It would fire an air vortex quite a ways. You could knock over light objects or extinguish a candle from a distance.
Here is one in the flesh.
ThinkGeek sold something similar years later, although I think it activated simply by pulling a handle on the back and releasing it
I happened to notice that the older one says “40 feet” and the 1978 instructions say “18 feet.” Just kind of a fun detail.
As an aside, I love the industrial design vibe of older instructions!
How did it manage to get such a big blast of air from that?
It creates a toroidal vortex, which can travel much further than a plain old blast or puff of air.
You can think of it a little bit like how a wheel works, except that it’s a torus (like a donut shape) instead of a round wheel as in a car. It’s the same basic idea though! Just like you can shove a wheeled cart a lot further than a cart sliding along its bottom, that is also true of a vortex where the air rotates around the minor axis.
Vortex ring:
But you don’t see the vortex since it’s just made of air. If you put smoke or something, it becomes visible, like a smoke ring.
My grandparents had one of these it was quite fun though a little loud
