Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: And how the tech are you? Yeah, I'm gonna stick
Speaker 1: with that one, and welcome to the first episode of
Speaker 1: what I'm calling tech Stuff Tidbits. These will be shorter
Speaker 1: episodes in which I tackle a particular topic in tech
Speaker 1: and explain it as quickly as I can, which, uh
Speaker 1: actually is not fast at all because I'm from the
Speaker 1: southern region of the United States and we have a
Speaker 1: predisposition of turning a two minute story into a forty
Speaker 1: minute yarn. So you know, sit back. But I plan
Speaker 1: on bringing these sorts of episodes in on Wednesdays when
Speaker 1: I'm not doing like a multipart episode where I'm covering
Speaker 1: a really big part in tech. So here we go,
Speaker 1: And the topic I want to talk about today is
Speaker 1: the various voltage standards and electric plugs and outlets you
Speaker 1: find around the world. In fact, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of different ones all around the world used by various countries.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you find different ones within a single country, and
Speaker 1: that applies both to voltages and two outlets, and anyone
Speaker 1: who has traveled internationally knows that this is a thing,
Speaker 1: and they can become a real hassle when you're trying to,
Speaker 1: you know, manage travel because of the different outlets and voltages.
Speaker 1: So if you bring along something like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: your favorite hair dryer or a computer, or you know,
Speaker 1: a charging cable for your phone, you might find that
Speaker 1: you can't plug it into anything because the outlets are different,
Speaker 1: and you probably wouldn't want to plug it in if
Speaker 1: you could, because the voltage might be different. You can
Speaker 1: even destroy electronics if you plug them into an adapter
Speaker 1: that fits the outlet, but the voltage is drastically different
Speaker 1: from your home country. And I thought it might be
Speaker 1: interesting to talk about those different standards and why they exist. Okay,
Speaker 1: but let's start with a quicker pressure on electricity. So
Speaker 1: when we talk about electricity, we often refer to stuff
Speaker 1: like voltage and current, and I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but for me, it can get pretty confusing. I always
Speaker 1: like to do a refresher on these things. So the
Speaker 1: analogy folks tend to like to use is you think
Speaker 1: of it like a water system. So imagine you've got
Speaker 1: a big old tank of water with a a faucet
Speaker 1: like a port at the base of the tank. So
Speaker 1: if you open that up, it allows water to flow
Speaker 1: from the tank out and maybe you've got a pipe
Speaker 1: attached to the tank. This is your classic gravity system
Speaker 1: that are used by water tanks all over the world,
Speaker 1: all right, So the amount of water that's flowing through
Speaker 1: the pipe when you open up the faucet, that's like
Speaker 1: electric current. The water pressure is like voltage. So as
Speaker 1: the water level of the tank goes down, the water
Speaker 1: pressure decreases because there's not as much weight pressing down
Speaker 1: on the water that's escaping through the pipe. That seems
Speaker 1: pretty intuitive, right. The water pressure goes down, so you're
Speaker 1: still having the same amount of water coming through, it's
Speaker 1: just not being pushed as hard. Now. An electricity voltage
Speaker 1: really describes the potential difference in two points of an
Speaker 1: electrical system or field, and the greater the difference, the
Speaker 1: greater the voltage. And if the potential difference is small,
Speaker 1: the voltage is small. It's kind of like that water
Speaker 1: tank analogy. When the water level gets really low. Now,
Speaker 1: when you want to transmit electricity over long distances, you
Speaker 1: need a good amount of voltage. You need a good
Speaker 1: amount of pressure in order to do that. Now, part
Speaker 1: of the reason for that, there are actually a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons. We're not going to go into all of them,
Speaker 1: but part of the reason is that the lines that
Speaker 1: you use to transmit electricity, you know, the cables, they
Speaker 1: are not perfect conductors. And if we go back to
Speaker 1: the water analogy, imagine that the pipes have some like
Speaker 1: corrosion or maybe some leaks and stuff in them, and
Speaker 1: this resists the flow of water. Well, in electricity we
Speaker 1: see that too. It's called electrical resistance when you're talking
Speaker 1: about an imperfect conductor, and conductors under normal conditions are
Speaker 1: all imperfect. Something else we need to talk about is
Speaker 1: direct current versus alternating current. And again we're gonna just
Speaker 1: do really surface level stuff here. So direct current is
Speaker 1: what you get when you hook a battery up to
Speaker 1: a simple circuit. Electricity just flows in one direction. Now,
Speaker 1: we can describe current as flowing from the positive terminal
Speaker 1: to the negative terminal, even though the flow of electrons
Speaker 1: is in the opposite direction. It goes negative terminal to
Speaker 1: positive terminal. But that's something you're gonna have to take
Speaker 1: up with. Mr Benjamin Franklin the next time you see them.
