Why can’t the whole world agree on one electrical plug to use?
In: Engineering
In the early days there were lots of grids with different standards. These had different requirements for the plugs. There were different voltages, frequencies and standard amperage in addition to different safety standards and costs. For example due to a shortcomming in materials after the war the UK safety standards were very lose so that sockets were unfused meaning you needed higher safety standards for plugs. Another issue was that grids close to each other running on different standards needed plugs that could not be mistaken for each other.
There are a lot of work standardizing on electrical plugs. When the grids were nationalized instead of regional grids there were few enough plugs and appliances that most were able to switch over to the new standard quite easy. However the current approach to standardize across the continent such as Schuko and Europlug have to be backwards compatible with all older systems in the transition period. And because buildings have a long lifetime the transition period is equally long. And not all older systems can be made compatible with each other without other intermediary standards. However we are now at a point where most European homes are using the same standard with only a few countries lagging behind.
Because it would be very hard to switch, and not worth it most of the time, some plugs are rated for different voltages and made for different electrical systems, and sometimes adapting doesn’t always work in all cases, for example British plugs are made for a different electrical system than European ones
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