uksparx...
The WHOLE idea of moving to 50 Hz and double voltage, i.e. 220 was to stop American appliance exports -- indeed American electrical anything over a century ago.
THE LAST THING European manufacturers ever want to face is identical standards to the US. The reason is market size and manufacturing scale: one leads to the other.
That's simply not true actually not true at all. 50Hz has been around for a very long time, going back to the very early days of AC power.
Using 230V 50Hz actually exposes Europe to *far* more competition than the US as it's the most commonly used system in the world. It is also used in China and India.
50Hz has been around for a very long time, and seems to have been adopted by AEG in the 1800s. You might consider it a metric frequency as it is 100 peaks and troughs per second or 50 full cycles per second. As such, it fits into the general European metric approach to such things.
220V has also been around for a long time. For example, here in Ireland 220V 50Hz has been standard certainly since the early 1920s.
There were various other systems in use around Europe in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. These were a mix of voltages, AC and DC. Although, it seems it was almost always 50Hz when it was AC.
The AEG / Siemens inspired 220V single phase standard seems to have spread quite quickly across most of the continent and it was standard everywhere before long, except in the United Kingdom, Malta and Cyprus. Do you seriously think the Brits would have adopted a German inspired standard in those days ?? They ultimately settled for 240V 50Hz.
The systems developed separately on either side of the atlantic. There wasn't all that much regular movement of people between the two areas and it really didn't matter that they weren't compatible.
CENELEC, the European electrical standards body, decided to harmonise the two very slightly different voltages i.e. 220V and 240V by moving to 230V. Initially this was just a nominal change of voltage and but as time has gone on, power companies have actually moved to 230V. Typically this is done when transformers at the Medium Voltage level of the distribution grid are replaced, or if they can be modified they were.
There aren't any exotic frequencies or voltages in Europe, it's rather boringly standard 230V/400V 50Hz.
Even the plugs and sockets are rather blandly the de facto standard CEE 7/X family. The only oddities are the UK, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta (BS1363). Denmark (now migrating to CEE 7/X), Italy (also migrating to CEE 7/X) and Switzerland which has its own system. Every other EU country and all of the former eastern bloc countries use CEE 7/X. That's something like 1 billion people!
