Inside the Box (Fan)
An appreciation of a device, and a ritual
I wrote recently at The Bulwark about box fans, how it’s very hard to find a good one today, and why I love using them. Everybody pretty much uses air conditioning now—and I like air conditioning! But there are many spring, fall, and late summer days, or at least evenings, when it would be much cheaper, and just as pleasant, to open the windows and circulate the air with a good old-fashioned box fan.
I think I’ll be reading further about box fans and trying to figure out more about their evolution and decline. I like writing about devices—like here or here—and I might do something like that in a follow-up post.
But what started this piece, actually, had nothing to do with fans, per se, but rather this observation my wife and I had visiting various open houses in Fairfax County, Virginia. From the Bulwark piece:
The windows in these expensive, very nice homes frequently do not work.
Sometimes they’re old and have never been replaced; sometimes they’ve been painted shut; some look fine but are so stiff they’ve likely not been opened for years; some are brand new but are so cheap that the plastic in the locking mechanisms warps under pressure so that the window cannot latch shut. Some don’t even have intact screens. (That can sometimes be explained by a realtor trick: Removing the screens lets in more light. In these cases, the screens are stowed in the garage or basement.)
But functional windows are one of the most obvious things to look for in a house, aren’t they? My late-summer plans depend on them: I can’t wait to take advantage of cool nights by getting a box fan running. (Our little condo has sliding windows that don’t accommodate a box fan, which I regret almost as much as the prohibition on barbecue grills.) How can it be that working windows aren’t a priority for affluent homeowners in Northern Virginia? I have to think it’s because they don’t use them: They just flick on the air conditioner instead.
Growing up, we always used air conditioning, but on nice days we’d throw the windows open, and on cool nights I’d set up a box fan in my window, open other doors and windows, and get a serious cross-breeze going. My parents would put a fan, in the opposite direction of mine, in their window. I remember a certain excitement in that little routine. It was kind of like starting a fire. There’s something rewarding about working with your hands, doing something resourceful and practical, and seeing a result. It was something we did together. It’s adjacent to an anecdote that I’m now in danger of repeating too often:
I keep thinking about a point a co-panelist made at a talk I was invited to about zoning, housing, and beauty in the built environment. She was an interior designer by trade, and was talking about how to make a house, or an apartment, feel like a home.
She mentioned fireplaces.
A gas or electric fireplace is trendy, easy, and marketable. A real wood-burning fireplace is messy and requires more work (though I guess it’s also pretty salable.) But the thing about a real fireplace is that once you start the fire burning, you don’t know exactly when it will end, and you can’t turn it off. It creates a kind of pleasant, productive friction. “Let’s put on one more log.” “Oh, let’s just stay till the fire goes out.” That uncertainty is binding. It creates a setting for socializing that the gas fireplace doesn’t. “Alright, guess it’s time to wrap up,” you might say, as you flick the switch off.
There’s something subtly alienating, isolating, and anti-social about the smooth, frictionless operation of the thing. The good friction of the real fire draws people together in a way that is awkward to do entirely on your own, when circumstances are working against it.
A few readers thought I was tut-tutting them for using air conditioning, but no, not at all. I was just lamenting that the status of air conditioning as the go-to cooling technology makes it harder not to use it, even when it isn’t the best option. It’s just not worth making and selling big, heavy box fans, because the market just isn’t big enough anymore.
Now the cheap ones you can still buy work well enough, but they’re louder and don’t move as much air. And they just look and feel…cheap. You can see this with pretty much every product on its way out, as it reaches obsolescence—tube TVs, typewriters, cassette players. One or two perfunctory models might still be made for years, but almost never with the same deliberate design and level of quality.
In fact, I even made the point that it can be anachronistic, and even a consumerism of its own, to look back at things that were, in their time, the boring, standard, mass-produced products of their day:
Even as we gain new conveniences or abilities through new products, we often come to miss the old way. We get rid of yesterday’s tech when it becomes obsolete, but we want it back when it takes on that aura of antiqueness, becomes a historical curiosity, or even starts to convey intimations of forgotten wisdom. Consider things like surviving typewriters, cathode-ray tube televisions, and mechanical push mowers. Of course, nobody would have viewed these recently outdated things in such a rich way just as they were going out of fashion, and so there’s always something anachronistic about this way of assessing them. It might even represent its own kind of boutique consumerism. And it’s easy to romanticize a more difficult past from a comfortable present; innovation is good, and, given the option, most people outside small communities of enthusiasts would prefer not to return to these products over their successors.
Nonetheless, a sturdy fan—metal frame, metal blades, strong motor—really does something useful, and as far I have ever seen, no retail store still sells any fan like that. As a kid, my dad’s family had a General Electric steel-blade box fan that was electrically reversible—meaning you could blow air in or out with the turn of a knob.
I’ve never even seen that feature on a consumer-grade fan. That was a very nice model, but it was from an ordinary retail store. And to this day my dad remembers how much air that thing could move. My grandmother gave it away years ago, because almost everybody did, if they didn’t just put them out on the curb. Today that fan would be worth a lot of money, as are many plainer models from that era. I’m a big garage sale/thrift store guy, and I have never, ever seen one of them. It’s almost shocking how something so ubiquitous could nearly disappear.
It’s interesting how many of the replies and comments on this piece described strong feelings. It seemed like most people with a memory didn’t like fans—they wished they had AC, their room got the hot air instead of the cool outdoor air, they remembered sweating all night without AC, etc. People describing current habits mostly enjoyed how a fan helped them to take advantage of the cool outdoor air. I’m not sure that means anything, but it’s interesting.
As noted above, I will probably be revisiting this topic. But in the meantime, read the whole piece!
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