FACTORALY - E39 FANS

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Fans have been keeping us cool for centuries, from huge ones that cool a whole room to small ones that flutter and send messages. We hope this episode makes you one of our biggest fans. If only... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello everybody hello everyone i'm bruce fielding i'm simon wells we're voiceover artists yes we are can you tell you can tell if we do like this, you know, where you get really... If we actually lean into the microphone. Yes, or when we go, and now the sale is on. So Bruce and I are voiceover artists. We spend all day sitting in boxes, talking into a microphone. And we both love random and interesting facts. So put those two things together

what do you get factorially which is exactly what i've just described it's it's us two talking about interesting hopefully interesting facts around a particular topic and you lot listening and absorbing and learning yes occasionally correcting us when we get it wrong. So what's this week's subject, Simon? This week's subject, Bruce, is fans. Well, when we said fans, did you have like, were you thinking about sort of like, take that? Were you thinking more about sort of staying cool? I was definitely thinking of the staying cool movement of air type fan. Phew, because I was thinking that as well.

Excellent. movement of air type fan few because i was thinking that as excellent although i did for a moment think fans and then you've got fanzines and all those comic con and all that stuff we should probably have communicated better it's purely fortuitous that we've actually researched the same type of fans both landed on staying cool that could have been a mistake couldn't it yeah just out of interest um what do you know about fans the other type that we haven't researched oh very little i have you i've never really been a fan i've sort of never joined a fan club or anything like that no no me either um fan is short for fanatic um which means someone who is wholeheartedly dedicated to a particular cause or interest or whatever it is.

Football fans, music fans. But fan is not short for anything, though, is it? The fan that we're talking about. The fan that we're talking about. No, it's... I looked this up, obviously. Of course you did. Of course I did.

I like a bit of etymology. So the word fan, originally in Old English spelt with two Ns... Not even two small Fs. No. It's not welsh um the the old english word fan with two n's comes from the latin word vanus which in turn probably not totally sure but probably comes from the latin word ventus meaning wind ah because you get things like weather veins don't you which are the things that turn around so similarly that that that vanus also gives you veins so the the blades on a windmill um weather veins on top of a on top of a building that tells you which direction the wind is coming from all connected to the same the same route of all sorts of fan indeed um but that word fan uh with its double n um was first used as far as i can

find out was first used in an agricultural sense um in the use of winnowing ah and winnowing is where you separate uh a grain into its usable edible bits and the chaff the husk right that you don't need yes and you had a winnowing fan so this is the the very first original meaning of the word fan so a winnowing fan i don't know why i'm putting my hands out like this to show it to you because this is an audio podcast um it basically blows across as you as you mill and it drops down it blows across and blows the the light stuff to one side and the heavy stuff drops. Exactly that. So this is an ancient practice still used in certain parts of the world.

It's used in harvesting rice in China. It's used in harvesting wheat throughout Europe in small, you know, sort of cottage industry style. You have this wicker tray. You have all of your grain on it. You toss it up into the air like a chef, you know, flipping a frying pan. As you say, the light chaff, the husky stuff, blows away in the wind, and you're left with the grain. So that's the wind connection.

That's why it derives from the Latin word for wind, because the wind is used to blow away the chaff. Of course. So that's a winnowing fan. Okay. Well, the first thing that came into my head, and this may be just the way I'm wired, was fan dance. Oh, right.

Okay, fine. And I discovered that the thing that I thought was a fan dance is only one of the things that's a fan dance. There are many other types of fan dance, are there? There are two other things that are fan dances. Oh, okay. So the first thing that pops up when you look up fan dance, weirdly, isn't either the burlesque thing or the other thing I've completely forgotten about, which was the Chinese fan dancing. Of course, yes.

Sort of flittering a little hand fan in front of your face. Exactly, exactly. Moving around in circles. completely forgotten about which was the the chinese fan dancing of course yes yes sort of flittering a little hand fan in front of your face exactly moving around in circles yes all that stuff yeah um it's actually a special forces thing that they call the fan dance and what it is it's a 15 mile hike up a mountain in wales with a fully loaded backpack and you have to complete this 15 mile march in four hours and 10 minutes as part of it's like all the special forces do this thing called the fan dance really yeah i've never heard of that i know of all the possible random stuff you could have brought up today about fans not for a minute did i think of a Special Forces hike. We are random stuff. That's incredible.

