It's more complicated than that,
andu. See the following potted history of the three main TV standards:
Engineers trying to improve technology (PAL has higher resolution than NTSC, for example), differences between existing earlier technologies in the different countries and the need to maintain certain backward compatibility, different frequencies (60 Hz in USA, 50 Hz in Europe), and even politics played a part in the creation of these different TV standards.
There's one thing wrong in the above article, though, He gives the impression that PAL is a uniform standard. Well, it ain't. There are several different variants of PAL used throughout the world and they are not compatible. As I mentioned in previous posts, my PAL TV set bought in Greece had to be modded to work in the UK, and my PAL videocassettes from Malaysia won't play on a UK VCR (and vice versa). You can see a list of the different variants of PAL on the following page:
which also has an error: It says all PAL systems are interoperable except for PAL-M. Well, from personal experience with TV sets, DVD players and VCRs I can say this is not the case.