Thanks, I’d never heard of that before.
Well the patent clearly says “novelty” wire gauge, so clearly this only pertains to wire used in joke and magic shops.
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In Italy It’s also used in some cases for street lighting, because it’s slightly cheaper and less likely to be stolen by a Darwin Awards candidate.
That’s a very special purpose wire that I never ran into during my internship. That I even ran into aluminum wire was a surprise to my instructor.
Cool. I want one of these, but I want it to do something else.
…maybe I’ll carry around that pocket wire gauge after all. 
It can probably open bottles too
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Closely aligned markets: the cables were the hard-to-obtain and expensive part of a suspension bridge. (And Emily Roebling was the real brains of the outfit!)
It’s not the 1970’s aluminum wiring that scares me - it’s the 1950’s cotton-and-gutta-percha Romex. I don’t know how many old Romex cables that I’ve found that crumble at a touch, leaving the conductors bare.
Knob&tube, by contrast, is usually quite sound. I leave it alone it it looks to be in decent condition. Cloth Romex has to be pulled out post-haste, it’s a fire waiting to happen. Aluminum is OK as long as the connectors are built for Cu-Al bonding and are in good condition.
You also see copper-clad steel wire in antenna applications, where (1) it needs high strength-to-weight, (2) the skin effect means that the relatively poor conductivity of the core isn’t important.
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Makes sense. I mostly bent conduit and pulled wire for industrial and agricultural applications. Hanging high-tension wire or radio was a bit beyond me, although I did learn the math for it.
I think better than a gizmo that only measures one kind of wire, even if that is the most common kind, is a book that had tables for lots of different kinds of wire resistances. And for something manufactured to pretty tight tolerances, like magnet wire, I go with the manufacturer’s specification.
Isn’t aluminum still used pretty commonly in the high-current side of residential wiring? I know that the SER cable landing in all three of the breaker boxes I’ve had to work in was Al, and in two of those cases I watched it being installed. The visual difference is a very handy reminder of where the scary part is.
Disclaimer: I’m not an electrician - just an engineer who literally knows just enough to be dangerous…
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Back when I did this stuff 25 years ago, it was highly discouraged and against code for most applications. Mostly because everyone was paranoid after several house fires in the 80’s and 90’s were traced to old aluminum wiring. You were only supposed to buy the stuff if you were replacing existing wiring. A brief search of modern day codes and it seems that aluminum is back on the menu. Even Home Depot sells a variety of the stuff, I could even run travelers for 3-ways all in aluminum.
Horribly, some combination of price pressure and human perfidity has led to “copper clad aluminum” (‘CCA’ for short) showing up in low end ethernet cabling.
Higher resistance makes PoE much more problematic; and being significantly less malleable makes cable runs and terminations an absolute nightmare in terms of cracks and bad connections creeping in. Run away screaming.
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And… The Cincinnati Roebling Bridge to KY. Model for the Brooklyn Bridge!
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