Standards get adopted for lots of different reasons. In a case like this, it would be because the first electric companies had their own standards based on their equipment. As those companies spread their services to more people, machines were built to use the local standard. People weren’t getting toasters shipped from other countries for the most part; everything would be made more or less in your area, to fit your local standards. There was no reason to care if the UK and the USA had a different system of volts and hz. Now, so many things are built to accommodate whatever your local standard is that shifting to something new would be a big expensive problem requiring you to replace a tone of machines and infrastructure. On top of that, there isn’t a strong reason *to* change, since there really just aren’t that many issues with one place having a slightly different standard than another. And, even if you did want to change, what standard should you adopt?
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