TechStuff Tidbits: Why is there no universal voltage?

Published Jan 6, 2022, 1:48 AM

Travel the world and you'll discover that you will need some special gear to plug in your electronics as you go from place to place. Plugs, outlets and even voltages vary around the world. We're going to talk about why.

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

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