equipment, which is used to turn night store heaters off and on, and make sure electricity users' hot water is hot enough at bath time.
He believed the right human, somehow built into the machine, would superimpose what he described as a ''cleaner'' higher-frequency signal that would produce more reliable baths, and warmer night store heaters.
The key to his ideas are too complex to lay out here, but were a combination of the ''human in the machine'' concept, in which the subject is not earthed, a Faraday cage, and a form of mind control Hollison called ''the spark technique''.
''It works, man,'' he told me.
''All you need is some training and the right attitude.
''If you clear your mind and imagine yourself as, say, a sort of a substation ... ''Hollison drifted off subject at this point, but took it up out of the blue two hours later.
''The electricity can't hurt you, man, unless you let it.
''It's cause and effect, it's oil in water, everything is connected and not connected if you just let it be.
''I had it all together that night, and it wasn't the spark technique that let me down.''
• The night in question was cold but clear; a slight, damp mist could be ascertained in the darkness.
It was perhaps Hollison's own ego that helped bring things undone.
He had set up posters at a Dunedin Sound gig advertising his plans, with the result a small band of chattering, short-haired youths gathered outside the Jutland St substation.
Using a key he had copied during his time with the department, he let the group in.
I was there that night, and remember the element of theatre Hollison introduced to proceedings.
He pulled a steel belt with which he intended to connect himself to the wiring of the ripple control unit from his bag with something of a flourish, and I noticed the handle of the soldering iron he always carried with him was painted gold.
It took some time to remove the panel from the back of the unit, by which time some of the youths had drifted off.
But a core of about 13 watched as Hollison, perhaps a little too confidently, arranged himself inside the ripple control unit, attached wires to his belt, and closed his eyes to silently prepare his mind for the spark technique.
• Few of those who were there, even after 30 years, are willing to even broach the subject of that night.
News reports show Hollison was found blackened and unconscious - but just alive - an hour later by workers responding to a mass power outage in the south.
Certainly nobody called an ambulance, instead fleeing shocked and guilty into the night.
The collective shame of that group lingers, made worse by the constant reminders from tiny scars they carry on their faces caused by drops of solder that exploded across the substation.
Hollison says he has no memory of the night, but defends angrily his decision to use solder to attach the cables to his belt.
''It wasn't a problem with the bloody solder,'' he said.
''Well ... perhaps I could have used more flux.''
* There is no such book, and the above was made up (or was it?).