
How Ceiling Fans Allowed Slaves to Eavesdrop on Plantation Owners - samclemens
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/punkah-project-fans-antebellum-south
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oldcynic
The Indian nawabs and maharajas preferred deaf punkah wallahs for this very
reason. They were using them long before the British Raj vassalised the
princely states.

Interesting that the American version seem to be usually wood. In India and
the Middle East they're usually cloth held by a lightweight bamboo or wood
frame.

I pity the poor soul who had to operate that huge contraption in the last
photo.

~~~
notatoad
it sounds like the weight was the point:

>Many of them, including a scrollwork mahogany slab at Melrose mansion in
Natchez, Mississippi, seem to have been designed to look particularly weighty,
so that visitors understood the effort required of the operators.

it wasn't just a fan, it was a way to show off your power to dinner guests -
"look how much effort my slaves are putting in to keeping you comfortable".

I found this really interesting in the context of current discussion around
automation - whether this work was being done by slaves or by paid servants,
it still seems shocking to me that human labour would ever be wasted on
something so trivial. i wonder what people 100 years in the future will be
shocked that we wasted effort on.

~~~
mikepurvis
... perhaps that we burned oil to generate electricity that we then consumed
huge gobs of during the summer to keep our homes and businesses at a frosty
21C?

There's a direct analogy to the discussion at hand:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave)

~~~
notatoad
That's a pretty good comparison, actually

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RandallBrown
I was thinking this was going to be some sort of accidental primitive
microphone. Still an interesting article about something I haven't heard of,
but the eavesdropping part of the article wasn't the hook I thought it would
be.

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onetimemanytime
slightly off topic: amazing how far we have come, and how much more we have to
go. You could walk into a market and go home with slaves, totally yours, to do
whatever you pleased with your property.

~~~
Anechoic
And we're not _that_ far removed from it - my grandmother knew former slaves
and her grandmother was a slave.

~~~
fredley
In many places in the World, we're not removed from it. Slavery is still an
issue almost everywhere, even in the United States[1], it's just that it now
takes the form mostly of domestic slavery and sex trafficking. Other parts of
the World still openly practice forced marriage and bonded labour.

1: [http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today/domestic-
se...](http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today/domestic-servitude)

~~~
bagels
What part talks about the US?

~~~
fredley
The section titled _Domestic Servitude in the United States_.

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tomohawk
Still vestiges of this today:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5850053/Undercover-w...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5850053/Undercover-
worlds-elitist-secret-society.html)

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macromaniac
Did not know this was a thing, reminds me of the turnspit/underdog which also
had it rough
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog)

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jbb67
Apparently I am not allowed to read this article without consenting to being
tracked. Not worth it.

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_RPM
This reminds me of my racist extended family and it makes me sick

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foob
The title makes it sound like there was some interesting technical trick or
something. As far as I can tell, the article basically amounts to, "humans
have ears, and putting slaves in close proximity to their slave owners allowed
them to hear their conversations." Am I missing something, or is this just
clickbait?

~~~
mulmen
There is no technical trick but I don't think this constitutes clickbait. What
would you suggest as a better headline?

~~~
whatshisface
Maybe, "slaves eavesdropped on plantation owners while operating manual
ceiling fans." Then, it wouldn't be implied that something about the ceiling
fans in particular helped with the eavesdropping.

