How Ceiling Fans Allowed Slaves to Eavesdrop on Plantation Owners | Hacker News Reader

How Ceiling Fans Allowed Slaves to Eavesdrop on Plantation Owners

atlasobscura.com

111 pointssamclemens32 comments

The Indian nawabs and maharajas preferred deaf punkah wallahs for this very reason. They were using them long before the British Raj vassalised the princely states.

Interesting that the American version seem to be usually wood. In India and the Middle East they're usually cloth held by a lightweight bamboo or wood frame.

I pity the poor soul who had to operate that huge contraption in the last photo.

it sounds like the weight was the point:

>Many of them, including a scrollwork mahogany slab at Melrose mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, seem to have been designed to look particularly weighty, so that visitors understood the effort required of the operators.

it wasn't just a fan, it was a way to show off your power to dinner guests - "look how much effort my slaves are putting in to keeping you comfortable".

I found this really interesting in the context of current discussion around automation - whether this work was being done by slaves or by paid servants, it still seems shocking to me that human labour would ever be wasted on something so trivial. i wonder what people 100 years in the future will be shocked that we wasted effort on.

Yes I think you have it. I took that mahogany example and the slightly surreal case of requiring a slave to work a swing to operate one as exceptional. Generally aiming for conspicuous consumption is the simple answer.

I'm sure they'll find more than a few things to look at in confusion and wonder once they drop out of fashion, just as we can point at click farms, and other strange edges of our economy now. I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where so much human effort isn't wasted on sheer pointless trivia.

> look how much effort my slaves are putting in to keeping you comfortable

This attitude is pervasive still, in many areas of modern life - not just amongst the billionaire class where it's very much unchanged from the post: extravagence is a simple marker of how wealthy and powerful you are.

Think of empire-building managers ammassing as many charges as possible - just for many of them to do bullshit work. Think of how you prize a 'hand-made' item over a machine-made one - even when the hand-made item is more likely to have imperfections, or to have been e.g. stitched by a sweat-shop worker.

A part of our monkey-brain wants other monkeys to know how successful we are, and one of the most base representations of power is how many other monkeys are doing things for you. Machines don't count.

... perhaps that we burned oil to generate electricity that we then consumed huge gobs of during the summer to keep our homes and businesses at a frosty 21C?

There's a direct analogy to the discussion at hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave

That's a pretty good comparison, actually

I went to my nephew’s little league playoff last week. Some douche had a Lamborghini parked in a grass field at the game.

The absurdity of driving a car like that to a little league and driving it over an open field is incredible, and is no less a peacock display of power than that wood slab.

Nobody hit a ball through his windshield?

> it still seems shocking to me that human labour would ever be wasted on something so trivial

On the subject of "so trivial", how much time have you spent in the tropics during summer?

Bunnie wrote about a similar example from today: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4364

At this point, it seems blindingly obvious to me that all zippers should have this tiny tab, but the zipper’s designer wouldn’t have it. Even though the tab is very small, a user can feel the subtle bumps, and it’s perceived as a defect in the design. As a result, the designer insists upon a perfectly smooth tab which accordingly has no feature to easily and reliably allow for automatic orientation.

I’d like to imagine that most people, after watching a person join pullers to sliders for a couple minutes, will be quite alright to suffer the tiny bump on the tip of their zipper to save another human the fate of having to manually align pullers into sliders for 8 hours a day.

Because of the extra labor involved in putting these together, the zippers cost more; therefore they tend to end up in high-end products. This further enforces the notion that really smooth zippers with no tiny tab on them must be the result of quality control and attention to detail.

Probably the heavier that one is the easier. Just use resonance to move it and use minimal force. Just need to time it well.

I was thinking this was going to be some sort of accidental primitive microphone. Still an interesting article about something I haven't heard of, but the eavesdropping part of the article wasn't the hook I thought it would be.

slightly off topic: amazing how far we have come, and how much more we have to go. You could walk into a market and go home with slaves, totally yours, to do whatever you pleased with your property.

And we're not that far removed from it - my grandmother knew former slaves and her grandmother was a slave.

In many places in the World, we're not removed from it. Slavery is still an issue almost everywhere, even in the United States[1], it's just that it now takes the form mostly of domestic slavery and sex trafficking. Other parts of the World still openly practice forced marriage and bonded labour.

1: http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today/domestic-se...

What part talks about the US?

The section titled Domestic Servitude in the United States.

This man was a slave in the US in the 20th century. Amazing story.

https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Robert-Powerful-Twentiet...

Today most of the stuff you bring home from the market was either made with slave work, or with machine work. The latter is not unlikely to have even worse impact on human lives on a great scale.

I think development of technology was often motivated by finding means of freeing slaves from atrocious work to give them dignity; if a machine could be built doing the same, that allowed some slaves to escape. Ultimately, this showdown can be seen in our field where many are motivated by similar principles whereas others still want to keep the control of others, warping the rules to their benefit.

> You could walk into a market and go home with slaves, totally yours, to do whatever you pleased with your property.

then: people as property

now: people as a service

Still vestiges of this today:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5850053/Undercover-w...

Did not know this was a thing, reminds me of the turnspit/underdog which also had it rough https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog

Apparently I am not allowed to read this article without consenting to being tracked. Not worth it.

This reminds me of my racist extended family and it makes me sick

The title makes it sound like there was some interesting technical trick or something. As far as I can tell, the article basically amounts to, "humans have ears, and putting slaves in close proximity to their slave owners allowed them to hear their conversations." Am I missing something, or is this just clickbait?

You’re not missing anything.

There is no technical trick but I don't think this constitutes clickbait. What would you suggest as a better headline?

Maybe, "slaves eavesdropped on plantation owners while operating manual ceiling fans." Then, it wouldn't be implied that something about the ceiling fans in particular helped with the eavesdropping.

Ok, we'll s/help/allow/ above to mitigate this. It's an interesting article anyway.

Looks like this comment was force-hidden by the mods for some reason.

Because they changed the title in response, so it's irrelevant.

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