It's a fairly common interest believe it or not; I was very interested in this era of fans while I was in grad school. In fact I was interested in an even more specific variety of pancake motor 6 bladed fan that pretty much every other fan-fan also wants. Since they're so bloody expensive I ended up collecting radios from the 1920s instead, which kind of scratches the same itch.

https://antiquefanparts.com/1893-meston-series-aa-12-desk-fa...

https://antiquefanparts.com/circa-1888-edison-x-motor-fan/

https://antiquefanparts.com/1890-riker-electric-motor-compan...

https://antiquefanparts.com/circa-1894-edison-sixth-hp-slow-...

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/antique-1901-general-...

My grail fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZzkUC0TAhg http://www.hudsonscustommachining.com/images/1904emerson/lar...

They cost so bloody much, it's probably easier to just build a reproduction.

The cheapest one is $20,000!

I thought they were too much when I was in grad school in the 90s and you could find them on ebay for $500.... $500 for a goddamned fan! Well, it's not like they made more of them since then, and many have been parted out or thrown away.

Those pancake fans are really cool!

Oh, no argument that they look cool. I was just expecting the price to be a lot lower!

Does anyone make good-looking modern reproductions?

Nope. But for $20k you could probably pay a skilled machinist to make you a couple of them.

Connoisseurship can make about anything interesting!

That said I love fans. I especially love those big old fans that seem to have a speed setting of 'menacingly slow'.

> Why cap guns? Who knows.

I know, because 11-year-old me owned one, back when selling them was legal. The reason is nostalgia, or a yearning for the brightness of the world we knew then. Artifacts bring the memories back, in a sweet flood.

Experimentation revealed ways in which cap gun tech could be abused. We wanted a louder pop, so how about folding over the tape of caps to double up? Possible, but tends to jam. For a really loud "bang", how about setting a whole roll of caps down on the pavement edgewise, and hitting it with a hammer? Imagine the surprise when the hammer's head came flying back up, faster than it was brought down ...

Wait, they're illegal now? Where? I had those growing up in Canada in the early 2000s. If I remember right, we got them at the dollar store. And yes, I remember hitting a whole ring at once with a hammer.

Probably for the best here in the US. Police here jump on any excuse to use deadly force and hearing a bang sound from a cap gun would likely invite a hail of real bullets. Did you see a 9 year old girl was pepper sprayed recently? And that 75 year old man shoved over, banging his head on concrete, and bleeding on to the streets from it for having an imaginary police scanner? And the girl trying to give a guardsman flowers getting a direct hit from a flash bang in return? Imagine if one of them had a cap gun...not pretty.

Yep.

This is also a big part of why 'Light guns' for video game consoles in the US looked more and more like a prop from Buck Rogers through the 90s