The history
From a gas-fed salon hood in 1888 to brushless dryers spinning at 110,000 rpm, and the safety rules that stopped them killing people in the bath.
People have always dried hair with sun, wind and fire. In 1888 a hairdresser piped warm air from a stove into a hood, and within a few decades a small motor, a fan and a coil of new nichrome wire fitted into your hand. Dryers got lighter and stronger, the blow-dry turned them into styling tools, and a string of bathroom deaths led to the shock protection now built into every plug.
1888
First hair dryer patent
Alexandre F. Godefroy, St. Louis, USA
1906
Nichrome heating wire patented
Albert L. Marsh, USA
1911
Hand-held hair dryer patent
Gabriel M. Kazanjian, Chicago, USA
c. 1920
Hand-held dryers on sale
Racine Universal Motor Co. and Hamilton Beach, USA
1955–1958
Sensitive earth-leakage breaker
Henri Rubin, South Africa
1962
The blow-dry
Rose Evansky, London
1987 (off), 1991 (on and off)
Immersion protection required
UL 859, USA
2024 order, 2025 deadlines
BIS mark compulsory for dryers
India
1750 – 1915
Bimetal, a gas-fed salon hood, the first electric dryers in Germany and, crucially, nichrome wire that can stay red hot for years.
1759
The clockmaker John Harrison bonded two metals that expand by different amounts, so the strip bends as the temperature changes. He used it to keep his sea clocks accurate in hot and cold weather.
Why it mattered. The same bimetal idea, as a snapping disc, is the thermal cutout inside every hair dryer.
1888
18 September 1888
Godefroy, a hairdresser often described as French, patented a hood that fitted over a seated customer's head. A pipe carried warm air from a stove into it; the same box could also be used for shampooing and for shaping wigs. Some accounts give 1890.
Why it mattered. It is the first patented hair dryer: the idea of drying hair with a stream of warm air.
1900
c. 1900
Early electric hair dryers were made in Germany around the turn of the century: heavy metal machines with the fan and motor driven from the handle. Exactly who built the first is not certain.
Why it mattered. Electricity and a small motor turned a fixed salon machine into something you could hold.
1906
Marsh found that an alloy of nickel and chromium resists current about 50 times more than copper and survives being heated red hot over and over without burning through. It was patented in 1906 as Chromel; today we call it nichrome.
Why it mattered. Almost every toaster, heater and hair dryer element since has been a coil of nichrome.
1908
AEG registered the name Fön, after the warm, dry wind that blows down from the Alps. By 1910 its dryer had been slimmed to 1.8 kg with a 300 W heater.
Why it mattered. A brand name became the everyday word for a hair dryer in many languages.
1910 – 1950
Small universal motors make hand-held dryers possible. They are heavy, weak and noisy at first, then Bakelite cases make them lighter and safer.
1910
April 1910
Hamilton Beach was founded to build small appliances around Chester Beach's light, high-speed universal motor, which runs on AC or DC. Its first hit was a drink mixer.
Why it mattered. A light motor that could spin a fan fast was the missing piece for a dryer you could hold in one hand.
1911
6 June 1911
Kazanjian, an Armenian-American, was granted a US patent for a hair drier with a heater and a fan that forced a blast of hot air through it, light enough for one person to use. He had applied in 1908.
Why it mattered. It set out the modern plan: a fan pushing air through a heater, in the hand.
1920
c. 1920
Around 1920 the first hand-held electric dryers reached shops in the USA. They weighed about 1 kg and gave only about 100 W of heat, so drying took a long time, and they were loud and costly.
Why it mattered. Drying hair moved from the salon chair into the home.
1923
c. 1923
A.C. Gilbert, famous for toys, sold small electric appliances such as the Polar Cub hair dryer. Early dryers like it ran at low wattage and needed long drying times.
Why it mattered. Cheaper dryers began to reach ordinary homes.
1925
c. 1925
The Sol hairdryer, now in London's Science Museum, has an aluminium body, a wooden handle and a simple fan with two heat settings. It was aimed at middle-class homes.
Why it mattered. Hot and warm settings, the ancestors of High and Low, were there almost from the start.
1945
c. 1945
Bakelite, an early plastic that doesn't conduct electricity, replaced metal cases. The Bylock dryer had an all-Bakelite casing, ran on 200–250 V, drew between 50 and 550 W and spun its fan at about 9,500 rpm.
Why it mattered. An insulating case made dryers lighter and much less likely to give a shock through the body.
By the numbers
Early dryers were feeble; today's run at 1,200 to 2,000 W. Points are single documented models or typical values, not averages.
1950 – 1972
Motors move inside light plastic bodies, power climbs, and the blow-dry turns the dryer into a styling tool. Earth-leakage protection is invented.
1951
A soft bonnet with holes in it, connected by a hose to a dryer, let people dry their hair at home while sitting down. Rigid salon hood dryers followed.
Why it mattered. It brought the salon's sit-under dryer into ordinary homes.
1954
GEC redesigned its dryer so the motor sat inside the casing, making the whole thing neater and easier to hold.
Why it mattered. The layout of a modern dryer, with fan, motor and heater in one barrel, took shape.
1956
1955–1958
Rubin built earth-leakage protectors that could trip at a few tens of milliamps. After a fatal shock near Johannesburg, a few hundred 20 mA units were fitted to homes in mining villages.
