Your effusive thanks received and greatly appreciated, but stop. Thanks.
Last first; Those half moon window dryers were Franklin built things and had a lot of GE in the design.
Norge made Hamilton washers with those poor aluminum pumps that did not hold up at all. The first dryers were the original "goes with anything" because there was no washer made to go with them. A lot of them were teamed up with Bendix Automatic Home Laundry washers for the very latest in pre and immediately post WWII home laundering. The early models with the controls on the front are actually taller than a washer because what did Hamilton know from automatic washers? It still was not as tall as a Bendix sitting on a hunk of concrete.
Brent; The little old Hotpint is an electric dryer, in fact it is the one with the squiggley Filtrator heating elements from the "bend to fit" school. It's the one where almost all you hear is the air from the blower. These early dryers used perforated drums so that the radiant heat could get in from the side. The Hamilton has a galvanized drum. Filtrators used a porcelain one. That funny Westinghouse dryer with the red auto-dry dial with the numbers from 1 to 10, (Bake to Broil) I think, has a white perforated drum. The old Blackstone, the pre-1957 GEs, Maytags before Halo of Heat and old ABC-O-MATICs were perforated drum style dryers also. Manufacturers quickly learned that if you used a solid wall drum, you did not have to have an outer tub around it so that saved steel and weight.
Toggle; you deduced correctly. The main air current was actually drawn past the drying chamber, but there was a way for make up air to enter. It would be a necessity for the later gas models to have some air come in around the burner to support combustion.
I have a late 50s / early 60s electric Hamilton still with the rectangular door window that needs some parts. If anyone finds one in decent shape, I need the drum clean out plug and the slider bar for the pulley in back and a couple of other things, but I will buy the complete dryer and do what's necessary to move it. Mine looked really nice and had the back screwed on so we never thought it had major parts missing, sort of like the 1956 Philco dryer with the funny shaped door and that big timer in the middle of the contol panel. It looked great, but when we opened the back, it had no pulley, no belt; so sad. Really sad because we were at one of those "filled it wall to wall and bottom to top" points in our long relationship with Public Storage and John was weeding the collection.
