Why Europe uses 240V at 50Hz but America uses 120V at 60Hx
In: Technology
Not a technology question, this is a history question. It’s really hard to change electricity format once you have a bunch of users. If they have to throw out all their appliances and buy new ones, you have a “villagers with pitchforks” moment.
Europe and America were days away by steamship, nobody would ever carry an electrical appliance with them on travel, there was absolutely no reason for them to have the same format, or voltage, or plug shape, or … . Skip ahead to today, when everybody carries electronic gadgets with them everywhere – Well the folks in the 1880s got it wrong. Alas, they’ve been dead for centuries so they “got away with a mistake”.
They designed their grids independently. No one ever thought it would matter because if you were in one spot, you couldn’t be buying electronics from the other spot.
All of Europe needs to agree because they share power grids, same with the US and Canada, and it was a lot easier to import electronic from across a land border than it was across the Atlantic back then, so it didn’t really matter that they were different.
100 years later, when everything is so much more interconnected, it would be so much work to change all the grid to one system, make millions of devices obsolete, and we couldn’t even agree on a single system.
The electrical grid was setup independently in multiple nations simultaneously with competing standards and patents. The concept of a unified grid standard wasn’t on their mind, selling appliances was.
Keep in mind power back then was not as ubiquitous and arguably necessary for life like it is now.
Edison’s genius wasn’t selling lightbulbs, it was selling the powergrid needed to turn them on. By having a standard that was protected by patents you had to buy your appliances from Edison to work on his grid.
Ultimately though Tesla’s AC system was proved better than Edisons DC system and won out.
North America standardized on a 110v 60hz system, while Europe setup a 220v 50hz system independently.
Those responsible for the European and UK power grids did their own thing, deciding what form of current was best for their purposes. This is also why outlet types are different, different companies made their own unique plugs.
Tesla actually recommended a 220/240 volt grid and 60hz but no one at the time listened to him. Today only a few countries (like South Korea) use this setup.
Power grid standardization today would be nigh-impossible and impractical. You couldn’t force consumers to through out and re-buy their devices en-mass like that purely to change to a global standard.
Most electronic devices today use switching power supplies that enable them to work on any grid making this mostly irrelevant.
[removed]
50 is half of 100 and 60 is like 60s in a minute so they are rounds numbers. it just so happens that around this range is optimal for normal use
Early light bulbs worked best at 120V. DC power plants used 250V with 2 loads in series and a third wire to balance the difference as these low voltages had huge transmission losses. The AC grid retained the split phase system in America. Europe went with the simpler straight 240V which was more efficient anyway.
While 120V is safer, european standards are designed so the average person will never touch the electricity.
When power systems were first introduced, there was no standard. Eventually a “war of the frequencies” broke out. Many companies were trying to find the best compromise of frequencies to run both motors (mainly for industrial purposes) and lights, plus being able to transmit the power over long distances. High frequencies lose their energy quicker than low frequencies, but at too low of frequencies, lights visibly flicker.
Most people found that somewhere between 50Hz and 60Hz is best to run motors and lighting systems while also allowing for long transmissions with the materials they had at the time.
From there, basically the system chosen by the largest company would become the standard because tool and appliance manufacturers would make equipment that would be bought and used by the most people possible.
In the US, Westinghouse was the winner, and their system was 60hz. In Europe, it was AEG and they had chosen 50hz.
As for the voltages, early Edison light bulbs required 55 volts of DC power to operate, and s 2 bulbs in series would need 110V. So it was for that reason that Westinghouse built his AC systems off of that same voltage.
However, higher voltages are easier (and cheaper) to transmit. A lot of testing was done with increasing the voltages of US grid systems until we found that 220V would have been ideal. But so many people had stuff on the 110V system already that it became usfeasable to change all the systems to 220V, so we kept it at 110 (actually, we send 220 to homes and then split it into 2 110V rails to run our stuff, with some exceptions like ovens and welders and such). Luckily for Europe, the US had learned these lessons before their grid systems were really taking off and so they basically just started theirs at the 220V range.
And lastly, because of system losses, they bumped those voltages up to 120V and 240V instead of sending out 110V and 220V.
I’m a noob at this. Let’s say I have a product rated for 240V from the UK and I bought it over to the US and just used a converter plug. Will this burn my equipment?
I know stuff from the US at 120V will definitely burn in the UK because I experienced it first hand.
My city was on 25hz until Hydro Québec tookover.
Old mines had these insane electromechanical wheels to convert before electronics were the norms when the switch happened
My dad told me you could visibly see a bit of flicker. Wasnt the best.
It wasnt completely done until the early 60s
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the US is 120V per say. Household voltage is 240v single phase with the phase split resulting in 120v- typically urban residential transformers are delivering 240v three phase in a star configuration which gets split off between the phases. Commercial is usually 208v three phase delta, and light industrial and some commercial is 480v three phase, a lot of times for lights they split the phases for 277v. Big industrial operations can utilize kvs from the grid.
One thing to note, every home in Canada and the USA gets 240v service.
[this video does a good job explaining it. ](https://youtu.be/jMmUoZh3Hq4?si=hNzqbnbFEVT9EpYn)
Latest Answers