Speaker 1: The electricity always flows in one direction. With direct current,
Speaker 1: it's like a one way street. It starts at one terminal,
Speaker 1: goes through the circuit, ends at the other terminal. That's it.
Speaker 1: With alternating current, the direction that electricity flows switches many
Speaker 1: times a second. It reverses. It goes starts at one
Speaker 1: terminal and goes to the other, and then reverses that.
Speaker 1: That's going to be part of the a discussion here.
Speaker 1: As in the good old us of A, where a
Speaker 1: lot of the early working electricity was taking place, you
Speaker 1: had people like Nicola Tesla and George Westinghouse making decisions
Speaker 1: to settle on alternating current and at a frequency of
Speaker 1: sixty hurts, that is, changing the direction that the electricity
Speaker 1: is flowing in sixty times a second. They saw that
Speaker 1: as being best for transmission. Moreover, Tesla and Westinghouse kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to transmit at a voltage of two forty
Speaker 1: volts because it was more efficient. If you were to
Speaker 1: try and transmit at lower voltages, you had some power loss,
Speaker 1: which means you weren't you know, you weren't creating and
Speaker 1: transmitting electricity as efficiently as you could, which means you're
Speaker 1: actually having to produce more than what you needed because
Speaker 1: you were losing stuff along the way. All right, let's
Speaker 1: get back to direct current. So in the early days,
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison, who was Mr Direct Current and his one
Speaker 1: volts d C current, that was the only game in
Speaker 1: town for the most part in the early early days
Speaker 1: of the electrification of the United States, and so everything
Speaker 1: in the ecosystem ran on d C power, including stuff
Speaker 1: like lamps, you know, the stuff that you would actually
Speaker 1: want to run on electricity. It was dependent upon d
Speaker 1: C and DC is pretty simple from an engineering standpoint.
Speaker 1: Making devices that run natively on direct current is just
Speaker 1: easier to do than something that runs on alternating current.
Speaker 1: We technically for most stuff that runs on a C
Speaker 1: for a lot of stuff anyway, not most, a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff, we have to have a device to convert
Speaker 1: that from a C to d C before it then
Speaker 1: goes on to power whatever it is we're using. Edison
Speaker 1: viewed a hundred ten volts as being a balance between
Speaker 1: safety and practicality. So he thought of a hundred ten
Speaker 1: volts as being a low enough voltage that the average
Speaker 1: person wasn't likely to electrocute themselves while using electricity, and
Speaker 1: it would also be strong enough to push current out
Speaker 1: to a decent range. So he thought that the two
Speaker 1: forty volts that Westinghouses a C System was proposing was
Speaker 1: being you know, dangerous, and that it was over kill.
Speaker 1: At least that's how he he promoted it. It could
Speaker 1: very well be that he didn't think that and he
Speaker 1: was just promoting his own because that was what he
Speaker 1: had to offer. But at any rate, that was the
Speaker 1: messaging he gave out that two forty volts would be
Speaker 1: would kill you. By the way, we really got to
Speaker 1: worry about amps more than volts when you're talking about
Speaker 1: the deadly nature of electricity. But I've talked about in
Speaker 1: previous episodes. So moving back, d C had one big disadvantage,
Speaker 1: which is that it is harder to transmit DC over
Speaker 1: large distances, at least it was back in the day.
