In this short video a guy -- presumably an electrician -- tries to clarify the variety of 240 volt outlets in use in America. One that particularly confuses the man in the street is the 120/240 (or 125/250) volt version used for dryers, etc, which have both 240 and 120 circuits within.

I was interested to see the older style (pre 1996) at 1:07

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g7A1j0qQ1j8

Electrical life is complicated when your base voltage is just 120 volts or thereabouts.

The scary thing is that back in the day, there was a Beta-VHS battle going on in the US over AC or DC and they almost wound up with DC, with that camp fighting hard against the stark reality that AC was and still is easier and cheaper to transmit over long distances and things like switches like AC better because of the better control over spark quenching.

a Beta-VHS battle going on in the US over AC or DC

Yes, including Thomas Edison financing public electrocutions of animals with AC to show how lethal it is.

After watching the video I am somewhat confused myself - that socket that looks like our 20A one has no earth? I've never seen a double-insulated whitegood before so I am not quite sure how they get around the safety aspect.

This is what is good about the British 3 phase, 4 wire system - you still get a choice of two voltages and the socket patterns are more universal. Oddly enough, I've been told by a few people that Clipsal is a popular brand in Ireland. If I ever speak to a cousin of mine who lives there I will ask him to verify that if I can remember.

IMO, Americans made a rod for their own backs when they chose 110 as their base voltage, necessitating heavy gauge copper wiring and its associated cost, which led to a period of use of aluminium wire throughout houses and the associated fires from high resistance joints.

From a radio point, I believe that it is only recently that they stopped using 2 pin sockets and also at one point upped the voltage from 110 to 115 or 125. As their older radio transformers had no primary taps for changed voltages, which was a hangover form earlier times: Some burnt out.

Worse were their 2 pin plug tops and poor regulations. The plug pins could in many cases be reverses as they were parallel, not staggered. That meant that it was Rafferty's rules as to what ended up on a live chassis. It was even published in some manufacturers data sheets, that if you got hum, reverse the plug. That being due to having active on the chassis.

There are also issues with me in respect of line caps. These more so than filtering, were to provide an RF path to ground, which was at ground potential. However, In a transformer set with no grounding, that could bleed active onto the chassis, or where there were caps from neutral and active, to chassis: Make a lovely voltage divider.

Before we get too smug there was a similar situation a bit closer to home particularly in Adelaide. If you check the switchboards in some of the older pre-1925 buildings you will find a small notice plate that states, "This switchboard has been converted from 200V DC to 250V AC". Also I have found an odd number of 2-pin GPOs very similar to the early US types. The original wiring had been disconnected but I assume that when these were originally connected to 200V DC using double cotton covered wire with no earth.

Funny how we adopted up the early US "240V" pattern but wired it M.E.N.

Where else do they use "our" plug, apart from NZ?

Mainland China!

I wonder how that happened?

China has A and N reversed to the way we do it.

There's no smugness in any of the comments above - just constructive criticism (with perhaps a dash of 20-20 hindsight) about electrical systems that have carried a lot of issues with them through the passage of time.

It is true that there was once a large number of incompatible systems in Australia. Australia is like the US - a big country and big countries will have more of these issues than physically smaller ones. But Australia did learn from the problems various electrical systems had and made the 240/415 volt 3 phase, 4 wire system universal as quickly as it could.

In Sydney and Melbourne in particular, DC mains was still being supplied, mainly for lifts and escalators, up until the late 1980s and building managers had to scramble to have rectifiers installed to keep DC machines running, or get them swapped out for AC machines in time for the shutdown of the DC mains.

These days, with the esception of special purpose outlets, intended only for situations where the use of a standard one would breach the SAA Wiring Rules, there is now only one electrical supply system nationally and only one socket, with some slight variations to, again, comply with regulations. This is what makes sense. Quite a few other nations have adopted the same system with the same socket we use. New Zealand, Argentina, Papua New Guinea, many pacific islands and China to name several.

VIR cabling was everywhere, as PVC was a 1950s thing. There is still a lot of VIR around. It is fine when left alone. When disturbed, or left exposed so mice can attack it, it will invariably require replacement. There are still millions of dwellings in Australia which are not RCD protected and/or still have historical electrical cabling or bakelite in service.

An associate has a house over 100 years old, that still has VIR wire albeit currently he is not living in it. I did tell friends who worked where I did to get to hell out of the house they were renting as it had VIR wire. It did eventually burn down: They were well out of it by the time it did.

I do have a 1937 Trade Annual, which lists the "hotchpotch" of AC & DC Town Voltages at that time.

I did suggest to a member of the CWA who's hall we were hiring for meetings and we were not the only ones, that at the age of the building & a few electrical issues, especially a run of old Bakelite Sockets on the traditional wooden blocks fed by around 8m of metal conduit at a height that the kids in a dance group, cols touch, be checked.

It was worse than I expected. The electrician that checked it was horrified. It was replaced starting at the fuse box, which also got replaced.

She was happy, as she got an extra, more useful GPO in the kitchen.