Historical Perspective on Hand Dryers

I was channel surfing and stopped a few minutes to watch The Glass Menagerie. It was filmed in 1950. The play was written by Tennessee Williams in 1944. In one of the scenes Kirk Douglas washes his hands and dries them with an electronic hand dryer. I was startled to see a gadget being used 60 years ago that is still in use today.

There's not a lot of information on Frenchman Alexandre Godefoy but he did invent the first hair dryer in 1890. Harry McLeckie from Chicago invented the hand dryer in 1948. Again not much

to be found on him either. McLeckie's device looks like a smaller version of Godefoy's contraption. Another point of interest is women back in 1890's used vacuum cleaners to dry their hair. They just switched the hose around like a shopvac and used the exhaust to blow rather than suck.

Of course we all know old Danial Hess of Iowa invented the vacuum cleaner in 1860. However our propensity to suck has no limits and many people after him invented new ways to suck and obtained patents as well. The vacuum pictured is from 1910.

These inventions seem to be spaced by the length of a lifetime. I wonder if one person had to die before another could take the idea and profit from it. Hummm?

I'm not sure if the hand dryer in the movie was a "plant" or a "product endorsement". It was only 2 years old at the time the film was made so it must have caught peoples attention as a new fangled device. When we watch it today the hand dryer doesn't register in the same manner.

There are a good deal of things that must not register when we watch old movies. Things that were new and exciting 50 years ago are taken for granted now. It might answer to why old films have a limited audience. They don't get the same excitement level of being exposed to new THINGS.

The conventions of the story haven't changed too much either. Granted the MTV generation has all but killed holding a camera shot for more than 2 seconds. But human drama hasn't changed face over the past 100 years of so.

Observation: The more things change the more they stay the same. Slow progressive evolution. Spiral advancement through time and space. Man am I hungry.