Speaker 1: So it would mean that you would have to build
Speaker 1: a lot more power plants, and you have to locate
Speaker 1: them close to wherever you were going to be using
Speaker 1: that electricity, otherwise known as the load. So you would
Speaker 1: have to have power plants located near neighborhoods because as
Speaker 1: you moved further away from the our generation facility, the
Speaker 1: voltage would drop off and you would kind of lose
Speaker 1: pressure in other words, and the flow wouldn't be strong
Speaker 1: enough to power the stuff you were plugging in. But
Speaker 1: a C could take advantage of something that d C couldn't.
Speaker 1: It could take advantage of transformers. Now, these are simple
Speaker 1: electrical components that can boost or step up, or decrease
Speaker 1: or step down voltage. It works on a simple electromagnetic
Speaker 1: principle that I'm not going to go into here because
Speaker 1: I have covered it dozens of times in past tech
Speaker 1: Stuff episodes. But the important bit is that with transformers,
Speaker 1: you can generate electricity and you can send it out
Speaker 1: at one voltage. You can step that up, you know,
Speaker 1: step up the voltage hundreds of times if you needed
Speaker 1: to in order to transmit it across thousands of miles.
Speaker 1: And then once you start getting close to where the
Speaker 1: electricity is going to be used, you have other transformers
Speaker 1: that stepped down the voltage and send it on to say,
Speaker 1: businesses and homes. Now that's important because if the voltage
Speaker 1: remained super high the whole way through the quote unquote
Speaker 1: pressure of the electricity would burn out. Your electronics. This
Speaker 1: is what can happen if you just use a simple
Speaker 1: adapter to plug a device into an outlet in a
Speaker 1: country that uses a a you know, higher voltage. So
Speaker 1: if you're coming from say the United States, where the
Speaker 1: voltage is volts, more on that later, because that's kind
Speaker 1: of tricky, and you go to say the you know, Europe,
Speaker 1: where you might run into two two volts and you
Speaker 1: don't have a way of reducing that voltage. The pressure
Speaker 1: that voltage is possibly going to destroy whatever it is
Speaker 1: you plug into that outlet, even if you have an
Speaker 1: adapter for it. Um or it may make catch on fire,
Speaker 1: you know that kind of stuff. I actually saw an
Speaker 1: episode of Sordid Food on YouTube recently, great great channel,
Speaker 1: by the way, a bunch of British blokes making food.
Speaker 1: But I saw an episode Unsorted Food recently where they
Speaker 1: got a Japanese toaster and they tested it out on
Speaker 1: a British outlet and it immediately burnt out the toaster
Speaker 1: because it was too much voltage. So word to the wise,
Speaker 1: all right, that's some grounding right there, so to speak.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a pun. But we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break and we'll be back to talk about voltages
Speaker 1: and outlets. Okay, let's get back to talking about Tesla. Here,
Speaker 1: he had determined that two hundred forty volts would be
Speaker 1: a good starting point because it would lead to less
Speaker 1: power loss when transmitting electricity, but Edison successfully argued that
Speaker 1: to forty volts would be too dangerous, and ultimately Westinghouse
Speaker 1: went with a hundred ten volt a C system in
Speaker 1: the early days of the electrification of the United States.
Speaker 1: This would not be as efficient as a two forty
Speaker 1: volt system would be, but otherwise it worked just as
Speaker 1: I described. So the US moves forward using a hundred
Speaker 1: ten volts, and we'll get back to that in a bit. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: over in Europe, the various countries were looking at building
Speaker 1: out their own electric grids, but they came to a
Speaker 1: similar conclusion to Tesla. Namely, countries discovered that it would
Speaker 1: be more efficient and therefore more cheap to operate if
Speaker 1: they pushed out electricity at a higher voltage in order
Speaker 1: to send it to customers. Sure, it might be more dangerous,
Speaker 1: but the savings were hard to deny, and so European
Speaker 1: countries largely settled on between two hundred twenty two forty
Speaker 1: volts for a c transmission. Now, this is in the
Speaker 1: early part of the twenty century. At this point, like
Speaker 1: late nineteenth early twentieth century. Now, Europe also departed a
Speaker 1: little bit from Tesla's vision. Because Tesla had said, you know,
Speaker 1: two d forty volts at sixty hurts, you know the
Speaker 1: frequency of sixty hurts. These countries chose to go with
Speaker 1: a different frequency. Uh, the United States was at sixty hurts,
Speaker 1: but most of the countries in Europe went with fifty hurts. Now,
Speaker 1: there are several stories about why Europe went this way.
