Sorta funny story:
In 1988 I had a monstrously heavy orange gas plasma display Toshiba laptop. Being a firm believer in surge suppression back then I had a round sure suppressor on the end of the cable. That was my standard operating configuration. The laptop was auto voltage even back then.
My boss asked to borrow that laptop for a trip to Germany so I said sure, no problem. When he got to the Paris airport, (remember this is 1988) security made him take it out of the bag and they wanted to see it plugged in and operating. The only outlet they could find was at the Pan Am ticketing counter. When he plugged it in he blew the circuit that ran all the reservation/ticking system in the entire Pan Am counter. He forgot to take the surge suppressor off. Needless to say it was NOT auto voltage switching. Security was so upset they sent him on his way but the people at the counter were frantic and so was he.
He called me that night and said he may have burned up my laptop. When he told me what happened I asked him to remove the surge and it powered up just fine. Even then they made some people prove it was really a laptop but I think some of the security people hadn't actually seen one before.