I get a little bit patriotic sometimes. And sometimes that's for comedy purposes, and
sometimes it's genuine.
And this is genuine.
'Cos I really do believe that the British plug is one of the greatest designs that has
ever hit the world.
For loads of reasons. I mean, there's the safety features that most folks, at least
in Britain, know.
Which is that it's really difficult for a kid to take, say, a screwdriver, and just
poke it into one of the holes.
'Cos up here is earth, ground for the Americans, that's the safety one.
These two here are live and neutral, where the actual danger is. But they've got shutters
over them. I cannot -- don't try this at home -- I cannot poke a screwdriver in there right
now.
What I have to do is plug the earth pin -- which is slightly longer -- the ground pin, here
-- in first. And when that goes in, little shutters come up, and let the other pins in.
So I can show that. 'Cos this extension here is really badly designed, which means I can
put the plug in upside down. So if you have a look at those shutters, when I put the earth
pin in...
...there we go. And there's now a contact for the other two pins.
So you need to have a really inventive baby to be able to put one in there and another
in there and then get a shock. So that's safer, that's brilliant.
What about if you leave the plug half way out?
'Cos American and European sockets, you leave the plug half way out, you've got live electricity
that you can kind of touch. If you can get a finger in there.
Well, not here.
'Cos on the live and neutral pins on the bottom, you can see insulation extends half way through
them. If the plug is far enough in to make a connection...
Like that.
...all you can touch is the insulation.
Okay. So that's the obvious safety features.
What about on the inside?
'Cos you've got to remember, until 1992, the British government did not require that electrical
appliances had plugs on them. If you bought a toaster or a washing machine, you would
get, almost always, a bare wire at the end.
And you'd be expected to wire the plug yourself.
So I got taught how to wire a plug in school. 'Cos that was still a required skill back
then.
Here we go. If I open this up...
First: there's a fuse. And that's an artifact of when the standard was made. Post-WW2, there
was a copper shortage, and it was a lot cheaper to require a fuse in every plug and just build
the circuit as one loop of cable going round the whole house than it was to have loads
of individual copper strands going out all over the house and a fuse for each.
So they just made the house one giant circuit, put a fuse in each plug. That's now safer.
Then you've got the three wires.
Blue is neutral. B-L, L for left, blue goes to the left.
Brown is live. B-R, R goes to the right. Live goes to the right.
You can also remember that live is brown because that's the colour your trousers will go if
you accidentally hit yourself with it.
And finally, there's this one. Green and yellow. That's the earth, or the ground wire. Now
in normal operation, that shouldn't be used, but it's basically a return path if all else
fails.
If something goes electrically wrong in the plug or in the appliance, that will ground
it and all the electricity will safely go away from people.
'Cos if that disconnects, and there's a problem, well, you could touch the metal bit of this
toaster and the electricity could ground itself through you, and through your heart.
Which is bad.
So instead, you have this wire here. And this is the really clever bit, this is the bit
that not many people know about.
You see that slack in the wire just here? In the event there's a tug on this cable,
something goes wrong, and all these start fraying and coming out, the live and the neutral,
the ones where the danger is, they'll get pulled out first.
And then, the earth wire will come out next.
So in the event of damage, of fraying, it's most likely that the earth wire is going to
be the safe one, and no-one's going to get killed.
So there you go: the British plug. Genuinely one of the best bits of design I've ever come
across, with one exception, which is that if you just let it fall on the ground because
you're just throwing something out of the way...
...it will almost certainly end up with the points pointing upwards. Which means in the
middle of the night, when you stand on it, it is really going to hurt.
You can also remember that because the live one is brown, because that is the colour your
trousers will go if you accidentally hit yourself with it. Er, and the big yellow and...
...you OK there?
[LAUGHTER] "I didn't see that coming!"
No-one ever does. Erm...
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