This will certainly sound stupid and even ridiculous to some, but I experienced a pinnacle of current technology today. How did it come to this? I received something with the post: a home ventilator, a rotating room-cooling fan, a thing with a propeller that turns around and around and pushes the temperature in my place down. I can already hear people laughing or telling themselves I’ve gone mad because of the heat, so I’ll go on as fast as possible. A fan is an excellent proof that we live in the future. Its principle is simple, but the way that simplicity is enhanced today amazes me. This sort of device for home use does not require a lot of electricity, but provides a nice flow of air, almost natural in its windiness. It does so almost silently, and, by rotating, delivers artificial wind almost evenly across a room. Moreover, the current generation of home ventilation employs some electronic niceties – like automatic shut-down timers and sleep functions – that make life even more comfortable. Now, if we go back in history for just 150 years, we will see that such simple pleasantries as household fans were non-existent. People had to rely on their own hands, or, more rarely, on clever accommodation design, to bring about the drafts of air so needed in summertime. Today, we get this service for small money. People will, of course, always object that we also have air conditioners which render household fans obsolete. However, the overall effect of an active air conditioner always includes a hundred small risks and annoyances with it: allergies to filtered air, extreme differences in the temperatures of the cooled room(s) and the outside environment, large utility bills, and so on. In comparison, a fan remains always useful, especially because of the simplicity of its operational principle. I was a fool not to buy one earlier – my laziness in this respect has punished me for too long. That, luckily, came to an end today. It’s time to enjoy some well-ventilated rest. Q. W3ary out.
