"What is my loftiest ambition? I've always wanted to throw an egg at an electric fan."
Oliver Herford, writer, artist, and illustrator
Being too hot must have been a major problem for people before the late 1800s. As soon as electrical power was introduced, inventors started to work on ideas for the electric fan.
Dr. Schuyler Skaats Wheeler (1860-1923) was the American engineer responsible for creating the personal two-blade desk fan—an invention beloved of anyone who has ever held down an indoor job in the summer months. Invented by Wheeler at the tender age of twenty-two, the fan was made of brass, with no protective caging surrounding the rotating blades, resulting in a product that was both stylish and dangerous in equal measure.
However, like most inventions of that time that used electricity, when they were first introduced these fans were the reserve of the rich and the powerful, It was not until the 1920s, when industrial advances meant that fan blades could be mass-produced from steel, that prices started to drop and the ordinary homeowner could afford one.
Aside from his fan, Wheeler also became known for employing a large workforce of sightless people. He noticed that his sighted employees who were skilled at winding coil did so without ever looking at their hands. He blindfolded himself to see if he could wind coil without looking and found that, with a little practice, he could. The number of blind individuals in the population had increased as a result of World War I. Wheeler set up a department at his factory that employed only sightless men and women, putting them on a par with their sighted contemporaries.