Why it mattered. This is the idea behind today's 30 mA RCCB, which saves people from appliances that fall into water.
1961
Dalziel, who had measured how much current the human body can survive, worked with a manufacturer to build a transistor-based ground fault circuit interrupter.
Why it mattered. His research is where the 30 mA safety limit comes from.
1962
Evansky saw a barber drying a man's hair with a hand-held dryer and a brush, and tried it on a client. Within a year every leading salon in Mayfair offered the ‘blow-wave’.
Why it mattered. Styling, not just drying, became the hair dryer's big job.
1972 – 2011
Deaths from dryers in bathwater lead to bathroom GFCIs and then to shock protection built into every dryer's plug.
1973
1972–1975
The Consumer Product Safety Act of 1972 created the CPSC, which began looking at deaths from appliances. In 1975 the US wiring code began requiring GFCI protection for bathroom sockets.
Why it mattered. Bathrooms, where water and dryers meet, got their own shock protection.
1987
The UL 859 standard began to require that a hand-held dryer must not electrocute anyone if it falls into water while plugged in and switched off. Makers built a leakage detector (ALCI) into a big block plug.
Why it mattered. The safety device moved into the dryer itself, so it works on any socket.
1991
From 1991 the rule covered dryers switched on as well as off. Deaths fell from almost 10 a year in 1987–1990 to under 2 a year in 1991–1997, and to about 0.3 a year after that.
Why it mattered. It is one of the clearest examples of a safety standard saving lives.
1994
Doctors traced a patient's brittle, bubbly hair to a faulty dryer blowing air at about 300 °C. In tests, hair formed bubbles with a dryer at 175 °C or tongs at 125 °C: water inside the fibre had boiled.
Why it mattered. It showed exactly how too much heat damages wet hair.
2011
28 June 2011
A federal rule made any hand-held hair dryer without built-in immersion protection a ‘substantial product hazard’ that could be recalled or refused at the border.
Why it mattered. It turned a voluntary standard into a firm legal requirement.
By the numbers
Average electrocutions a year from hair dryers getting wet in the USA, before and after immersion protection became part of the UL 859 standard in 1987 and 1991.
2000 – today
Ionic and fast brushless dryers arrive, scientists measure heat damage, and India makes leakage protection and the BIS mark part of the rules.
2001
Makers began adding ion generators that spray negatively charged particles into the air stream, claimed to cut static and frizz. Panasonic later added its ‘nanoe’ charged water particles to dryers, from 2005.
Why it mattered. Ions became a big selling point, though the evidence for them is modest.
2010
20 September 2010
The CEA's safety regulations came into force, requiring an earth-leakage protective device on installations with a load above 5 kW. Electricians now commonly fit a 30 mA RCCB on home circuits.
Why it mattered. It brought residual-current protection into India's rulebook.
2011
April 2011
Researchers dried hair 30 times at different distances. Air at 95 °C from 5 cm away cracked the cuticle; drying from 15 cm, at about 47 °C, did less damage than leaving hair to dry naturally.
Why it mattered. It gave simple, evidence-based advice: keep the dryer moving and about 15 cm away.
2016
27 April 2016
Dyson launched the Supersonic, with a brushless digital motor in the handle spinning at up to 110,000 rpm and a microprocessor that measures the air temperature many times a second. It took about four years and a large team to develop.
Why it mattered. Brushless motors made dryers smaller, quieter and better at keeping temperature steady.
2024
5 March 2024
India's Quality Control Order for skin and hair care appliances made the BIS safety standard IS 302 (Part 2/Sec 23) compulsory for hair dryers, with deadlines in 2025 for makers of every size.
Why it mattered. Every hair dryer sold in India must now carry the ISI mark for electrical safety.
2026
April 2026
A chemist reviewing ionic dryers found the physics of cancelling static sound, but the ion output small and no scientific proof that they dry hair faster.
Why it mattered. A reminder to ask for evidence behind appliance marketing.
Did you know?
The German word for a hair dryer, Fön, comes from a warm, dry wind that blows down from the Alps.
Early hand-held dryers of the 1920s gave only about 100 W of heat. A modern one gives 15 to 20 times more.
Since shock protection was built into US hair dryers, deaths from dryers in bathwater fell from about 16 a year to almost none.
Wet hair is more easily damaged by heat than dry hair: water lowers the temperature at which keratin unravels from about 230 °C to about 150 °C.
A dryer's heating element holds roughly 3 metres of nichrome wire, coiled up so it fits in a barrel a few centimetres wide.
The people
dates uncertain · Hairdresser and inventor · France and USA
Patented a stove-fed salon hood in 1888, the first hair dryer patent.
1877 – 1944 · Metallurgist · USA
Invented nichrome, the wire in almost every heating element.
dates uncertain · Engineer · USA
Designed the light, fast universal motor behind Hamilton Beach's small appliances.
dates uncertain · Inventor · Armenian-American, Chicago
Patented a hand-held fan-and-heater hair drier in 1911.
dates uncertain · Engineer · South Africa
Built early high-sensitivity earth-leakage protectors in the 1950s.
1904 – 1986 · Electrical engineer · USA
Measured how much current people can survive and developed the GFCI.
1922 – 2016 · Hairdresser · Germany and England
Invented the blow-dry in her Mayfair salon in 1962.
born 1947 · Inventor and industrialist · England
His company's Supersonic brought a 110,000 rpm brushless motor to hair dryers.
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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