Plugs are the bane of a traveller’s life
My first tussle with hotel room electrics came early in my career when I was a radio journalist. My concern back then was whether I could unscrew the mouthpiece of the hotel room phone. If I could, I would connect my cassette recorder, via a cable and serrated crocodile clips, to two pieces of metal inside the disassembled mouthpiece and play my prerecorded report to the editors at the other end.
Today, whatever work we do, we conduct our business via mobile phone and laptop, which brings its own problems. Both devices require regular recharging and there is, as every traveller knows, a profusion of national plug designs. The International Electrotechnical Commission, the Geneva-based body that has been publishing international standards for electronics since 1906, lists 14 different types of plug. These include the threeround-pin plug used in countries ranging from India to Myanmar to Namibia, and the V-shaped-plus-grounding-pin plug used in Australia, Uruguay and Uzbekistan.
The British and Irish three-rectangular-blade plug works in Hong Kong and Singapore, as I have been grateful to discover on trips there. You can also use it in a slew of other one-time British territories, such as Cyprus, Uganda and Saint Lucia.
A few plugs have fairly broad currency. Much of continental Europe has the same tworounded-pin plug. The two-flatpin plug that you see in the US is in widespread use throughout
the Americas. Japanese plugs can be used in the US but, because of small differences, often not the other way around.
More confusing still, some countries have numerous different plugs in use the Maldives tops the commission’s list with seven.
How did the world get into such a plugging mess? According to the commission, attempts to standardise electric sockets worldwide have repeatedly failed. A meeting in Paris in June 1939 called for action. But World War 2 broke out “and for several years plugs and sockets were far from people’s concerns”. Not much progress has been made since.
For the traveller, it means packing an adaptor. I take a simple two-pin adaptor on European travels and a blockshaped international adaptor, with as many options as a Swiss army knife, when I go anywhere else.
My international adaptor’s pins sometimes struggle to make the connection in unfamiliar sockets and its weight-to-pin ratio is not great. It sometimes sags under its own bulk and needs propping up with a book.
None of this should matter, of course, because, after all those failed attempts, the world has now found an international standard: the USB socket for recharging phones and laptops.
The problem is that while most airports provide USB sockets, many hotel rooms don’t. I recently stayed in a twoyear old hotel in Spain, part of a large chain, whose rooms had nothing but two-pin European sockets. But as I’ve said before: hotel room designers aren’t always the brightest sparks.