Between 1880 and 1930, different countries around the world made an important electrical decision: choosing a type of plug. More or less, everyone did it on their own. When they wanted to realize the amalgam of pegs they had created, it was too late: they were trapped in the infrastructure they had installed. Bridging the distance, like It happened to the Madrid metrowhich turns left. As a consequence, more than a century later you have to put an adapter in your suitcase when you go on a trip.
As you travel around the world you can discover them all, or more quickly and educationally: you can also visit the Museum of Plugs and Socketsa Dutch website (one of the old school ones, judging by its design) that has catalogued, photographed and rigorously explained all the domestic sockets that there are and have been on the planet following the technical references of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the international organization that has to bring order to this chaos.
The 15 plugs in the world. The IEC uses the letters A to N (curiously, Thailand’s O came later) to classify the types of domestic plugs existing in the world and Here you can consult the complete list. The museum links each letter with its corresponding standard: the NEMA for North America (letters A and B), the CEE for continental Europe (letter C), but be careful because Switzerland has the SN 441011 standard and the J plug, BS 1363 for the United Kingdom (letter G), AS 3112 for Australia (letter I)… each with its dimensions, voltages, pins and safety standards.
From my own experience, I forgot to buy specific adapters a long time ago and opted for a universal adapter to live quietly in the hodgepodge. Because why not say it: from the point of view of practicality, this horde of pegs is a glaring failure of technical coordination unmatched in any other industrial sector.
Types of plugs in the world SomnusDe via Wikipedia
The failed attempt at a universal standard. In the 1930s, the IEC set itself an impossible mission (judging by the results): to achieve international standardization of domestic plugs and sockets. In 1986 he published IEC 60906 standard with that ambition. No need to say it went wrong. Only Brazil in 2002 and South Africa in 2013 adopted the IEC 60906-1 standard and even then, both countries allow multiple standards.
The EU said “no, thank you” remembering Rocío Jurado and her “it’s too late now, ma’am.” With complete honesty, the European Commission recognized in 2017 that harmonizing the continent’s plugs would require transition periods of more than 75 years, an investment estimated at 100,000 million euros and would generate some 700,000 tons of electrical waste.
That oddity called Switzerland.
That strange case called Switzerland. It is no surprise that the Swiss citizenry likes to go it alone: it is there, between Italy, France and Germany, but it does not belong to the EU nor does it use the euro. So, as we mentioned above, has its own plug defined by standard SN 441011 (until 2019 it was SEV 1011) and the J plug, which is only used there and in the Principality of Liechtenstein. In addition to being an “exclusive” plug due to how little it is used compared to others, it also has a particular geometry in the shape of a hexagon.
Paradoxically, when the IEC designed what was to be the universal plug in 1986, it based its shape on the Swiss T12 plug, although with differences in the diameter of the pins and the displacement of the ground pin. The world tried to copy Switzerland to create a global standard, but Switzerland continued on its way.
The plugs that said goodbye. The museum has an entire section dedicated to plugs that were developed as alternatives to current standards and have been out of production for years and some almost extinct. Some of the most striking cases are the British Wylex and Dorman & Smith, the impractical hook-shaped Hakenstecker or the Greek Tripoliki with three pins arranged in a triangle. Surely all of them now coexist in physical museums and in this digital museum that constitutes the best archive of the failure of global electrical standardization.
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