Antique and Vintage Fans

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As electricity spread across North America in the 1880s, a time before air conditioning, consumers delighted at the potential to improve air flow as much as the ability to light up the night. Man-made breezes could now be delivered via electric...
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As electricity spread across North America in the 1880s, a time before air conditioning, consumers delighted at the potential to improve air flow as much as the ability to light up the night. Man-made breezes could now be delivered via electric motors that spun pie-slice-shaped brass blades, stirring and circulating the air within what had been stagnant rooms. The first electric fan was designed in 1882 by Schuyler Skaats Wheeler, the American son of Dutch immigrants. Inspired by the experimental work of luminaries like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, Wheeler attached a two-blade propeller to the central shaft of a small electric motor, and the first desktop fan was born. Wheeler partnered with the Curtis & Crocker Electric Motor Company to produce his fans, and in 1889, Wheeler and company co-owner Francis B. Crocker split off to establish the Crocker-Wheeler Electric Motor Company, which manufactured motors for fans as well as other industrial devices like lathes, drills, elevators, and sewing machines. The antique fans envisioned by Wheeler were hardly what we’d call “child-safe” today: Their blades, which spun at upwards of 1,600 revolutions per minute, were uncaged, while their direct-current, or DC, electrical connections were exposed, producing shocks if touched even when the fans were not running. During the 1890s, cages were gradually added around the blades, ostensibly to protect the fan blades—though most observers knew the metal propellers would win in a battle with curious hands. “This guard is intended mainly to protect the fingers of children or meddlers from the effect of contact with the rapidly revolving fan, we suppose, as we have observed that in cases of such contact the fan, like the equally deceptive buzz-saw, usually protects itself,” an article in an 1890 edition of “Science” magazine explained. Edison, whose Edison Illuminating Company sent power throughout lower Manhattan, was a self-interested proponent of DC, but many of his...
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