A legacy from the 1800s leaves Tokyo facing blackouts
itworld.com
itworld.com
The United States ended up on 120V because of Thomas Edison's lobbying, but took Tesla's recommendation of 60HZ. Europe took Tesla's recommendation of 240V but adjusted the frequency to the "more metric" 50HZ.
Typical electrical service for small buildings is 240v using two of the three legs. At the service panel each of the legs is available separately as 120v or in combination as 240v. Larger buildings and industrial applications will often use 208v three phase services for power efficiency. Higher 3 phase voltages are also used on a more limited bases
If you were to take the 3 phase power more common in large buildings, or light industrial facilities, and use any two legs, you would be looking at 208v between any 2 legs, and 120v between any leg and the neutral from the step down transformer.
Almost any variant of power can be produced by the correct transformer, given the the basic power available to location is sufficient, and of the correct type (i.e. 480v 3 phase can be tranformed into 208/120v 3phase or 240/120v single phase).
Lower frequencies were easier to build for early components, 50Hz is about the lowest frequency that you didn't notice flicker on a lamp. Almost all the early non-industrial use of electricity was for lighting - industry tended to generate their own power on-site using whatever equipement they happened to buy.
Telsa picked 60hz apparently because it allowed him to reuse clock mechanism in test gear. He also felt that 60sec/60min so 60hz was a 'natural' solution
tl;dr: Nowadays there are no real advantages/disadvantages to prefer 50Hz vs 60Hz. The distinction is mostly just because of historical vendor lock-in.
Lights, both incandescent and florescent, will flicker if the frequency is low.
Aircraft and spacecraft use 400Hz because the equipment can be lighter and smaller.
So we also have interconnections with limited capacity between the grids. I recall reading about a new interconnection plant being built between three of our grids on the border of NM and TX with superconducting cables, but can't find the link. Maybe someone else can post it.
things that would get screwed up are devices that use the signal to time events. some high voltage switches use these things, but overall, i bet washing machines, dish washers, computers, lights, tvs, and radios would just work.
even garage door openers should work.
clocks and larger equipment might be a bust and maybe some of the robotics stuff at plants might be a bit off, but maybe just maybe it would work. these things are designed to condition the power in most cases within a few percentage points anyways.
i bet if it's that dire, they give it a go.
What happens is that the rest of the country tries to back drive your generator + turbine at 20% over it's design speed - this is a bad thing (tm)
It's hard enough phasing generators across the country when they are on the same frequency. The normal solution for long haul links, or links between different grids is to use a DC cable. The trouble is that people don't have spare Gigawatt AC:DC DC:AC converters lying around