I wonder why they call it a fan dance other than just for sheer hilarity. I did try and find that out, and there is no reference to why it's called a fan dance. Maybe people can tell us. So before I go on to my two other sorts of fan dancing, have you got any other sorts of fans that you'd like to talk about? Well, I mean, when I say fan, I automatically think of an electric fan on a stand blowing nice, cool air. Does it sound like this? That's uncanny.

That's exactly what it sounds like. And that wasn't even a sound effect. That was actually Bruce holding a small fan up to his mic it was very good um so there's that automatically i think of that after that i think of the um handheld fan that starts off as a as a rectangular thing that you can slip in your pocket and then you fan it open so that it makes a hand fan which you then waft daintily in your face in order to cool down. Yep. There are an awful lot of different varieties of hand fan,

and some of them are actually very old. So the oldest mention of a hand fan that I can find is from 2000 BC in Egypt. So I mentioned the sort of fan that you fold out. Those are relatively recent. So before that, a fan was a solid object, often sort of fan that you fold out those are relatively recent so before that a fan was a solid object often sort of a circular wooden frame with a handle with a with perhaps a silk screen woven over it that you would constantly have by your side and waft yourself with um there have been large palm leaves suspended from the ceiling tied up to a rope and a pulley and you would have someone you know standing a punkawalla boom see this is why i have this this relationship with

bruce he knows exactly what a punkawalla is what's a punkawalla punkawalla is it's basically a chap who sits quietly in a corner with a piece of string just pulling the piece of string up and down which moves uh like as a cam thing moves a piece of wood across from side to side. And attached to the piece of wood is a piece of material or a leaf or something, which wafts cooling air down towards the person sitting underneath it. Exactly. And that fan was called a punker. In India, around 500 BC,

is the first mention we find of a punker, or punker, however you want to pronounce it. And the person who operates it is, as you say, a punker or punker however you want to pronounce it and the person who operates it is as you say a punker wallah great word isn't it brilliant well it wasn't just india um similar things in in china um about 3 000 years ago similar frame uh with beautiful chinese designs on it and writing yeah um and the the there was a dance that went with the fan which was like a an entertainment right that um took ages to learn it was really precise and it was a mixture of dance tai chi and kung fu oh i mean a properly regulated regimented uh thing and it took like one dance which didn't

take that long to do took about three months to learn oh my goodness and you had to get every single movement absolutely precise and they were usually done uh things like chinese new year okay so people would learn a new a new fan dance yeah for the next chinese new year and they would kind of put in the animal into that that dance right um and it was brilliant and the other thing that chinese used it for was a bit like you know at a wedding people the the the bride wears a veil over her face the chinese used a fan like that the person getting married would put the fan over her face so just just showing her mouth right and then at the conclusion of the ceremony she would lift the fan and everybody would go oh she's adorable or oh that's the wrong person oh also i think i mean they may have been an egyptian invention the chinese

claim that they were chinese obviously everybody's going to claim that it's it's their invention but i found reasonable evidence to suggest that they are japanese in origin the folding hand fans there are examples of this dating back to the sixth century in japan first of all on on tomb paintings in in japanese tomb paintings there are there are examples of this thing and it's very clear what they are you know they they are individual slats of wood or ivory or whatever um with thin layers of paper or feathers or silk woven in between the slats and the slats are all attached together by a pivot at one end so that the whole thing can collapse or fan open obviously the word fan as a verb comes from that fact that you open a fan and it fans open

yes and things like fan tailed when you're talking about birds and stuff. Sure, I suppose peacocks have been fanning long before fans existed. Yes, yes. But these things are terribly delicate and sometimes very expensive, depending on your class in society. Some of them were just a single sheet of paper with a beautiful painting or illustration on it. And yes, the fan was a very important accessory to a lady of status. And then they came west. They did. Like everything.

Probably Marco Polo. He seemed to have brought everything back. He's done an awful lot to bring stuff over, hasn't he? Yes. Spaghetti and piñatas. Please listen to our previous episodes that explain what Bruce just said. They were very popular with the French in the 17th century, all the 1600s. And then the Huguenots had a little bit of a contretemps with the French church.

