Yes, Artisi, I should have said that there are mechanical limits to speeding up a pump (properly applied ankle-bite).
I recall working as an Application Engineer ( a couple of centuries ago) having to select 20-30 pumps at a time for a refinery or chem plant. We would always try to fit each service into 2-pole speed first (smallest, cheapest) and then work down to 4, then maybe even 6 pole motor. Very common to only have one curve for a pump model at say 3600 rpm, and if the service required 1800rpm, we would just whiteout the flow and head values on the axes and handwrite in the corresponding 1800rpm numbers. It was a real luxury to have curves for separate synchronous speeds. We would do the same thing to convert to 50 cycle speeds, same curve for all speeds; the original cut&paste I guess.
I remember the old guys commenting on how lucky we were: "back in the day, we used to hand draw every curve on tracing paper, for every pump, with French curves and slide rules"......We just said: " go away old man, I don't have time to listen to your babbling, I have pumps to select".
The point is,
While I would have loved to have had the current computer selection programs back then, I often wonder what, if anything, has been lost by not having to "think" you're way through speed changes and so forth. Maybe some people would not be so puzzled by 50 to 60 Hz changes??