fittings.

The work of TC 23 took a long time to commence. The IEC CA, at its meeting in Torquay, UK in June 1938 and again in Paris, France in June 1939 urged the experts participating in TC 23 to finally schedule their first meeting and to give priority to the question of plugs and sockets. Then World War II broke out and for several years plugs and sockets were far from people's concern.

Starting standardization work

After the war, and its subsequent economic recession, work on domestic plugs and sockets got under way at the first meeting of TC 23 in Luzern, Switzerland in October 1947. By this time, the European work had moved to the CEE (International Commission on Rules for the Approval of Electrical Equipment) and TC 23discussed a possible co-operation with the CEE in the field of 'Unification of the International Standards relating to sockets, plugs and connectors'.

The CEE work led to the first edition of its publication 7, in 1951. In essence this was simply a selection of the most widely used plugs and sockets in Europe, excluding the UK and Ireland.

At this point the IEC as a whole, and in particular all the experts participating in TC 23, realized that there was very little chance to still achieve agreement on a common standard on plugs. Over the years so many different plug types had been introduced that even in a limited regional area like Europe standardization was highly unlikely.

Nevertheless, in 1957, TC 23 issued the first edition of IEC Publication 83, Standard