Electric Fan Manufacturing: From Diehl to ABB Robots

Electric fan manufacturing looks simple from the outside: a motor, a few blades, a guard or a canopy and some wire. In practice a fan plant cuts sheet metal, presses housings, winds motors, molds or stamps blades, paints parts and assembles everything on a line. This post follows that job from hand-pulled punkahs through the first electric fans of the 1880s, then looks at ABB's new IRB 1700 robots announced in October 2026 and asks where robots could fit in a fan plant, and where the evidence stops.

A ceiling fan with a light kit in New Orleans, 2004. Photo: Bart Everson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

From hanging punkahs to the first electric fans

Moving air by hand is old work. According to Wikipedia, the punkah, a hand-operated hanging fan cut from palmyra leaf, was first invented in India around 500 BC. In the 1860s and 1870s some of the first rotary ceiling fans in the United States were driven by water turbines that turned the blades through belts. These fans needed a stream or a pipe and a long line of belts, so they stayed in a few mills and shops.

A French Indochina courtroom with ceiling punkahs hanging over the bench, around 1885. Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Electricity changed that. Wikipedia credits Philip Diehl with the first electric ceiling fan in 1882, built around a motor he had engineered for early electric Singer sewing machines. The motor sat inside the fan, so no belts were needed. Diehl later added a light kit, which is why so many ceiling fans still carry a lamp. Accounts differ on credit: another entry says Schuyler Wheeler invented an electric fan between 1882 and 1886 and that Crocker & Curtis, an American motor company, marketed it. In 1885 Stout, Meadowcraft and Co. of New York sold a desktop fan with a motor driving the blades directly.

An electric oscillating table fan made by Emerson in 1914, with brass blades. Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Volume followed. According to Wikipedia, KDK of Japan pioneered mass-produced electric fans for home use in 1909, and in the 1920s industrial advances let steel fans be mass-produced in many shapes, which lowered prices. Hunter, Robbins & Myers, Century Electric, Westinghouse and Emerson were among the companies that sold ceiling fans in the United States around the turn of the century. By the 1940s, Crompton Greaves of India had become the world's largest maker of electric ceiling fans. Air conditioning pushed many companies out of the business in the 1960s, and decorative ceiling fans returned in the mid-1970s. Wikipedia also notes that by World War I most ceiling fans had four blades instead of two, which made them quieter and able to move more air.

A modern ceiling fan with a light, the kind returned to fashion after the mid-1970s. Photo: Hans Olav Lien / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What a fan plant does, and what ABB just launched

A project report from IMARC Group lists the equipment for a ceiling fan plant: sheet metal cutting machines, presses, motor winding machines, blade molding machines, painting booths, assembly lines and quality inspection equipment. It also says the scale of production and the level of automation set the total machinery cost. Much of that list is stand-alone machinery. The handling between machines, the welding, the finishing and the final assembly are the jobs where robots could still take over from people.

Workers assemble electric fans by hand at a small factory in Varanasi, India, 2005. Photo: Jorge Royan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

We searched for a fan maker that has announced a robot line, and found no named factory or case study in the news for 2026. What did appear is ABB's announcement on October 13, 2026 of the IRB 1700 and IRB 1700ID. The five variants carry 6 to 12 kg and run on the OmniCore controller. ABB claims up to 20% shorter cycle times than comparable robots and up to 15% lower power use, with path repeatability down to 0.03 mm. They made their public debut at the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai.

An ABB IRB 1700ID with a welding torch and wire feeder at its public debut at CIIF in Shanghai, October 2026. Photo: ABB

ABB lists arc welding, deburring and sanding, machine tending and material handling among the jobs for the new robots, and the IRB 1700ID routes its cables and hoses inside the arm. Those are fan plant jobs: welding a wire guard or a stand, sanding a cast or pressed housing, loading a press. This is a possibility, not an announced project. A cell like that would be designed and tested first in RobotStudio before anyone wires it up.

An ABB IRB 1700 in a sanding demonstration at the China International Industry Fair, October 2026. Photo: ABB

What comes next for fan production

Fan designs keep changing. In 1998 William Fairbank and Walter K. Boyd invented the high-volume low-speed ceiling fan, a very large slow fan for warehouses and factory floors. Small fans often use brushless DC motors, while big industrial ones use three-phase motors. Each new motor type changes the winding, the housing and the test procedure, so a line that builds one product well has to be reprogrammed for the next. Fan makers also change blade shapes, colors and finishes for style, and Wikipedia notes that table and stand fans arrived in bright colors in the 1950s.

A high-volume low-speed fan, the large slow design invented in 1998, hanging in a shop in Sydney. Photo: Nick-D / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB's smaller robots could suit that. A YuMi IRB 14000 or a compact IRB 1200 can place small parts such as screws, capacitors and wire leads, and an IRB 360 FlexPicker can pack finished fans or parts into cartons at speed. A palletizing robot such as the IRB 460 stacks the boxes. None of these has been announced for fans, but they are the standard tools for the packing and small-part steps. Related lines are covered in our posts on electric motor manufacturing and kettle and small appliance manufacturing.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

The open problems are economic as much as technical. A household fan sells for little, so a robot cell has to pay for itself on very thin margins, and a plant that builds many fan models needs fast changeovers. Safety fencing, cycle time and training for operators matter as much as the arm itself. My guess is that robots reach welding, finishing and packing at large plants first, while hand assembly stays common where labor is cheap and runs are short.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

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