Ancient Web: René Rondeau Kept a Gallery of Antique Electric Fans

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before the electric fan became a cheap plastic appliance, manufacturers tried all sorts of motors, blades, and power arrangements. René Rondeau's little web gallery keeps a surprisingly early selection of those machines visible.

Visit René Rondeau's Antique Fan Page

The index presents eleven individual fan types, organized as a list of manufacturer names and approximate dates. They range from the C&C Motor Company in the late 1880s and a Perret Elektron bi-polar machine to a 1910 Jost hot-air fan and a brass direct-current model from Robbins & Myers.

Asterisks have a useful meaning: the page marks certain fans that are no longer in Rondeau's collection. This is a personal catalog documenting objects that have moved on, rather than a promise that every pictured machine can be inspected in the same room today.

A century of electricity fits on one page

Separate entries open photographs and short captions. The C&C Motor Company page identifies a lamp-resistance electric fan from around 1887–1890. The Crocker-Wheeler example dates to approximately 1892, when electric motors were still conspicuous pieces of engineering rather than components hidden in household shells.

The index also lists Edison Ironclad fans, including a glass-back specimen dated around 1893, two six-blade bi-polar versions, an Emerson Tripod, and a GE Pancake. Those nicknames were descriptions collectors could use to identify distinctive historical motor designs and housings.

One of the strangest names belongs to the Jost hot-air fan, dated around 1910. A hot-air-driven fan belongs to the transitional period when a room might be cooled by machinery that did not resemble a modern plug-in desk fan at all.

The site does not claim to be an exhaustive museum. Some pages are sparse, and several use images more than prose. Yet its particular set of photographs and approximate dates preserves collector knowledge that is easy to lose when artifacts change hands without documentation.

The pages sit on an independent site otherwise associated with antique sound recordings and phonographs, another reminder that early electrical machines do not always fit into today's neat hobby categories.

An everyday object has a complicated ancestry. Rondeau's index gives that ancestry a small, hand-built shelf.

Browse the complete antique-fan index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.