For a long time, the notion of a silent summer night has been alien to many people who live in the hot, poor parts of the planet. The road outside the house might be quiet, the sleeping residents indoors might never snore – but there is always the whirring whip of the ceiling fan above the bed.
Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, these fans are indispensable on sweltering days, or even uncomfortably warm ones. You can sleep, do homework, eat dinner and watch TV without sweat beading your brow and pasting your shirt to your skin. The ceiling fan’s white noise is a comfort – a signal that summer can be borne. If the noise stops, as it often did during power cuts when I was growing up in India, it’s time to worry.
In a time of climate change, when each summer promises to be hotter than the last, and when the air conditioner both cools our rooms and warms the planet, the ceiling fan is an old solution to a 21st century problem. In moving air, its drafts of air elevate the upper temperature threshold of comfort for the human body by 3-4 degrees Celsius – a wide margin for parts of the world where the hottest afternoons run to 30 degrees Celsius or so. In these regions, on many days, a ceiling fan is all you’ll need.
It’s important to emphasize what these ceiling fans are not. These are not the long-bladed contraptions often seen in movies set in the plantation houses of the American South, turning so lazily that their purpose could only be ornamental. Instead, these ceiling fans are single-minded industrial products. Their speed can sometimes be controlled by a regulator dial set into a nearby wall, but they’re built to spin as fast as possible, so that their three or four blades blur in motion. Table fans and standing fans, broadcasting their air only into a narrow cone of space, have nothing on the ceiling fan, which, like a benevolent summer deity, cools the whole room from up above.
In the United States, its country of birth, the ceiling fan has all but vanished. In 1887, an engineer named Philip Diehl, working with Singer in New Jersey, used a sewing machine motor to create the first electric ceiling fan. A clutch of manufacturers emerged – Westinghouse, the Dayton Fan & Motor Co., D.L. Bates & Bros., Emerson Electric – and the ceiling fan became a ubiquitous summer remedy. By breaking up the air in a room and setting it in motion, the fan pushes currents of air over you, resulting in evaporative cooling. The airflow helps the moisture on your skin dry faster, cooling your body particularly well on a swampy afternoon.
In “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald described his louche socialites Daisy and Jordan on a day too hot to move, lying on a couch “like silver idols, weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.” After World War II, though, America air-conditioned itself coast to coast. By 2009, 87 percent of U.S. households had AC. Meanwhile, through the rest of the 20th century, the ceiling fan remained a common installation mostly in countries where ACs were too costly, or where the supply of electricity was expensive or unreliable.
At least when I was growing up, few people considered the ceiling fan’s strong environmental credentials. But they were there all the same. The fan uses a small fraction of the energy that an air conditioner needs. A 2022 paper published in Lancet showed that switching from air conditioning to fans yielded a 76 percent reduction in electricity use, and associated greenhouse gas emissions shrank from an annual 5,091 kilotons to 1,208 kilotons. A fan requires 30 times less power to cool a 90-cubic-meter space than a central air-conditioning unit.
It creates no heat islands of its own, unlike the air conditioner, whose back end spews hot air out into the world. In a 2020 study, scientists found that the use of ACs during a modeled nine-day heat wave would increase air temperatures by up to 2.4 degrees Celsius. According to a World Economic Forum projection, the emissions from ACs will contribute a 0.5 degree Celsius rise in global warming by 2100.
To be sure, in temperatures that soar into the hundreds – the kind that the city of Delhi, where I spent part of my childhood, regularly experiences these days – the ceiling fan struggles. There’s no doubt that air conditioners actually bring down the ambient temperature in a room, whereas a fan does not. The widespread use of fans across the developing world has largely been a function of economic necessity. Were families offered air conditioners and cheap power instead, they’d likely accept gladly. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, famously called the air conditioner “one of the signal inventions of history,” crediting it with the modernization of his country. “Without air conditioning, you can only work in the cool early morning hours or at dusk,” he said in an interview.
With ACs, on the other hand, you can work more comfortably all day, whether in a factory or an office building. Researchers now expect the world to have 4.5 billion air conditioners by 2050, up from the current 1 billion or so.
Much of that growth will occur in newly prospering countries in Asia and Africa. And who could begrudge them air conditioning now, at a time when their summers are turning hotter than ever, and when their ceiling fans are running up against their limits?
The countries that relied on fans for decades were responsible for dramatically less carbon emissions, on a per capita basis, than air-conditioned nations like the United States or Japan. Even today, only one in 10 of the 2.8 billion people in the hottest parts of the planet have access to ACs in their homes. The climate crisis is, for the most part, not of their making – and yet it is now, as temperatures soar in their cities and villages, that bodies like the International Energy Agency are calling for moderation in our reliance on air conditioning.
Perhaps the key to dialing back our air conditioning habit lies not in how many ACs are used but who uses them. Even with global warming, the temperate regions of North America, Europe and Japan can cruise through the better part of their summers with just a ceiling fan. The reward won’t lie only in the fan’s environmental virtuousness, I promise.
You’ll have an appliance that makes less noise, and that doesn’t leach your skin of moisture, leaving it parched or ashy. You’ll spend your days in more humane temperatures, and in rooms that are never overchilled to the point that you need a light hoodie – even as summer blazes on outside the window. And you’ll taste the sweet, swift pleasure already familiar to hundreds of millions of people around the world: the interval between the flip of a switch and the fan’s attainment of its top speed, the mere seconds that lapse before the fan’s singing breeze makes summer bearable again.
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