The History of the Cooker Hood and Extractor Fan

Compared with most of the appliances on this site, the cooker hood’s history is less clean-cut — several companies and inventors have laid claim to being “first”, and unlike, say, the microwave’s well-documented origin story, the early record here is genuinely murkier.

Early 20th-century patents

Patent filings for ventilating hoods designed to sit above a cooking range date back to at least the 1920s in the United States, describing a fan and capture panel arrangement not far removed from a basic modern extractor. Through the 1930s, several American manufacturers — including companies that would go on to become long-running names in kitchen ventilation — began producing and selling range hoods commercially, initially aimed as much at reducing kitchen heat and odour as at food safety.

Restaurants and commercial kitchens led the way

As with dishwashers, extraction technology was adopted in commercial kitchens well before it became a standard feature in ordinary homes — professional kitchens had a more pressing need to manage heat, smoke, and grease at scale, and could justify the cost of dedicated ventilation systems long before domestic versions became affordable or expected.

A slow arrival in British kitchens

Domestic cooker hoods took a long time to become standard in the UK. For much of the 20th century, British kitchens simply relied on opening a window, and dedicated extraction was seen as an unnecessary extra rather than a near-default kitchen fitting. It’s really only in recent decades — alongside open-plan kitchen-diners becoming the dominant new-build layout, where cooking smells and steam have nowhere obvious to escape to — that cooker hoods have become close to universal in new UK kitchens.

Ducted vs recirculating

The two basic approaches used today — ducted hoods that vent air outside, and recirculating hoods that filter and return air to the room — have coexisted for decades, with the choice largely dictated by whether external ducting is practical for a given kitchen layout, exactly the distinction our own troubleshooting guides for this appliance still have to account for.