Right. And decided to come to the UK. And they not only brought all their lace work and all the fabulous other stuff that the huguenots uh used to do they also brought with them the fan so that's how we got them interesting so they and there and there were sort of different types that there was a brise which was just basically just sticks there was there was nothing really there okay sort of between between the between the veins if you like yeah of fan. Then there was the pleated fan, which is the one that we kind of know a bit.

Right. And then there was the cockade, which was one that I've actually got one, which it starts off as a stick, and you open it up and it turns into a complete circle. Oh, I can picture that, yes. Yes, which is lovely. And actually, I had a dinner party many years ago when it was incredibly hot and we didn't have air conditioning in the dining room.

Yeah. So I went out to Chinatown because I don't live that far from Chinatown in London. Okay. And I just went into a shop and I said, we had about 12 people for dinner. And I said, can I have like 15 Chinese fans, just cheap paper fans? Yeah. And they were all that sort of cockade circular fantastic circular fan and so we basically just put one on each place setting so that everybody could

actually just fan themselves while they were eating their food that's very good i like that now i've often wondered as i'm sure many of us have, you know, these things keep us lying awake at night. I've often wondered, how does a hand fan or an electric fan work? It's not actually generating cold air. That's what aircon is for. It's purely wafting around the warm air that is too warm, which is why we want the fan in the first place. And I hadn't really realized this, but apparently the wafting of air against the skin makes sweat evaporate to a certain extent yes um and therefore leaves your skin slightly cooler than it was before when it had the sweat on it and the second action of a fan is to purely um move the particularly hot air

that surrounds your body away from you yes because we generate it don't we that's why if you wear a hat you stay warmer yes it traps the hot air in yes um so yes it was i found it interesting to actually realize oh there are some mechanics there is actually some science involved in the physics of yeah of fans yeah absolutely yeah but when they became very popular in the uk as always we thought oh we can go one better than this. And, you know, we made celebration fans for coronations and all the other various odds and sods that we do. But then, you know, like magazines today have like sort of scandal sheets. So what the magazines did is that they started to come up with, because fans were very popular, things like fan languages. Oh, good. You went down that route. Excellent.

Yes. So in 1740, Gentleman's Magazine, why it wasn't a ladies' magazine, but Gentleman's Magazine talked about speaking fan, and they broke the alphabet up into five sections of 25 letters each. They left off the J for some reason. Okay. And there were various different positions that you could put the fan in like sort of leaning on the hold held in the right hand and leaning the

fan on the left on the left forearm yes uh bicep or wherever yes and so each of these five positions was one of the five letters of the alphabet in that in that section in that section oh so you would do two two moves would give you like okay it's the it's the first section third letter so that's a c oh my goodness that's complex but then um obviously somebody thought ah it's too boring we're much more salacious than that at uh at cassell's magazine so so let's talk about what fan language actually is. And it's like, oh, you know, if you're a woman carrying your fan in your left hand, that means you're a desirous of an acquaintance. Or if you hold your fan, like, open, that says, wait for me.

And if you start fanning very slowly, that says, I'm married. Right, okay. And if you draw the fan through the hand, that means, I hate you. Oh my goodness. So you can kind of go, I'm desirous of an acquaintance, wait for me. Oh, I'm married. I hate you. It's beginning to sound like semaphoreore if you really wanted to string together a particularly complicated sentence you'd be waving your fan all over the place wouldn't you you could you

or you could accidentally send people mixed messages because you were just a bit hot yes yes or you dropped your fan by mistake yes did you have a look into fan language yeah so i found examples of this a little bit later than what you're you're talking about um i looked at the sotheby's uh website sotheby's being an english auction house and and they had a little section about antique fans and i came across a company called um devolroy okay french company moved to england um They were a fan maker and retailer founded in Paris in 1827. They, as you say, this whole thing is rather manufactured by the people who sort of create these leaflets and brochures in order to increase sales. It's not reporting what already exists,

