---
created_at: '2015-10-12T12:07:21.000Z'
title: Why Every Country Has a Different Plug (2009)
url: http://gizmodo.com/5391271/giz-explains-why-every-country-has-a-different-fing-plug
author: JacobAldridge
points: 48
story_text: 
comment_text: 
num_comments: 57
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1444651641
_tags:
- story
- author_JacobAldridge
- story_10373969
objectID: '10373969'

---
![](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--o_uihaNT--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/18mn6p37pcy2gjpg.jpg)

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in
widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who's ever
traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny
story\!

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the
sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida,
you won't be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy
a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able
to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your
flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to
buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that's
cool\! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you\! And parts
of Nigeria\! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn't support 240v power
natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

Advertisement

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the
Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across
the world.

I'd hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country's culture,
because they're plugs—they don't really mean anything. But in the sense
that they're probably not going to change until they're forcefully
replaced with something wildly new, it's kind of what they
are.

## What's Out There

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)

Advertisement

Click for larger

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by
whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we're
going to stick with [U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade
Administration
names](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CA4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ita.doc.gov%2Fmedia%2Fpublications%2Fpdf%2Fcurrent2002final.pdf&ei=MnboSqTTHtTdlAf9wpj9Bw&usg=AFQjCNHsDqIMskNIE2F4O-rd6A2_rd8Z8Q&sig2=8E4MDqwwsI1Q9AC6ypW99g)
(PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs\!
Turkey uses type C\! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the
letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less
confusing—they don't actually mandate anything. They're not standards,
in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the
110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the
220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It's not that
the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or
another, but the devices and power grids they're attached to probably
are.

Advertisement

## How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you've
probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison's early experiments
with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful
mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to
lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla
invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current
(AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison's
technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time
people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea
for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were
[exchanged](http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/physics%2010%20notes/Electrocution.html),
elephants were
[electrocuted](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bowA1xUZpmA), and
eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and
national standardization [started in
earnest](http://illumin.usc.edu/article.php?articleID=181&page=4).
Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla's patents for
power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In
Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their
monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat
arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up
to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly
spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn
of the century, by the way. It's an old
beef.  

Advertisement

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)

  
For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al
dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house's wiring, which
today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey
Hubbell's "[Separable Attachment
Plug](http://www.google.com/patents?id=mQBKAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&source=gbs_overview_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false)"—which
essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light
socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

> My invention has for its object to...do away with the possibility of
> arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in
> buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or
> skill.

Advertisement

Thanks, Harvey\! He later adapted the original design to include a
two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a
three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named
Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too,
but it's pretty much the type Americans use now.

Here's the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell's plug were
unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept.
This was before electronics were globalized, and before
country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage
debate had been pared down to two(ish) which made life a bit easier for
power companies to set up shop across the world. \[Note: There are
technically more than two voltages in use, which reader Michael
clarifies rather wonderfully
[here](http://gizmodo.com/5391271/giz-explains-why-every-country-has-a-different-fing-plug#c16371711)\].
But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers
used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the
ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations
like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble
taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and
what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World
War.

Advertisement

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)

Take [the British
plug](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theiet.org%2Fpublishing%2Fwiring-regulations%2Fmag%2F2006%2F18-plugorigin.cfm%3Ftype%3Dpdf&ei=H27oStjRLc7blAfU4JyGCA&usg=AFQjCNGzEqKJY-io2tvy0dSMjH0JNT_Zqg&sig2=c2vwWsPc74IcCcFTApD3mQ).
Today, it's a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into
it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who's had a chance
to use one. But it isn't Britain's first plug, or even their first
proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles' cords were capped with
the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six
subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with
one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they
got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire
swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic
building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an
expensive proposition, so the government was all, "we need a new plug,
stat\!"  

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard
somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not
just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each
plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British
Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today.
Notice how even in the 1940s and '50s—practically yesterday\!—the UK was
devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the
world.

Advertisement

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same
thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That's
how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our
travel adapters' voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic.
Oh, and it gets
worse.

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)

You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years?
Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable
cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the
British way\! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new
one—wasn't introduced until 1946, and didn't see widespread adoption
until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as
does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess
who's got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to
have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.

Advertisement

## Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the
International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its
thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn't great. "There are
standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is,
really, everyone's invested in their own system. It's difficult to get
away from that."

When Holland's International Questions Commission first teamed up with
the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934.
Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and
the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War,
even\!—threw a stick in the committee's spokes, (or a fork in their
socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950,
when the IEC realized that there were "limited prospects for any
agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe)." It'd be
expensive to tear out everyone's sockets, and the need didn't feel that
urgent, I guess.

Advertisement

Plus, the IEC can't force anyone to do anything—they're sort of like the
UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can
issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are.
As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets
were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware
looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a
country want to change? Wouldn't the interim, with mixed plug standards
in the same country, be
dangerous?  

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)

  
But the IEC didn't quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard
plug for decades after. And they even came up with some\! In the late
80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged
number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for
110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the
one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country
that plans to has adopt\[ed\] the IEC 60906, so, uh, there's
that.

Advertisement

![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future
where plugs could just get along:

> Maybe in the future you'll have induction charging; you have a device
> planted into your wall, and you have a \[wireless\] charging
> mechanism.

Advertisement

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer
Forum in 2008, and it [looked like a science fair
project](http://gizmodo.com/5039871/intel-says-theyve-taken-a-huge-leap-in-wireless-power-tech):
It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted
enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we'll get this
power plug problem all sorted by oh, let's say, 2050?

She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people
to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case
scenario, for as long as we use wires we'll have at least two standards
to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now,
the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the
problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can
handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well
as as something near and dear to our hearts: "We have to move forward
into plugs we can really control," Gabriela told me. She means new stuff
like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard.
The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to
us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone'll charge via
USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just
give me the port.

Advertisement

In the meantime, this means that things really aren't going to change.
Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket
with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British
Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug
which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a
national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of
plug.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and [the IEC](http://www.iec.ch/), as
well as the [Institute for Engineering and
Technology](http://www.theiet.org/) and Wiring Matters
([PDF](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theiet.org%2Fpublishing%2Fwiring-regulations%2Fmag%2F2006%2F18-plugorigin.cfm%3Ftype%3Dpdf&ei=H27oStjRLc7blAfU4JyGCA&usg=AFQjCNGzEqKJY-io2tvy0dSMjH0JNT_Zqg&sig2=c2vwWsPc74IcCcFTApD3mQ)),
and USC Viterbi's illumin
[review](http://illumin.usc.edu/article.php?articleID=181&page=4). Map
adapted from [Wikimedia
Commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WorldMap_PlugTypeInUse.png)
by Intern Kyle

Advertisement

Still something you wanna know? Still can't figure out how to plug in
your Bosnian knockoff iPhone? Send questions, tips, addenda or
complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.
