Blowhard: A History of Hand Dryers
Children are afraid of hand dryers. YouTube is full of videos of kids crying in restrooms, the hand dryers roaring and callous parents laughing. My son is no exception. I used to avoid coffee shops I knew didn’t possess paper towels, no matter how sweet their pastries. Being a parent is like being the new kid in the cell block: you avoid confrontation by predicting conflict.
There are a few YouTube hand dryer videos without crying children. My favourite, by Show Maker (with an impressive 77k followers), is How to Make a Hand Dryer at Home. First, you disassemble a hairdryer. After this, you jam its insides into a Tupperware box. Next, you tape an on/off switch to the plastic lid.
The result resembles Pandora’s Box built by a robot who’s passed the Greek myth through Google Translate several times. A DIY hand dryer couldn’t be a worse idea if it were designed to be installed in a room where there’s lots of water, which, of course, it is.
A 2016 survey found 92 percent of Americans thought it proper to wash your hands after a trip to the restroom. The same survey reported only 66 percent actually do so. I once saw a stand-up who joked he doesn’t wash his hands after going to the toilet because he washes his privates every morning.
The UK newsletter PopBitch often reports the toilet habits of celebrities. A source alleges that Justin Bieber, I’m sad to say, doesn’t wash his hands. Remember this the next time you ask him for a selfie.
My office possesses a hand dryer older than any employee. How many hands has it dried in its life? (Not many in recent years; like me its efficiency is failing.) How many bosses has it heard criticised? It’s an old Model A unit with a silver circular button. It sends an asthmatic gush of air from a single silver exhaust. The hand dryer wears a proud badge, detailing its production by World Dryer, Berkeley, Illinois. Similar to the way we all transform into our parents, an important part of this machine’s identity is clearly its birthplace.
Mr. Wheezy may have value as an antique. There’s bound to be someone who collects hand dryers. People collect all kinds of crap. We live in the age of crap collection. Australian Graham Barker has been collecting belly button fluff since 1984.
London’s Science Museum has a 1935 ‘Handy Andy’ on display. Dating from 1935, this early hand dryer saw action in the women’s toilets of the General Electric company. It looks like an emaciated Dalek. You’d prefer to have damp hands than dare wake it.
I felt self-conscious taking my three-year-old son to the restaurant. It was in east London, a place I’ve never felt comfortable. A teenager again, I knew everyone was judging me. I don’t have a particularly edgy haircut. My trainers are only Converse. I don’t work in graphic design or marketing. What’s a boy to do?
But the waitress was very smiley, even when my son said the place smelled of worms. She led us to a booth, real leather and all. I asked D if he needed the toilet.
“No,” he said, acting like a grown-up and pretending to read the menu.
I began to relax. I might even order a beer. A craft beer.
“Uh oh,” said my son.
His face possessed the tight muscles of a pisser. I didn’t have to ask. I swept to his side of the table. Already, he sat in a puddle. I picked him up and ran for the toilet. We left a wet contrail. Diners made sounds of disgust.
In the restroom, D apologised, but didn’t cry. I removed his wet clothes. I tried drying his dinosaur underpants on the hand dryer. The noise made him cry and the pants stayed wet. Sobbing, he said the dryer sounded like thunder and maybe the roof was falling in.
Knowing there was still the river of piss to confront, I wished I’d taken us to McDonald’s.
We have Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis to thank for confirming that washing your hands is probably a good thing. Working in the maternity clinic of Vienna’s General Hospital in 1846, he questioned why five times more women were dying of childbed fever in the ward staffed by male doctors than the one staffed by female midwives.
One theory he explored was the deaths were caused by a priest’s bell. When a patient died, a priest walked through the ward tolling in lamentation. As more deaths occurred in the male-staffed ward, the effects were self-multiplying. The women died of bell terror, the fever coming as a result of fear. When Semmelweis arranged for the priest to take a different route, however, patients continued to pass away.
