Hell, I’ve even seen people rip them off to fit 3 prong plugs into 2 prong extension cords. I’m sure it’s not safe, but I dont know why and why they would be necessary sometimes and sometimes not.
In: Engineering
It’s a safety feature that appliance manufacturers starting using in the 70’s.
Let’s say you drop a toaster with a metal exterior and it gets dented. Unbeknownst to you, the location of the dent on the toaster is directly over an exposed wire in the toasters circuitry. The inside dent of the metal toaster is now touching the exposed wire where the dent is. When you plug in the toaster and move it, the electrical current will is not going to toast your bread, instead it is going to travel through YOU. However, if the manufacturer had the foresight to install a wire connecting the inside of the metal frame to the ground (the third prong), the current will instead travel through the ground wire and trip a breaker instead of shocking you.
The toaster example isn’t something that would be likely to happen today as 99.9% of toasters made today have plastic exteriors (for your safety). But any appliance you see with a third prong has it as a safety measure in the circumstance that the circuitry should fault in an exposed part of the appliance.
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