Speaker 1: Most of them center on the German company a E G.
Speaker 1: A G actually traces its history back to Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1: It it comes out of a company that was founded
Speaker 1: by Edison in Germany when Edison was expanding his operations
Speaker 1: throughout the world. One story is that engineers observed that
Speaker 1: at forty hurts frequency, you could use that electricity to
Speaker 1: power a lightbulb, but the lightbulbs would flicker. You could
Speaker 1: actually notice that they were flickering, And it's because they
Speaker 1: were flickering in within the interval of those reversals of electricity,
Speaker 1: because it's doing it forty times a second. However, if
Speaker 1: you increase the frequency to fifty hurts, the flicker was
Speaker 1: fast enough so that it was imperceptive. Bowl right, we
Speaker 1: would just see it as being a solid light. We
Speaker 1: couldn't see that it was actually flickering. So that's why
Speaker 1: they adopted fifty hurts as their standard. However, that's just
Speaker 1: one story. Another story says that the metrics standard sequence
Speaker 1: that the German engineers were using went one to five
Speaker 1: and it wouldn't include six, and so it would be
Speaker 1: inconvenient to choose a frequency of sixty hurts because of
Speaker 1: the metric standard that they were using, so they chose
Speaker 1: fifty hurts instead. I don't know that that's true. I
Speaker 1: honestly don't know that that's actually the case. These stories
Speaker 1: could be apocryphal, but one way or the other, the
Speaker 1: trend in Europe was to adopt a transmission standard of
Speaker 1: around two h volts and fifty hurts. One thing we
Speaker 1: can say for certain is that a e G had
Speaker 1: a pretty strong presence, like almost a monopoly, and so
Speaker 1: by setting that as their approach, it was probably very
Speaker 1: influential for other countries in Europe to kind of follow suit. Um.
Speaker 1: But even with that, I don't mean that every place
Speaker 1: in Europe adopted a similar standard. Even in the UK
Speaker 1: you had a dozen or so competing methods in certain
Speaker 1: regions up up to like nine I think in London
Speaker 1: at one point nine or ten. There was a clear
Speaker 1: need for standardization because it would be kind of a
Speaker 1: nightmare for pretty much everyone involved if you had all
Speaker 1: these different outlet designs and voltages and frequencies within a country,
Speaker 1: you would have to make stuff for specific regions or
Speaker 1: else you would run the risk of your stuff not
Speaker 1: working for all your customers, or worse, causing a fire
Speaker 1: or something. It would take the UK decades to adopt
Speaker 1: a fifty hurts standard, and they only did so after
Speaker 1: World War Two. But in the intervening years between the
Speaker 1: very beginning of electrification and World War Two, there was
Speaker 1: an organization called the International tro Technical Commission that attempted
Speaker 1: to create a standardized outlet voltage and frequency to be
Speaker 1: used primarily throughout Europe. The group got to work in
Speaker 1: the years following World War One and they were trying
Speaker 1: to get countries to kind of sign on to this
Speaker 1: idea of a universal standard. But tensions in Europe grew
Speaker 1: not related to electricity and then we had World War
Speaker 1: Two and all the the you know, the projects of
Speaker 1: trying to get everybody on the same page. That obviously
Speaker 1: went on the back burner as all out war was
Speaker 1: breaking out throughout Europe. Now, by the end of World
Speaker 1: War Two, various countries were pretty entrenched in their own
Speaker 1: power systems, their outlet designs, voltages, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Convincing countries to abandon the system they had in place
Speaker 1: in order to adopt a new universal standard, it was
Speaker 1: pretty much a loss cause, I mean every country would
Speaker 1: want to say, okay, yeah, let's have a universal standard.