The solution lay in Semmelweis’ realisation that the male doctors were involved in more than just childbirth. They also performed autopsies, often before helping deliver babies. He theorised that “cadaverous particles” were transmitted from the dead to the mothers by the doctors’ dirty fingers. He ordered his staff to wash their hands and equipment with soap and chlorine. This revolutionarily hygienic approach worked straight off the bat; instances of childbed fever dropped off immediately.
The Fonzie of the hand dryer world is the Dyson Airblade dB. You place your hands in a plastic crevasse, through which speedy “blades” of air travel. All moisture is exploded from your hands in seconds. It also feels great — like waving from the car window on holiday.
Sir James Dyson is a British inventor. If you’ve ever seen a wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel, you’ve seen a Dyson invention. It wasn’t the ballbarrow that made him his fortune, however. It was his vacuum cleaners. No aspirational middle-class home is complete without a Dyson.
Established vacuum cleaner producers weren’t keen on Dyson’s design because it came without a bag, using cyclone technology to ensure continued, unclogged performance. Hoover and friends feared that doing away with the dust bag would mean disrupting a steady source of revenue.
Consequently, Dyson set up his own company. His Dual Cyclone became the fastest selling vacuum cleaner ever. By 2005, Dyson were the US vacuum cleaner market leaders.
Not long after, other vacuum cleaner manufacturers began to abandon their bags.
Research published in 2009 by the University of Westminster suggested hand dryers are not a hygienic way of drying hands. Their analysis of warm air dryers saw an average increase of bacteria on the fingers by 194 percent and on the palms by 254 percent. The more modern jet air dryers scored better, but still saw an increase of bacteria: on the fingers by 42 percent and on the palms by 15 percent on average. Using paper towels reduced bacteria by around 76 percent on both fingers and palms, the study suggested.
(As you’d imagine, Dyson dispute these findings.)
If you’re interested in the bottom line, however, hand dryers are more economically than functionally efficient. It costs money to replace towels. Apart from the initial outlay of installation, hand dryers need only electricity and electricity costs less than paper.
World Dryers claim hand dryers are also better for the environment. They conducted a yearlong study of 102 hand dryers installed in Kansas public schools. The results saw, according to the hand drying company, savings of 34.5 tons of solid waste, 690,000 gallons of water, and 587 trees.
You may very well be spreading your germs everywhere by using hand dryers, but at least you’re saving trees.
I once saw someone drop a wrap of cocaine as they were drying their hands. As the package hit the floor, it opened, the contents blossoming. The dryer sent the drugs whirling in a white cyclone. When they settled, they ghosted a small circular patch on the floor, as if forensics were dusting for tiny prints.
The anguished “no” that the man let out as he fell to his knees has haunted me ever since.
The first modern hand dryer, the boxy type that can be screwed to the wall, was developed in 1948 by George Clemens. He also invented the first electric toothbrush. His company, World Dryer, was quick to establish its market dominance a few years later, introducing the Model A cast-iron cover as the industry standard. They were also first to introduce sensor-activated hand dryers, the sort that neurotically explode whenever you push open a restroom door.
The Illinois headquarters of World Dryer lie between Johnson Bros Metal Forming Co and Buhl Press Inc. The single storey structure, the heart of world hand drying, is surrounded by trees and built of brick. Opposite sit attractive, single-storey houses. Do their owners know the significance of their street? Are they ever offered experimental dryers to trial? A Stars and Stripes waves on the Word Dryer’s lawn. Are jokes ever made about the place being full of hot air?
(Google Streetview shows a yellow Mini outside the building. What’s remarkable about the car is that it appears to have the Scottish flag embossed on the roof. To what end, we can only speculate.)
Berkeley, Illinois, is a high risk area for tornadoes, experiencing an average of two a year. The area has been affected by 150 since 1950. On the afternoon of April 21st 1967, ten twisters hit the Chicago suburbs. Three of these were classified as F4 on the Fujita scale, F5 being the most violent. 58 people were killed. Over 1100 were left injured.
In Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988), we follow an office worker’s stream of consciousness through his lunch hour. At one point, the protagonist reads the “short silk-screened text” printed on the office restroom’s World Dryer:
“To Serve you better — — We have installed Pollution-Free Warm Air Hand Dryers to protect you from the hazards of disease which may be transmitted by towel litter. This quick sanitary method dries hands more thoroughly prevents chapping — — and keeps washrooms free of towel waste.”
He’s not happy.
“Come to your senses, World! The tone of authority and public-spiritedness that surrounds these falsehoods is outrageous! How can you let your marketing men continue to make claims that sound like the 1890s ads for patent medicines or electroactive copper wrist bracelets that are printed on the formica on the tables at Wendy’s? You are selling a hot-air machine that works well and lasts for decades: a simple, possibly justifiable means for the fast-food chains to save money on paper products. Say that or say nothing.”
One of the best scenes in The Godfather features a restroom. In an Italian restaurant, Michael Corleone murders a rival gangster and a corrupt policeman. He uses a gun that’s been hidden in behind the toilet.
Initially, he can’t find the pistol. We hear the loud rattle of a subway car. He leaves the bathroom to return to the restaurant. He doesn’t have a wee. He doesn’t wash his hands. There is no hand dryer to operate. If there were, it might spoil the tension.
In the most recent season of Fargo, one scene sees Carrie Coon’s police chief Gloria Burgle frustrated as she attempts to get a hand dryer to activate. She has similar problems with automatic doors. All this, like the character’s name, is symbolic or ironic or both.
The series showrunner, Noah Hawley, is known to be literary.
Look, the truth about most hand dryers is they never dry your hands satisfactorily. (With the exception of the Dyson airblades.) Don’t even think about trying to dry clothes or hair with the things, you’ll only be left disappointed (and wet). The strangest soaking I ever received happened after a gig at a derelict multi-storey carpark, back when I was young enough to attend edgy gigs at derelict multi-storey carparks. I followed the crowd from the exit, paying little attention to anything other than where the people around me were going. I’d had a few pints. I’d enjoyed the gig. I hardly noticed that the further I walked, the fewer people were around me. I opened a door and entered a spiral staircase. The steps led down. Now alone, the deeper I stepped, the darker the place became. Finally, I stepped into cold water that came up to my knees and so realised I’d gone the wrong way. I turned back, squelching, and retraced my steps. I returned to a stream of people leaving the auditorium. Outside, I darted into a pub, found the toilets, and stepped one foot onto the wall in an attempt to direct the hand dryer’s warm air on the saturated denim of my legs.
A man entered the toilets. Seeing me, presumably thinking my stance was some sort of sexual proposition, he turned and left before the door had closed.
The dryer didn’t dry my jeans.
If you Google “hand dryers in films,” you’ll get a disappointing return. You will find, however, a link to ProDryers Hand Dryers & Restroom Accessories’ short film Talking Extreme Air Hand Dryer Restroom Comedy and Funny, Strange Uses of a Hand Dryer. At the time of writing, it has received 42,311 views.
Piano music plays. A middle-aged suit turns from the sink to dry his hand. This is an unusual dryer, however. Not a Dyson but a Type A, with a face crudely superimposed with CGI.
“Hi,” says the dryer, “I’m your dryer and I’m a pro.”
We cut to a man taking a dump as he reads the Wall Street Journal.
I haven’t watched past this point.
My son has grown out of his fear of hand dryers. He’s now secure in the use of restrooms, an important staging post in his continuing development. He can even reach the urinal if it’s one of the lower ones and he stands on his tiptoes.
(I’m a proud father.)
Instead, D has moved onto more adult phobias: robbers and lightning. When he reaches puberty, he’ll begin fearing girls.
At home, I make sure to ask if he’s washed his hands after he’s been to the toilet. I’ve read sufficient think pieces to understand it’s good parenting to ask such important questions.
And if our ludicrously fluffy towels are ever in the wash, D could always use my homemade hand dryer, assembled through slavish devotion to YouTube instructionals. As long as he’s wearing rubber boots and is in the company of an adult, of course.
