1921

AMERICAN BLOWER COMPANY

SIROCCO CENTRIFUGAL

FAN

CIBSE Heritage Group

AMERICAN BLOWER COMPANY The Huyett & Smith Connection Mr Huyett, owner of a successful lumber business in Detroit, employed a young shop foreman Wright D Smith who developed an exhaust fan for the removal of wood shavings. “It had a double cut-off and double discharge and (was) believed by Mr Smith to have a high efficiency and wonderful possibilities.” Patents were obtained and in 1881 a co-partnership was formed by Huyett and Smith to manufacture and sell the fan.

The W D Smith later U.S. Patent of 1886

The W D Smith U.S. Patent of 1886

It was Huyett who funded the venture while “Smith was the inventive genius.” Over the next ten years, the Company manufactured a number of heating and ventilating systems, including the 1888 patented disc fan blower and hot blast apparatus.

Huyett & Smith hot blast apparatus, patented in 1888

Huyett & Smith also manufactured low pressure steam engines, but in 1895 the Huyett & Smith Manufacturing Company became the American Blower Company.

Davidson & Company Ltd & the Sirocco Fan In Belfast, at what he later named his Sirocco Works, Samuel Cleland Davidson (1846-1921) devised a low-pressure multivane curved blade fan which he patented in 1900. His fan became one of the most successful fans of this period and notable for its quiet operation.

The Sirocco Fan with “multiblade vane wheels and wide configuration”

(Engineering Review, May 1908)

Technical Note on the Sirocco Fan

This is the Introductory Note on the design of the Sirocco Impeller from the textbook “Fans, Bruno Eck, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1973.”

1901

1931

Sirocco Engineering Company of New York The Company obtained the U.S. rights to market Samuel Davidson’s centrifugal fan. During the first decade of the 20th century, the Sirocco fan went through numerous modifications, including changes to the blade design and the production of single-inlet and double-inlet configurations. In 1908, the Sirocco rights were sold to the American Blower Company.

Sirocco Engineering promoted Davidson’s Patent Sirocco Centrifugal Fans

(Engineering Review, September 1906)

American Blower Company The Company continued to develop heating and ventilating systems. The “ABC System of Heating and Ventilating” featured strongly in its advertising and used slogans such as “ABC Disc Ventilating Fans” and “The ABC Fan System of Heating.” American Blower also offered a complete line of steam heating systems and a variety of low-speed and high-speed electric and steam fan-motor drives. American Blower had offices in Detroit’s David Whitney Building and in 1898 was operating from premises at 70 Gracechurch Street in London.

1902

1902

1898

1898

1899

REFERENCES 1973 Fans, Bruno Eck, (from the German) Pergamon Press, Oxford 1994 Heat & Cold: Mastering the Great Indoors, Chapter Seven: Nineteenth-Century Heating, Ventilating and Mechanical Cooling, Barry Donaldson and Bernard Nagengast, ASHRAE ------ Engineering Review, magazine USA ------ U.S. Patent Office ------ Victorian Heating Engineers, Davidson & Company of Belfast, CIBSE Heritage Group website, www.hevac-heritage.org ------ Davison & Company, Graces Guide Footnote There is a book (not viewed): Air conditioning and Engineering: a Treatise of the Technique of Conditioning and Mechanical Movement of Air and the Transmission of Power……. Published by American Blower Corporation, 1956

The derelict Detroit Factory of American Blower in 2015

APPENDIX I A listing by the American Blower Company (Trade Mark Sirocco) of early Patent dates. 1901: 27th November 1901: 30th April; 4th June; 30th July; 27th August; 31st December 1902: 21st January 1903: 10th November 1904: 14th June 1905: 19th October 1906: 15th March 1908: 26th May

APPENDIX II To illustrate the development of the centrifugal fan by the American Blower the full text of a Patent is shown on the pages which follow. This is U.S. Patent 2,155,631 of April 25, 1939 granted to Edward L Anderson for a BLOWER (Filed June 20, 1936) assigned to the American Blower Corporation.