they're actually causing it to exist and um yes this leaflet published by dual rice said very very similar to the things you've just said um but yes so duval duval roy published their uh this leaflet because apparently the the sale of fans had um reduced slightly during the uh sort of early 1800s they'd they'd lost their appeal for whatever reason and purely in order to boost sales this company published a another leaflet um propounding this myth that they mean something and if you own one you're terribly clever and terribly stylish so bringing it back yeah relaunch the following the french revolution i think you know the the the popularity

of fans had reduced they were seen as a little bit aristocratic. So these guys published this leaflet to resurge the sale of them. A couple of other things I've found about the language, there are loads of these things. There are, as you say, there's 25 odd moves that can represent different things. I found placing the fan against your left ear signified to the other person i want you to go away immediately that's a very polite way of putting what i was thinking yes absolutely absolutely um but yes you know we've all we've all watched various um you know jane austen style regency regency period absolutely and i've always just assumed you know that that person is just dangling their fan by the string or they're wafting themselves

because they're warm but actually you look back at some of these episodes or these movies they are absolutely accurately done you know they've actually put this into the script to to represent what they are saying to the person or more importantly, what they're not saying to the other person on the screen. They've actually recreated the fan actions in some of them. So some sad nerd like us has gone through the script and gone, okay, we need you to be holding your fan like this at this point.

Precisely, yeah. Wow. That's encouraging, isn't it? Yeah. Research is not dead. And then this company, Duval Roy, eventually became a supplier of fans to queen victoria and um and the rest of the royal household um and they set up a boutique in new bond street in london and yeah just further cemented the popularity of fans in those social circles.

You do still see fans being used. Like, I've been to music gigs and things like that, where it's very hot. And a lot of the time, people will have taken a fan with them to just keep them cool. And then when you see it, you go, God, I wish I had the foresight to do that. Absolutely, yes. I mean, they seem like such a rudimentary device. But actually, I've seen people using them in the theatre. You know, they're silent. That's their benefit. Yeah, I guess. They do the job and they're quiet.

And they pack away quite neatly into a handbag. Unless you happen to be goods of desire in Hong Kong. Do you know what? Honestly, I've also looked up goods of desire in Hong Kong. So Bruce know what? Honestly, I've also looked up goods of desire in Hong Kong. So Bruce and I don't plan this at all. One day, Bruce says, what should we do next week, Simon? I said, I don't know, maybe fans. We don't talk for a week. We do our research. We come back and present our findings to you, dear listeners. We've both researched goods of desire. Go on then, Bruce. So I'm going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer it.

Okay, this is, we are talking, by the way, about the biggest folding fan, which was produced by goods of desire. And Simon, how long was this fan? This fan was just over eight and a quarter meters in length. That's about 28 feet. It's quite long, isn't it that's a very long fan and and simon how high was this fan it was about five and a half meters high i think if i remember 17 feet there you go absolutely you see you not only get the facts you get them in

metric and imperial he's the imperial i'm the metric this is back in 2009 yeah yeah and it went into the guinness book of records as as rightly it should as the largest fan in the world but we've been talking up to now about um the sorts of fans that you carry in your hand yeah or that you always said we mentioned at one point the ones that you have on your desk. Yeah. There are bigger fans than that. There are. There are a lot more powerful and bigger fans.

Okay. Have you sort of looked into industrial stuff here? Well, see, I'm a great fan of Formula One. Yeah. And they have wind tunnels in Formula One. Do they? And the thing that powers a wind tunnel… Is a big old fan.

Is a great huge fan. And what they do is they… I mean, these wind tunnels cost about sort of a mere $60 to $100 million to produce. I thought you were going to say they're expensive. And they're allowed, depending on where they finish in the season. If you finish sort of high up, you're allowed fewer runs in the wind tunnel. Right. If you finish lower down, you're allowed more runs in the wind tunnel.

Okay. So between 30 and 45 runs a week. Okay. And what they do is they use little, not little, but 60% scale models of Formula One cars. Right. but 60 scale models of of formula one cars right and they build them out of metal mostly because then it's easier to change things on the metal okay and and they run these things at about i think they're limited to 100 miles an hour something like that okay no faster than that and they spend an absolute fortune on these wind tunnels because it makes your car go faster and

if your car goes faster you get more points and if you get more points you get more money so speaking as someone who is not a formula one fan fan brilliant um i don't quite get this what what is the purpose of that what is the purpose of putting a model car through a tunnel with a big fan in it? What does that achieve? Okay, I could get a bit nerdy here. I'm going to try not to. Briefly.

