When I lived in England, believe it or not, everybody had to be an amateur electrician. I’m really showing my age, but back in the mid 80’s there wasn’t a common universal plug throughout England, so you had to buy your plug separately from the ‘flex’ which they called the electrical cord. I’m serious. You bought your appliance, lamp or other electrical device (I remember that in my case, it was a radio/cassette tape recorder), and then you bought a plug ‘kit’, which let you splice the plug on to the flex. You had to attach your plug yourself to any consumer electronics. It’s almost laughable, but that’s what the state of electrical standards adoption was in late-20th century England.
Eventually, the UK did standardize on a plug, but it ended up being the largest and bulkiest plug you’ve ever seen, including a fuse inside the plug itself. It was almost as if the Brits only begrudgingly accepted this newfangled invention of electricity, and decided that they were going to only allow you to use it if you had the proper muscle power to hold and manage these huge electrical plugs. The notion that you’d carry around an electrical device that needed to be plugged in hadn’t even been entered into the equation.
When people started carrying around laptops, the large size of UK plugs became even more troublesome. In the case of a Macbook Air, the UK plug was several times thicker than the laptop itself. Enter a clever designer and an ingenious design to the rescue. This video shows how a folding approach not only allows one to carry around a slim plug and unfold it when needed, but actually creates a new, secondary standard, where all of the prongs are still accessible but in a folded state, so a whole bunch of these folded plugs can be plugged into an adapter, which is plugged into the wall in its unfolded state (or perhaps, a new sort of power strip, built for the folded prong arrangement). To see what I mean, have a look at the video. It shows that sometimes good industrial design can almost work miracles. Lets hope this idea catches on:
That is a great design. The “surprise” bit at the end where they show how you can use it in the folded position is the cherry on top.
I remember being really surprised at how bulky the plugs are when I visited the U.K. last summer. Using international adapters only makes things worse. Here’s a photo of one setup I used:
http://gonenomad.com/2008/08/05/things-you-notice-living-united-kingdom#outlets
That was a brilliant solution to a very real problem. When I was living in the UK a few years ago, I had an adapter the sheer weight of which would cause it to fall out of a wall socket, occasionally.
Thanks so much for sharing that — and yes, let’s do hope this design catches on.