From 1932, a hand-propelled fan. A rarity, more than an everyday object, I would think. Who knows; I have no idea whether this was a commercial success or remained in the realm of ideas and unrealized inventions. Is it possible that this low-tech gizmo was ever-present in bourgeois living rooms? A bent wire makes the small wooden propeller spin as the hand squeezes the wooden handle back and forth, an ingenuous and sustainable (by today’s standards) mechanism which, according to the image caption, was developed by people from tropical countries where electricity is an expensive luxury (we don’t know who those smart people were, or which tropical countries they belonged to). The device seems a bit out of scale (too big), at least in the photo. “Everybody comes to Rick’s” was the famous line from Casablanca (1942). The film is ten years older than this little invention and I can’t avoid imagining how would Ilse Lund look on screen squeezing one of these in the film’s dark, smoky sets, while tormented trying to make up her mind between Rick and Laszlo. The lady in the picture is, certainly, not as sophisticated as Ilse and that is perhaps a clue as to the market segment for which this device would have been designed. How important was a hand-propelled fan in those years, right after the Depression? Sometimes it helps to re-contextualize objects in order to get a better idea of what they meant back when.