We have done an episode on cars already, so briefly. Okay, aerodynamics. It's all about aerodynamics. Okay. So what you want is for the car to be minimally affected by the friction of air. Okay. But you want to use the air to hold the car to the ground. So you want some sort of ground effect

so that actually it acts like a reverse wing. Okay. So that rather than lifting an aeroplane up in the air, it sucks the car to the floor. What they do in these wind tunnels is they add little winglets and little bits and pieces to actually alter the airflow to make the air go through the engine correctly to keep the keep the engine cool right

so yes so what you want is a car that slips through the air really cleanly that that is sucked down to the floor so that when it goes around corners it can that doesn't have to lose any speed it can continue to high speed around corners right and that's what the that's what the wind tunnels are for is to make sure that your car is is is working optimally in terms of that gotcha um and and though those kinds of wind tunnels are not only used for cars they're used for airplanes as well there's an there's there's one in america called the ames research center right i don't know whether you came across this in your research. I did not, no. I had a feeling you would do it for me. The Ames Research Centre, you can get whole bits of aeroplane, whole wings and stuff.

It's 40 foot wide, 8 foot high. And the fan runs it up to 300 knots, about 350 miles an hour. And it'll take a full-sized aeroplane part. So you can test a wing or a wheel or a bit of fuselage and and you can kind of work out how the wind is going to affect the airplane in the air which is amazing and then of course to get into the air you also need a fan because uh turbines turbines jet turbines are the things that get the aeroplanes into the air. And the most powerful fan there is, is the General Electric 90, which is on a Boeing 777.

Okay. And that generates 115,000 pounds foot of thrust, which is a lot. Goodness me. Each one of those, so four of you're you're going to go up in the air right wow see now that's i can visualize an engine on an airplane i i you know all the way back from an old propeller plane to a jet engine yes i would never specifically call that a fan purely because of its purpose i guess i i so associate a fan as being something that blows air onto you to keep you cool this is just doing that in reverse it's sucking air through it

and blowing it out the back in order to provide thrust well if you if you think about it the propeller on an airplane is a kind of a fan too i suppose so yeah it's something that's blowing air backwards yes to make the object that it's attached to go forwards, yeah. Yes. I'd never really put those two together. How interesting. I have my last fact about fan dancing, because obviously I've been fan dancing the whole way through.

Okay. I have friends who are fan dancers in the burlesque sense of being a fan dancer. So the very first fan dance, which is like an erotic way of dancing, you can be either naked or apparently naked and use two fans. It has to be two to hide your body from your audience yeah and the first person well the first person to bring this to popularity uh was a woman called sally rand okay and and she appeared at the 1934 chicago world's fair right and she did this fan dance that shocked and amazed everybody yeah it was so sexy wow how is she doing that?

And when you look at the, there is film, there is footage of Sally Rand actually doing these dances. And you watch it and you go, that's really clever. In the 1930s when nobody had done it really before her. To actually move the fans so that you never really know what's happening. And she would do things like she would go behind a screen, which was covered in tracing paper, and always be backlit. A lot of the time, it's one of the things that's fairly common with fan dancers, is that they're backlit because then the feathers in the fan,

which are beautiful, you know, bouffant feathers. They're sort of large ostrich-y feathers, aren't they? Exactly. They are usually ostrich very fluffy very large yes yeah and very opaque and um so they would do these dances and then she would go behind this screen so that you could see the silhouette of her behind the screen and she was probably wearing a body suit but it looked just in case sexy and then she would come out and she would still be using the fans. And it was absolutely fascinating. And it just exploded.

Then it kind of died off a bit. Right. And then the gay community got hold of fan dancing. Drag acts got very, very big into fan dancing. Yeah, sure. And then it sort of had a huge resurgence about sort of 10, 15 years ago. Right. And now it's quite a common sight at a burlesque to see somebody.

