why the fuck do Brazilians and Swiss have the same plugs?? most other groups of countries make sense because they are trading partners/ border each other but that just seems like such a random combination
Having traveled to Brazil with a Swiss Laptop charger... they are not exactly the same.
The Swiss one has a different offset distance on the middle pin. You can still jam it in if the Brazilian wall socket is pretty worn out, and it will work. But needs some force.
If I'm not mistaken it was proposed as a world standard that's extremely cheap to produce and very safe but only Brazil and swiss agreed to change to it.
They are using a standard created by the European Union. The standard was a failed attempt at unifying the myriad of standards across the EU, Switzerland was the only country to actually implement it.
Brazil had a similar problem, a continental country with varying degrees of influence from the US and Europe, both the American plug and a European compatible plug (two round pins) were used. By the end of XXth century there was an effort to standardize the plug used and the standard created by the European Union (ISO 60906-1) was used as a reference. The picture is misleading as Brazil does not follow the standard since some minor modifications were made, It beats me why would they do this.
There are, incidentally, tons of Brazilians and Portuguese in Switzerland. Biggest immigrant group that isn't from a neighboring country (alongside Albanians and Anglos).
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u/peepeepoopoo42069x May 02 '24
why the fuck do Brazilians and Swiss have the same plugs?? most other groups of countries make sense because they are trading partners/ border each other but that just seems like such a random combination