History of Electric Blanket - Save with Coupon Codes

The devices that evolved into today's electric blankets were first intended for invalids. The reputed father of the electric blanket was an American doctor, Sidney Russell, who devised an electrically heated pad in 1912. Russell was trying to find a way to keep his ill patients warm, and he developed a blanket that used electrical wires covered in insulated metal tape to accomplish this. Commercial use of a similar product began in the 1920s, when electrically heated blankets were used on patients in tuberculosis sanatoriums. The sanatoriums' weakened lung patients were advised to get plenty of fresh air, and they slept with windows wide open—sometimes even spending the night outdoors. Electric blankets helped keep the patients warm in bed in these draft conditions. People, both those sick and well, had long used hot water bottles or stone bed warmers to heat their beds on winter nights. The 1920s and 1930s saw many new, electrified versions of these traditional devices. These included electric warmers shaped like thermos bottles and flattened dome-like bed warmers heated with a light bulb. In the 1930s, electric blankets were produced in the United States and in England, primarily as a luxury item or as the finest accoutrement of a sick room. They were generally smaller and much thicker than today's electric blankets, and they were called warming pads or heated quilts. By 1936, one company had introduced a heated quilt with an automatic temperature control. Abedside thermostat responded to temperature changes in the room and cycled the blanket on and off accordingly. These early electric blankets also incorporated several safety thermostats which would switch the blanket off if a portion of it became dangerously warm.
The electric blanket as known today did not develop until after World War II. Research on electrically heated suits for fighter pilots during the war led to safety improvements and allowed manufacturers to make thinner, more easily folded blankets. ‘General Electric’ was a leading marketer of electric blankets. In 1945, as the war was ending, it began advertising its automatic blanket, emphasizing the connection with its wartime manufacturing of ‘electrically warm’ suits for pilots battling over Japan. The image of the blanket changed, from something needed by the sick or elderly to a modern convenience which made sleep more comfortable for everyone. Though the technology for post-war blankets was better, it was not much different from that used in the warming quilts of the 1930s. A blanket shell encased wires and embedded thermostats, and a bedside control with settings of high or low turned the blanket on and off. Gradually the number of embedded thermometers increased, so that a twin-sized blanket went from having four in the 1950s to possibly 10 in the 1980s. Blankets were developed that had two temperature controls, one for each side of the bed. Beginning in 1984, the technology changed significantly with the application of a thermostatless system. These new blankets used a ‘positive temperature coefficient wiring system’, which enabled the wiring itself to sense temperature changes. So the blanket could sense and respond to body temperature as well as room temperature.