Right. And it's really hard. I mean, you know, if you look, I don't know if you've ever seen a drummer's hands, like an African drummer or somebody who drums with their hands. Right, okay. They have really, really tough, rough skin on their hands. Yeah, yeah. Fan dancers, very similar. Really? Because they're really quite heavy oh yes i suppose so yeah the

rule was basically you dance with your fans until your hands become hamburgers and then you rest until they recover and then you do it again and again and again until your hands get so strong and tough that you can move these fans around as elegantly as they do. Wow, that's impressive. Yeah, because they make it look so effortless, don't they? It's just a gentle waft of the hand. And I'm using the word waft an awful lot today. Well, we're talking about fans, so wafting is allowed. Absolutely. But yes, I hadn't really thought about how heavy and cumbersome they are

and probably quite unwieldy because you know they're moving against the air so yes they're going to be quite hard work i should and yet you have to make it look elegant and stylish and smooth and cool absolutely the average fan that everybody has in their house, at least in this country, everyone has a fan in their house for those three days each year in the British summer when it gets unbearably hot and you need to cool down. So electrical fans in that sense, in terms of domestic or office use to cool one down, they're older than I had realised. The first electrical fan for that purpose was created back in the 1800s. There was an American gentleman called Skylar Wheeler. Great name. Skylar. I love the name Skylar. fan and patented it and it was exactly as we picture a fan now you know it's three or four blades that are slightly tilted they're put on a pivot they rotate uh due to a motor and they propel air forward in your i'm betting it didn't have a cage around it to stop you from chopping

your hands off surprisingly it did really yeah i i didn't think it would either, but it had a cage. Not a very good one, to be fair, but still, it had a cage. And around the same time in the early 1880s, another fellow called Philip Diel made the first electric ceiling fan. So neither of them can necessarily claim I invented the electric fan, but it was around that era. And that's a lot earlier than i thought it was going to be i i sort of think of the classic 1920s 30s um detective comics they've always got a a fan sort of ceiling chopping chopping away on the ceiling um but yes the 1880s and then to bring that up to the modern day i had a quick quick look at bladeless fans. Oh, like the Dyson? Like

the Dyson. So it looks like a fan. It's on a stand. It has a large circular rim, but there's nothing inside it. And it somehow projects cool air out of it. The concept of a bladeless fan was put forward by Toshiba way back in 1981. but it was the dyson company who made a reality 2009 and um they used the phrase air amplifying technology and it uses a couple of scientific techniques called inducement and entrainment which kind of comes back to what you were saying about the way that the the f1 cars use air to suck them into the ground so it uses something a little bit like that so you have a small motor it's not entirely bladeless because although you can't see any blades there is a small fan a small motor in the

base of the of the fan and it just generates a little bit of air at a low velocity it projects that air through thin slots that go all the way around the rim of this circular tubular device and then the air sort of wafts around wafts the air wafts around that circle again and again and again sorry let can i just stop you there certainly go back to the beginning of this podcast yes get a bottle of vodka and a shot glass every time simon says what that's definitely the way to do it i'm going to use it even more now sorry so carry on you you were wafting i was wafting so the the air is projected through the slots it circulates it. It doesn't waft. It circulates around the rim of this circular device. And that action, that sort of stream of air, sucks air into it from the outside.

And that is called entrainment. And so it sucks more air in. It then amplifies it again, projects it out, creates this airflow stream, sucks more air in. So it actually amplifies it again projects it out creates this airflow stream sucks more air in so it actually amplifies air right so it's a bit like a sort of like a perpetual motion sort of air machine yes it produces a bit of air it sucks in more air it produces even more air it sucks in more air wow and so you just get this constant and because there are no blades in the main body of the fan it it's not chopping air. It's not sort of blowing it to you in small waves.

It's just a constant, constant flow of alcohol. Why are they so expensive? Because they can be. If you have a certain technology that's patented by one person and one person alone, they can kind of charge what they want so i have we have we spun up our fans sufficiently now do you think i think so i think i've wafted away all of my facts thank you for listening we we really appreciate your listening to this and um if you do like them um then tell people that you like them and tell them where they can find it. Yes.

Like, subscribe, rate, and review, and share. All those things. Yes. So please tune in next week for another fun-filled episode of Factorily. Goodbye. Cheerio.