12. Fly Fan

This “Improved 20^th Century Fly Fan,” a mechanical table-top device, was used at summer picnics in the Gaithersburg area. It was made in Baltimore by the National Enameling and Stamping Company, a branch of the nation's largest tinware manufacturer. A paper label on the base includes patents recorded from 1885 to 1893.

Gently rotating to deter flies, the blades could be adjusted in height and set parallel to the table or at an angle (“an important advantage peculiar to this Fan only”). The base is wound up to power the unit which is “Complete In Itself…No Key Required.”

The fan was donated by Charles T. Jacobs in 1994. His daughter, Mary Beth Fleming, said it was “part of summer picnics at my grandparents’ [Merle and Ethel Jacobs] house in Gaithersburg and lived in a corner of the basement in the winter.” A generation earlier the family had lived 12 miles north of Gaithersburg in Browningsville where this fly fan might have first seen use.

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