Before kitchens were ventilated, cooking was a smelly and smoky experience. The kitchen would quickly fill with smoke and nasty gases, stinky odors would spread throughout the house, and grease would stick to and damage the walls. However, in 1933, Vent-a- Hood set about making cooking in the home a more enjoyable and safe experience and invented the first kitchen extractor. Also known as an extractor hood, it was able to capture all the by-products of cooking, except grease.
Early kitchen extractors were considered, quite correctly, to be fire hazards because the grease they could not catch could easily ignite with the high temperatures generated by cookers. Later extractor designs, using wire mesh to catch grease, were incredibly inefficient and could only capture about 25 percent of the product. In 1937, Vent-a-Hood improved their original design and incorporated a special blower into their kitchen extractor, known as the Magic Lung®, which could pressurize the air blowing through it to liquefy grease and reduce the risk of fire in the kitchen.
Basic extractor hoods, now found in kitchens worldwide, comprise of a skirt to capture the rising gases, some kind of grease filter, and a fan to force ventilation. There are two types of kitchen extractor: the dueled hoods, which are vented and release cooking by-products outside of the home, and the ductless hoods, which rely on charcoal to clean the air by removing any odors and smoke particles before releasing it back into the kitchen.
Kitchen extractors have revolutionized home-living, making cooking a far safer, more pleasant, and smoke-free experience than it was at the turn of the twentieth century.
