The history
3,300 years from a pharaoh's feather fan to a ceiling fan that sips 30 watts.
For most of history, a breeze on a hot day meant someone waving something: a feather, a palm leaf, a folding fan, or a huge cloth punkah pulled on a rope all night. In the 1880s a small electric motor with a propeller on its shaft changed that, and Tesla's induction motor made fans cheap, quiet and long-lived. Today India alone has hundreds of millions of ceiling fans, and new motors are cutting their power use by more than half.
Han dynasty (attributed)
Spinning (rotary) fan on record
Ding Huan, China
c. 6th–9th century
Folding fan
Japan
1882
Electric fan
Schuyler Skaats Wheeler, USA
1882 (patent 1889)
Electric ceiling fan
Philip Diehl, USA
c. 1907
Oscillating fan
Diehl and Co., USA
1913
Mass-produced electric fan in Japan
KDK, Japan
1400 BCE – 1700
Fans are waved by hand, and clever buildings use wind, water and night air to stay cool.
1323 BCE
c. 1323 BCE
Tutankhamun was buried with fans, including a long gold-covered fan that once held about 30 white and brown ostrich feathers. Its handle says the feathers came from ostriches the young king hunted in the desert east of Heliopolis.
Why it mattered. Fans were so precious in ancient Egypt that a king took them to the afterlife.
1300 BCE
c. 1300 BCE onwards
A painting in the Egyptian house of Neb-Amun, from about 1300 BCE, shows a rooftop wind scoop called a malqaf. In Persia, tall towers called bâdgir caught the breeze, and some sent it over cool water in underground channels before it reached the rooms.
Why it mattered. Moving air over water cools it by evaporation, the same trick your skin uses when a fan blows on sweat.
400 BCE
c. 400 BCE
Persians built yakhchāls, tall domed ice houses with thick walls and shade walls. Water froze in shallow pools on clear winter nights and was stored underground, sometimes cooled further by windcatchers.
Why it mattered. It showed that shade, wind and night sky could keep things cold with no machine at all.
150 BCE
2nd century BCE
The oldest Chinese fans that still exist are a pair of side-mounted fans woven from bamboo, from the 2nd century BCE. The Chinese character for “fan” combines the signs for “door” and “feather”.
Why it mattered. China became one of the great homes of fan making and fan painting.
180
Han dynasty (c. 1st–2nd century CE)
Later accounts credit the Han craftsman Ding Huan with a hand-cranked rotary fan: seven wheels about 3 metres across that one person could turn to cool a whole hall. Historians are not sure of the exact date, and the story comes from later records.
Why it mattered. It is the earliest known record of a fan that spins instead of waves.
750
8th century
During the Tang dynasty, Chinese engineers used water power to turn fan wheels for cooling. Rotary fans became even more common under the Song dynasty.
Why it mattered. Letting water do the work was the first step towards fans that turn by themselves.
988
988 (invented c. 6th–9th century)
The folding fan was invented in Japan, probably between the 6th and 9th centuries. In 988 the Japanese monk Chōnen sent gifts to the Song emperor that included twenty fans of thin cypress slats and two folding paper fans.
Why it mattered. A fan that folds flat could go anywhere, and it spread from Japan to China and later to the world.
1600
15th–17th centuries
Portuguese traders began bringing fans from East Asia to Europe from the 1400s. By the 1600s folding fans were fashionable across Europe, and whole trades grew up to paint and make them.
Why it mattered. The fan became one of the most important fashion accessories in Europe for three centuries.
1700 – 1882
Big fans hang from ceilings, but a person or a stream of water still has to power them.
1780
c. mid-1700s–early 1900s
The Indian pankha, from pankh, a bird's wing, grew into a big cloth fan hung from the ceiling of offices, courts, barracks and homes. Workers called punkah-wallahs swung it with a rope, often in day and night shifts, for very low pay; in the 1880s some earned about 3 rupees a month.
Why it mattered. It was the ceiling fan before motors, powered by the hard, often unseen labour of Indian workers.
1827
1827 onwards
Jean-Pierre Duvelleroy opened a fan shop in Paris in 1827. His son Jules later handed out leaflets claiming that women used fans to send coded messages, such as fanning slowly to say “I am married”. Historians now think this language was invented in the 1800s to sell more fans.
Why it mattered. It is a reminder that a good story can travel further than the truth.
1865
1860s–1870s
The first rotary ceiling fans in the United States had no electric motor. A stream of water turned a turbine, which drove long belts that spun several two-bladed fans at once in stores, restaurants and offices. In 1886 John Hunter and his son James, immigrants from Ireland, started making water-powered belt fans in Syracuse, New York.
Why it mattered. Ceiling fans were ready and waiting; they only needed a better engine.
1882 – 1940
Electric motors spin propellers on desks and ceilings. Tesla's AC motor, guards and oscillating heads make fans safe and everyday.
1882
Wheeler, a young American engineer, put a two-bladed propeller on the shaft of an electric motor. The Crocker and Curtis company went on to sell electric fans in the 1880s.
Why it mattered. A motor plus a propeller is still the basic recipe of almost every fan.
1882
1882 (patented 12 November 1889)
Diehl, a German-born engineer who designed motors for Singer sewing machines, fixed a fan blade to one of those motors and hung it from the ceiling. He patented his “electric-motor fan” in 1889 and later added a light to it.
Why it mattered. It turned the water-and-belt ceiling fan into a self-contained machine you could hang in any room with electricity.
1888
1 May 1888
Tesla was granted patents for a motor with no brushes, driven by a magnetic field that spins as alternating current flows through its coils. Galileo Ferraris in Italy worked out the same idea independently. George Westinghouse bought the rights to Tesla's patents in 1888.
