Why Do Electric Plugs Have Holes? Answered

if you've ever looked at the end of an electric cord and notice these little holes on the plug you might have wondered what they were there for well you're not alone because many people have no idea what their actual purpose is and in this video i'm going to tell you why the holes are there why they were put there in the first place and get rid of some of the myths and wrong information about their actual use how long have those holes even been there so let's start with this appliance this is an italian pizzelli iron it's from the 60s and at the end of the chord you can clearly see this thing has the holes but the 1960s is not old enough we want to see the first plug the original invention and to do that we've got to go back to 1913 and harvey hubble he patented the first universal plug that you see here but it doesn't have the holes but look closely because what it does have these small indentions and when you read the pattern these small indents were designed to help hold the plug in place so that it couldn't accidentally pull out this design was really good so good in fact that other people ripped them off and they couldn't copy it exactly so they modified the plug slightly to use holes instead of the indentions and a number of companies made these some had square holes others had round but hubble didn't like any of them so we sued them all now we lost in court but not because they didn't agree that they stole his design they actually said society in the u.s needed a standardized plug so the designs converged and we ended up with the plug style that hubble made but with the round holes now you would think that's the answer but unfortunately it's not and if we fast forward to today let's take a look at one of our modern outlets as they take this apart we're going to look closely at the portion that the plug slides into now it slides in just fine but you'll notice nothing is going into the holes there's no clip there's nothing that's taken advantage of holding the plug in and it's not specific to just this outlet i've taken apart dozens of them and i've never found any kind of mechanism inside so then why are we still putting the holes in place if we're not actually using them but you might have heard other reasons for the hull's existence the first of which is they're there to provide a lockout this could give some type of electrical safety or prevent someone using a device that wasn't supposed to but we know that's not correct because electric lockout tags would not be seen until the late 1950s another popular myth is that the small amount of material from those holes could be used to support the war effort but those holes were in existence in early 1900s where we were burning things like coal we definitely weren't thinking about saving metal and it was years before world war ii and what about standards there's got to be some type of a guideline about what a plug should or shouldn't have and there actually is one organization ansi puts out the guidelines and they do actually say that the holes are optional so now i'm really confused because we know that almost 100 years ago they actually used the holes and they were a critical part of the design and even the standards say that we don't have to have them at all so why do we still put them in and the answer is actually easy because for a company they're not going to make any more money if they start filling those holes in and customers actually expect to see them now you might not be looking for them when you're buying something but it's very obvious when they're missing and without a benefit to the company or the customer they're not going to change a design that's been around for almost 100 years hopefully this video gave you some good information and got you to think about a topic that you may never have considered before if you liked it please give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel for more videos coming up

Channel: Silver Cymbal

Views: 8,533,010

Keywords: diy, electric plugs, why do electric plugs have holes, electricity, plug holes, us plugs, nema 15p, nema 15, holes in my outlet, hoes in electric cord

Id: Db-dt5U3MCc

Length: 3min 17sec (197 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021