Drying in a Hamilton
Last night, I did a test of my own with a load of 4 of my 39" X 78" bath sheets. I usually dry them in the giant drum KitchenAid dryer, but last night I used a Hamilton from the early 1960s instead. The drums in these are very large, but I checked several time as the load dried and the towels were not tangled but flying freely. They took about 10 minutes longer than the 50 minutes in the KA, but I expected that because the heating element is of a lower wattage and the airflow is less, with a 3" vent.
Hamilton not only invented the automatic dryer but they came up with a unique air flow through the machine. It is called the carrier current. Air is drawn in at the base of the machine. A part of it is routed up and over the heating element, but most of it travels across the opening at the bottom of the outer drum to suck cooled steam out of the dryer. This means that the exhaust is not as hot as the steamy air at the top of the drying chamber and, most importantly, the clothes tumble in a steamy atmosphere until they are dry. I checked on the towels a couple of times and even though they were tumbling past the heating element glowing orange with the thermstat set to HIGH, they were not hot like in a Filtrator. The Filtrator drying principle is based on the Hamilton design, as were many early dryers.
When the load was finished, I folded the bath sheets which still were not tangled or wrapped up like they would be in the drum of my GE dryer and the stack of 4 was taller than the sides of the laundry basket in which I placed them which meant that they were fluffier than the ones dried in the KA dryer which dries them nicely. Even though the Hamilton has a UV bulb, it does not produce the fragrance of the Filtrator.
I first saw a Hamilton dryer in operation when I was 4 in our next door neighbor's basement. I remembered the almost silent operation and the pinky-purple light from the ozone bulb and the incandescent light colorig the white towels as they tumbled past the window. I did not see one again for years, but never forgot the first dryer I saw that allowed me to see the tumbling laundry inside. That gave Hamilton dryers a special place in my heart, like they were made for me. The window was suggested by the industrial designer Books Stevens, I believe, to let people see what was happening, and thereby remove fear of what was going on in this new appliance; that the clothes were not being tumbled in flames.
