Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Not too long ago, we had an episode
Speaker 1: on Augustine Daily and we talked about the installation of
Speaker 1: air conditioning at his Fifth Avenue Theater in New York.
Speaker 1: Not long after that episode came out, we got an
Speaker 1: email from listener Charlotte asking if we had ever done
Speaker 1: an episode on the history of air conditioning, and I thought, hey,
Speaker 1: I meant to pull that out as a Saturday classic
Speaker 1: to run after the Augustine Daily episode, but I forgot
Speaker 1: so here it is now weeks later, Thanks Charlotte. This
Speaker 1: episode originally came out on August twenty ninth, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It's August, although by the
Speaker 1: time this podcast comes out I could possibly be September.
Speaker 1: Not quite sure when this one's gonna drop yet. And also,
Speaker 1: it's hot. That's what August means usually for us, at least,
Speaker 1: yeah for us for sure. I started working on this
Speaker 1: episode on one of those days when I woke up
Speaker 1: and it was already eighty two degrees inside my apartment.
Speaker 1: It is eighty six degrees in my little studio right now,
Speaker 1: I am sitting with a cold pack draped over my chair.
Speaker 1: So I decided we should talk about the history of
Speaker 1: air conditioning. And sorry to our Southern Hemisphere friends who
Speaker 1: are always getting the episodes in which I'm complaining that
Speaker 1: it's hot, and so We're going to talk about ice
Speaker 1: or air conditioning or whatever. When it's winter there. I
Speaker 1: could go there and complain about winter while you're here
Speaker 1: and complain about hot because I love the heat, but
Speaker 1: that cold is not for me. So about a year ago,
Speaker 1: we did an episode on Frederick Tudor, who cut ice
Speaker 1: out of ponds in Massachusetts in winter and then turn
Speaker 1: that into a globally traded commodity. In that episode, we
Speaker 1: talked about some of the ways that people had been
Speaker 1: making ice and refrigerating things in warmer parts of the
Speaker 1: world before the establishment of the ice trade and the
Speaker 1: development of mechanical refrigeration. Things like people in the Indian
Speaker 1: subcontinent using earthenware vessels as evaporative coolers to make kind
Speaker 1: of a semi frozen slush, or using saltpeter infused water
Speaker 1: to chill bottles of beverages. Similarly, people all over the
Speaker 1: world had figured out ways to keep themselves at least
Speaker 1: relatively cool for millennia before the invention of air conditioning,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these methods are still in use
Speaker 1: in one way or another today. The most obvious starting
Speaker 1: point is the fan. People have probably fanned themselves with
Speaker 1: their hands or with relatively flat objects for about as
Speaker 1: long as people have existed, but in terms of objects
Speaker 1: created specifically as fans, we know that goes back at
Speaker 1: least five thousand years. We have examples of hand fans
Speaker 1: from numerous ancient civilizations all over the world. The earliest
Speaker 1: fans were fixed or rigid, and made of all kinds
Speaker 1: of feathers, fronds, textiles, and other materials. The first folding
Speaker 1: fans were probably developed in either Japan or China. There
Speaker 1: are examples from both that are about the same age,
Speaker 1: and both nations have their own lore about the development
Speaker 1: of the folding fan. Of course, fans themselves have their
Speaker 1: own history, with all kinds of mythology and symbolism and
Speaker 1: etiquette and art and culture woven in, and a lot
Speaker 1: of culture's fans have also had religious or ceremonial uses
Speaker 1: as well. And that's on top of all the variation
Speaker 1: in the materials that fans have been made of and
Speaker 1: how they've been designed and constructed. We probably, if we
Speaker 1: felt inclined, could do a whole episode just on fans.
Speaker 1: Only if we talk about Star Trek and the fan dance,
Speaker 1: then I'm in a lot of the earliest personal cooling
Speaker 1: methods were built around the fan, people either fanning themselves
Speaker 1: or having a servant or an enslaved person do it
Speaker 1: for them. In places that were both hot and dry,
Speaker 1: people used fans to force air through dampened screens or mats,
Speaker 1: which would both humidify the air and cool the air
Speaker 1: as water evaporated. In places where it was hot and damp,
Speaker 1: people were more likely to use fans to move air
Speaker 1: over ice, although that still made the room even more humid,
Speaker 1: and depending on where that ice came from, it might
Speaker 1: also make the room smell like gross pond water. After
Speaker 1: President James Garfield was shot in eighteen eighty one, his
Speaker 1: doctors used a variation on this fan and ice method
Speaker 1: to try to keep him cool, and that used almost
Speaker 1: five hundred pounds of ice per day. Leonardo da Vinciti
Speaker 1: developed a water powered fan in about fifteen hundred, and
Speaker 1: mechanically driven fans powered by things like hand cranks were
Speaker 1: developed about the same time. The first electric fan was
Speaker 1: developed by Crocker and Curtis Electric Motor Company in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty two. That in eighteen eighty four, William Whiteley developed
Speaker 1: the all Weather Eye, which was a fan that attached
Speaker 1: to the axle of a carriage, so when the carriage
Speaker 1: was moving, the fan turned and it forced air over
Speaker 1: a block of ice that was mounted under the passenger area,
Speaker 1: sort of air conditioning the inside of the carriage. That's
Speaker 1: pretty ingenious. There are also all kinds of architectural features
Speaker 1: all over the world intended to keep people cooler. Before
