[Radio Wrangler]

You could describe the American system as six-phase. Their mains is distrubuted as three basic phases, as ours is, but as Lucien says, the final transformers give 120-0-120v 180 degree two phase feeds to a property. The other pairs of phases are distributed to other properties, trying to keep the whole thing balanced.

Industrial users can have the three main phases, pretty much as ours have.

In may ways it's quite a sensible system, but sometimes they try to run too much power to things before they go to 240v feeds. Seeing kilowatt amateur radio power amplifiers with a '110' input for example.

I still think a lot of their fittings look more appropriate to doll's houses, though.

David