Speaker 1: Let's have it be ours and everyone else can adopt
Speaker 1: what we use, because we don't want to have to
Speaker 1: go through the incredible expense and the enormous amount of
Speaker 1: resources that would take to convert over for us. So
Speaker 1: everyone else should just get on the same page that
Speaker 1: we're on. Well, that's what everyone was saying. So you
Speaker 1: had these established ecosystems, it would be an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of money and resources in order to switch over to
Speaker 1: a new method, so nobody did. Uh. These countries also
Speaker 1: had various colonies and territories around the world. You know,
Speaker 1: this was still in the days of massive colonization. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're not out of that now, but it was really
Speaker 1: prevalent around this era of the twentieth century. So the
Speaker 1: grid systems that were set up in places like Asia
Speaker 1: and Africa largely mirrored the versions that were present in
Speaker 1: the colonizer's home countries, thus proliferating those specific implementations around
Speaker 1: the world. This is why you know, if you were
Speaker 1: to travel through Africa, you might encounter different outlets in
Speaker 1: different countries because at one time or another they were,
Speaker 1: you know, an extended territory of like France or England.
Speaker 1: Now most of the world operates on the two twenty
Speaker 1: to two forty volt range. North America and the northeastern
Speaker 1: half of South America are mostly on the one hundred
Speaker 1: to one hundred twenty seven volt range. And you know
Speaker 1: I said that US had switched to a hundred ten volts.
Speaker 1: It eventually moved to a hundred twenty volts, but ultimately
Speaker 1: the United States chose the two hundred forty volts for
Speaker 1: transmission at sixty hurts. But and this is important, the
Speaker 1: US also split that two hundred forty volts into two
Speaker 1: one twenty volts circuits. Once the transmission lines arrive at
Speaker 1: a building or house. So we still say that the
Speaker 1: US operates on a hundred twenty volts transmits at two forty.
Speaker 1: But the outlets you see those are one twenty volt outlets.
Speaker 1: And because again the devices we were using would burn
Speaker 1: out or worse if we connected them to too high
Speaker 1: a voltage. But big appliances are a little bit different.
Speaker 1: You know, stuff like clothes dryers or electric ovens, which
Speaker 1: require a lot more power than your typical plug and appliance.
Speaker 1: These would use a special neutral wire that would allow
Speaker 1: the appliance to a tap in tap into both of
Speaker 1: the volts circuits at the same time. So these special plugs,
Speaker 1: and if you've ever had to plug in, you know,
Speaker 1: an oven or or a dryer, you've seen these plugs
Speaker 1: that don't look like anything else in the United States.
Speaker 1: These plug into outlets that provide the full two d
Speaker 1: forty volts of electricity because it needs that level of
Speaker 1: quote unquote pressure to operate. So this is why you
Speaker 1: know you often have to buy a plug for some
Speaker 1: of these, they don't necessarily come with them. I should
Speaker 1: also do an episode about how for the longest time,
Speaker 1: UH electronics in the UK didn't come with their own plugs.
Speaker 1: They came with a wire, a copper wire, and you
Speaker 1: had to wire up the plug yourself. But that's for
Speaker 1: a different episode. The U S version of an outlet,
Speaker 1: by the way, is either the Type A or the
Speaker 1: Type B type AS that kind of has just two
Speaker 1: slots in it. The Type B that is like one
Speaker 1: that has two slots plus the round ground wire approach.
Speaker 1: So when you go to different countries, you might need
Speaker 1: more than just an adapter to plug your electronics in.
Speaker 1: You might need a transformer so that you can change
Speaker 1: the voltage in an effort to you know, not turn
Speaker 1: your toaster into a flamethrower or whatever, or alternatively make
Speaker 1: sure your toaster gets enough juice so that it can
Speaker 1: toast bread. And that is why that happened, because everybody
Speaker 1: was building out their power grids around the same time,
Speaker 1: and uh, they all kind of adopted their own internal
Speaker 1: standards and it got to be a big old mess. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the first of tech stuff ad bits. We're gonna
Speaker 1: do more of these in the future on Wednesdays. Hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics, please
Speaker 1: reach out to me on Twitter, the handle is text
Speaker 1: stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon Y. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production.
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