Why it mattered. The induction motor had no sparking brushes to wear out, and it went on to power most fans for more than a century.
1891
1890s
Westinghouse built small alternating-current induction motors to drive fans. A Westinghouse fan motor at the Smithsonian still carries a nameplate listing Tesla's patent.
Why it mattered. Fans were one of the first everyday machines to use the new AC motor.
1892
Emerson, founded in 1890, began selling electric fans in 1892. Makers such as Emerson, Westinghouse and General Electric soon filled offices and shops with desk and ceiling fans.
Why it mattered. Fans became one of the first electric appliances people bought for everyday comfort.
1905
early 1900s
As electricity arrived, electric ceiling fans largely took the place of rope-pulled punkahs in barracks and other big buildings. The old name lived on: in aircraft, the little air vent above your seat is still called a punkah louvre.
Why it mattered. A motor did the job that thousands of workers had done by hand.
1907
1904–1907
In 1904 Diehl's company gave its fan a split-ball joint so you could point it in different directions. About three years later this grew into an oscillating fan that swung from side to side by itself.
Why it mattered. Oscillation spreads one fan's breeze across a whole room.
1913
1913–1917
KDK, founded in 1909, began mass-producing its “Typhoon” electric fan in 1913, among the first electric fans mass-produced in Japan. In 1917 it applied to protect a new spiral fan guard, and in 1921 it launched Japan's first ceiling fan.
Why it mattered. Fan making spread beyond the US and Europe, and guards made spinning blades safer to live with.
1937
A British firm set up Crompton Parkinson Works in India in 1937, and it came under Indian ownership in 1947. By the 1940s Crompton Greaves had become the largest ceiling fan maker in the world.
Why it mattered. India, the land of the punkah, became a giant of the electric ceiling fan.
1940 – 2000
New shapes like the Vornado arrive, air conditioning pushes fans aside in the US, and an energy crisis brings them back.
1940
c. 1940
On an Antarctic expedition, Siple and Passel timed how fast a small bottle of water froze in different winds. Their results gave the first wind chill formulas: moving air strips away the warm layer around your skin.
Why it mattered. It explains why a fan cools people, not rooms: the air is no colder, it just takes heat from you faster.
1945
Odor had experimented with aircraft propellers before teaming up with Sutton. Their Vornadofan used sharply pitched blades inside a short duct to push a tight spiral of air that kept the whole room circulating.
Why it mattered. It showed that blade shape and a duct could make a fan move air much further.
1955
1950s–1960s
Willis Carrier designed the first modern air-conditioning system in 1902, and window air conditioners appeared in the early 1930s. As they became affordable after the Second World War, ceiling fans faded from American homes.
Why it mattered. For a while, it looked as if the fan's job was done.
1962
Wilson and Trickey described a DC motor whose brushes were replaced by electronic switches that feed each coil at just the right moment. Brushless DC motors later spread to computer cooling fans, where they are now used almost everywhere.
Why it mattered. Electronic control opened the way to fan motors that waste much less power.
1973
1973–1974
In 1973 Texas businessman Hub Markwardt began importing ceiling fans made in India by Crompton Greaves. In 1974 Burton A. Burton founded the Casablanca Fan Company in Pasadena. When energy prices soared in the 1970s, fans that used far less power than air conditioning sold fast.
Why it mattered. An energy crisis reminded people that moving air is a cheap way to feel cool.
2000 – today
Fans without visible blades, electronic motors that use less than half the power, and star labels that push efficiency.
2009
October 2009
Dyson's Air Multiplier hides a small impeller in its base, which pushes air out of a thin slot in a ring. The fast jet drags surrounding air along with it, so much more air moves than passes through the motor. Toshiba had patented a similar bladeless idea in 1981 but never sold it.
Why it mattered. It proved a fan can move a room's air by pulling it along, not just by pushing it with blades.
2022
September 2022
After a pilot of 100,000 fans, India's government-backed EESL began offering 5-star BLDC ceiling fans that draw about 28–32 watts, compared with 70–75 watts for an ordinary induction-motor fan. India buys around 40 million ceiling fans a year.
Why it mattered. Swapping the motor can cut a ceiling fan's electricity use by more than half.
2023
2022–2023
India made energy star labels compulsory for ceiling fans, with makers given until the end of 2022 to clear unlabelled stock and the rules applying from 1 January 2023. Every fan must now reach at least 1 star, and 5-star fans use about half the power of the most common older models.
Why it mattered. With some 500 million ceiling fans in use in India, small savings on each one add up to power stations' worth of electricity.
Did you know?
The word punkah comes from pankh, a bird's wing, and aircraft air vents are still called punkah louvres.
A fan does not make the air colder: it cools people, not rooms, so turn it off when you leave.
India has an estimated 500 million ceiling fans in use.
A BLDC ceiling fan can run on about 28–32 watts, less than half the 70–75 watts of a typical older fan.
The idea of a bladeless fan was patented by Toshiba in 1981, almost 30 years before Dyson's went on sale.
The people
938 – 1016 · Buddhist monk · Japan
Sent Japanese folding fans as gifts to the Song emperor of China in 988.
1847 – 1913 · Engineer and inventor · Germany and USA
Turned a sewing-machine motor into the first electric ceiling fan.
1856 – 1943 · Electrical engineer and inventor · Austrian Empire (today's Croatia) and USA
Patented the AC induction motor that drove fans for over a century.
1860 – 1923 · Electrical engineer · USA
Put a propeller on an electric motor in 1882 and made the first electric fan.
1908 – 1968 · Polar explorer and scientist · USA
With Charles Passel, measured wind chill in Antarctica.
born 1947 · Inventor and industrial designer · United Kingdom
His company launched the bladeless Air Multiplier fan in 2009.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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