I was wandering around The Conran Shop in Marylebone looking for a birthday present last weekend when I spotted the new Dyson desktop fan. Costing around £200, it has won universal praise for its minimal design and ingenious engineering. It works by sucking in air at the bottom (ooh er, missus) and then squeezing it out again at high speed via a whisper thin gap in the ring.
Like an idiot I stared at this for ages trying to figure out where the fan was… then bought a pen for my friend’s birthday, wishing I could have been more generous and that they lived in a rather warmer place than Maida Vale. I’ve just seen online today that documents indicate that in the early 1980s, a Tokyo company called Shibaura Electric developed a nearly identical idea; however, it was never marketed. See LINK