So in England we have the ground prong so our cables are all the same, however I know in the states and other places they don’t, so how come no damage is caused if the positive and negative are the wrong way around?
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AC is alternating current… which prong is positive and which is negative intentionally goes back and forth 50 or 60 times a second, depending on where you live. It’s why your electrical panel makes a humming or buzzing noise.
As a result, most appliances don’t care which is which because it’s always changing anyway. They’re built to take electricity traveling in either direction because that’s exactly what happens. For them, flipping around the plug is no different than having waited 0.01 seconds before plugging it in. Who cares?
Nevertheless, one prong is definitely the more dangerous of the two, and so some appliances are designed around this for safety reasons. They’ll have one prong intentionally bigger, or have a grounded plug (actually safer!) so that it only plugs in one way. Then the safety design will play to the more dangerous of the two main prongs.
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