Is It Breezy In Here?

 

My last stop was in Indianapolis, Indiana. Last time I came thru here, a couple of years ago, I was pretty impressed with the town. It just seems like a very livable town. I had several touristy things to see, but I pretty much vegged out. After a couple of days of doing nothing, I thought I had better get out of the camper and at least do something. I decided that I was going to go to the Antique Fan Museum – not the fancy Victorian lady fans, but actual mechanical fans. I figured it would probably take me about 15 minutes to see it all – due partly to lack of interest and also – how many fans can there be in a museum? I mean you have blades that whir around and move air – what else can you say? Boy, was I wrong.

There is an Antique Fan Collectors Association (AFCA) that started the museum in 1997. It now houses over 600 antique fans, some dating from the early 1800's.

Fan after fan - all with some sort of significance.  

This is a water fan. 
The water would go in that little knobby thing you see thru the blades and turn a wheel inside. 
This was sort of like a water wheel you would see on a mill. 
The water would then drain out of the bottom of the fan.  

Banker fans - Supposedly designed so that they would not blow money around.

A fan that runs on kerosene

This is one of the first oscillating fans. You place the fan on the platform and then those wing pieces would change direction causing the platform to move back and forth.

Atlas holding a fan - this was a contemporary fan - the docents in the museum's shop made it.

This had a knob on top that you would turn and....

The decorative front would rotate and there is your fan

The red fan is from a bordello

Funeral fans - supposedly the lights would give the deceased a healthy facial glow.

The museum was two floors.  The second floor had more contemporary fans and lots and lots of ceiling fans. They just removed sixty of the ceiling fans and you can hardly tell they are gone. 

There is a Facebook group called the Ceiling Fan Kids which is made up of kids with a thing for ceiling fans.  They have discovered that autistic kids really like to watch the fans move.  Each of the ceiling fans has a remote so the kids can turn the fans on and off.  One day, a kid came in and turned every single fan on and then took all of the remotes and put them in a pile.  We are talking gale force winds.  It took the staff two hours to figure out which remote went with which fan and get them turned off.  

There was a chair-fan that came from the Benjamin Franklin museum. Ol' Ben was a pretty inventive guy.