Ceiling Fans Throughout the Ages
Ceiling fans cool because of wind chill. Wind chill is the fact that moving air hitting your skin feels cooler than stale air. The first humans to ever create artificial wind chill via a tool were the ancient Assyrian and Egyptian royalty, who employed servants to wave large leaves over them to cool them on hot days.
Hand held fans have been around for over 2,000 years. The Japanese folding fan, or Akomeogi, has been around for almost 1,400 years. During the Middle Ages hand held fans become very popular among Europeans. During the 1700s there were over 150 master hand held fan makes in Paris, France alone. Hand held fans were quite popular and fashionable during this time period, especially among upper class women.
Also, during the 1700s inventors were wrestling with the idea of creating mechanically driven personal fans. Many of these one off inventions are enormously expensive today and paved the way for modern fans. Mechanical ceiling fans were first successfully implemented in factories during the industrial revolution. Workers suffering from heat exhaustion got the idea of attaching metal or wooden blades to whirl shafts overhead that were used to drive machinery. During the 1860s and 1870s factories in the United States used water-powered turbines to drive belts that could spin multiple two blade ceiling fans. These turbine powered belt driven ceiling fans become popular in many high-class restaurants and office buildings.
Philip Diehl is considered the father of the modern electric fan. Diehl was the head of the company, Messrs, Diehl and Company, one of the larger companies in the early electronics industry. One of Diehl’s greatest inventions was the first electric motor suitable for use within Singer sewing machines. A derivation of this motor was eventually used within the first electric ceiling fan.
Amid much publicity, in 1882 Diehl introduced the very first electric ceiling fan. The first electric ceiling fan had two bubble blades that were driven by a self-contained electric motor that was an adaptation of Diehl’s sewing machine motor. Toward the later 1880s and early 1890s the Diehl electric ceiling fan became a big hit throughout America.
Diehl refined his electric ceiling fan over time, making smaller motors and even adding electric lights. Eventually Diehl introduced the Electrolier ceiling fan, which was a combination chandelier and ceiling fan. By the early 1900s the electric ceiling fan was prolific and in the homes and businesses of individuals all over the world. By the 1920s ceiling fans were utilized by almost every American consumer services oriented business, such as restaurants, in the country.
During the great depression when people didn’t have the luxury of paying for a cooler environment, along with many other industries, the ceiling fan industry suffered immensely. All the way through world war two, the ceiling fan was not very popular in America. Although, throughout the rest of the world, the ceiling fan was becoming immensely popular in warmer climates.
In the 1970s, during America’s energy crisis, ceiling fans again become widely popular because of how little energy they consume relative to other cooling systems. One of today’s foremost ceiling fan manufacturers, the Casablanca Fan Company, was founded in 1974. Around the same time other popular ceiling fan companies, such as Hunter Fan Company and Emerson Fans, came into prominence. History has made the case for ceiling fans as a low energy consuming method of increasing airflow and cooling in a variety of environments. Today, billions of ceiling fans are used around the world to make your and my world a little cooler.
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