Speaker 1: industrialization and the creation of air conditioning, most people lived
Speaker 1: in buildings that were adapted to where they lived. They
Speaker 1: used local materials and building techniques which were suited to
Speaker 1: the needs of the climate and the landscape. The whole
Speaker 1: idea is summed up as vernacular architecture. Vernacular architecture is
Speaker 1: absolutely full of ways to deal with heat and humidity,
Speaker 1: and there are so many that we cannot possibly name
Speaker 1: them all, just like we cannot possibly name every variation
Speaker 1: on the fan. But here are some examples. People on
Speaker 1: coasts oriented their homes to catch this sea breeze through
Speaker 1: the windows. Porches gave people an outdoor, semi sheltered place
Speaker 1: to go when the house got too hot, and sleeping
Speaker 1: porches had bunks or hammocks already there for when it
Speaker 1: was just too hot to possibly go to sleep in
Speaker 1: the house. Thick walls, high ceilings, and large windows have
Speaker 1: insulated buildings while also allowing air circulation. Shady courtyards and
Speaker 1: fountains of offered respite from the heat, and in places
Speaker 1: where it's hot in the day and cool at night,
Speaker 1: thick walls made from mud or adobe absorb heat during
Speaker 1: the day and to keep the inside cooler, and then
Speaker 1: release it at night to keep the inside warmer. Then,
Speaker 1: of course there's just planting trees to shade the buildings
Speaker 1: from the sun. In the southeastern United States, one common
Speaker 1: design was the dog trot house. This was a house
Speaker 1: with two halves separated by a roofed breezeway in between,
Speaker 1: which usually also connected a front and back porch. Usually
Speaker 1: the kitchen was on one side of the dog trot
Speaker 1: while the sleeping area was on the other, so you
Speaker 1: weren't heating up your bedroom while you were cooking your food.
Speaker 1: Dog trot houses were often built upon bricks or stones
Speaker 1: rather than resting on a foundation or the ground, and
Speaker 1: that allowed air to circulate under the house as well.
Speaker 1: And sometimes these are also called possum trot houses. And
Speaker 1: the same basic design is still used in some places today.
Speaker 1: My sister in law lives in a house just like this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are also, I mean there are historic ones that
Speaker 1: still stand in newly built houses that are still following
Speaker 1: that same basic design. I remember when I was in
Speaker 1: college there was one at the botanical gardens next door
Speaker 1: to the campus where we like to go sit around
Speaker 1: and read. Step wells are a way of dealing with
Speaker 1: the heat in very arid countries, especially on the Indian subcontinent.
Speaker 1: This is a pool of water very very deep underground
Speaker 1: which people would reach down an incredibly long spiral or
Speaker 1: zigzag staircase. These pools had to be that deep underground
Speaker 1: because that's how far down you had to go to
Speaker 1: get to the water table. They were used as a
Speaker 1: water but then also having such a deep, dark underground
Speaker 1: shaft gave people a place to retreat out of the heat.
Speaker 1: Sometimes stepwells were designed to serve as very large gathering
Speaker 1: places with intricate stairways and terraces, basically lots of places
Speaker 1: for people to go down there and chill out. A
Speaker 1: lot of these stepwells fell into disuse as human activity
Speaker 1: lowered the water table, either gradually filling with trash or
Speaker 1: being taken over by animals. The British Empire also destroyed
Speaker 1: a lot of them under the idea that they were unsanitary,
Speaker 1: and this was kind of ironic since it was extremely
Speaker 1: fashionable for British people to complain about how miserable the
Speaker 1: heat was in colonial India. Today, though, some stepwells are
Speaker 1: being restored and reopened as water sources, and the same
Speaker 1: principle has been used to design modern buildings that require
Speaker 1: less energy to cool. Wind catchers were common in Persian
Speaker 1: architecture starting thousands of years ago, and a lot of
Speaker 1: them are still standing and still working today. This is
Speaker 1: essentially a window tower that's built to take advantage of
Speaker 1: the prevailing winds, so exactly how the tower is designed,
Speaker 1: how many windows it has, and which direction it faces
Speaker 1: depends on where it's being built. When the wind blows
Speaker 1: through a windcatcher, it draws hot air up out of
Speaker 1: the house. Sometimes there's also a reservoir of water or
Speaker 1: a very deep well inside the house, so as the
Speaker 1: hot air moves out, moist, cooler air is pulled up
Speaker 1: from below. A similar design was also part of ancient
Speaker 1: Egyptian architecture. So vernacular architecture is just full of things
Speaker 1: like this, and people living in hot places have also
Speaker 1: adapted their behavior, like the siesta during the hottest part
Speaker 1: of the day. But as areas have adopted air conditioning,
Speaker 1: these traditional elements have tended to disappear as people instead
Speaker 1: design buildings that are going to be mechanically cooled. And
Speaker 1: we're going to start talking about that in some detail
Speaker 1: after we first pause for a little sponsor break. Modern
Speaker 1: air conditioning was developed in the United States, and the
Speaker 1: United States has adopted it much faster than the rest
Speaker 1: of the world, so the next stretch of this show
Speaker 1: is going to be pretty US centric. The first person
Speaker 1: in the United States to write down some thoughts for
Speaker 1: creating a large scale way to cool places was John
Speaker 1: Gory in eighteen forty two. He wrote about wanting to
Speaker 1: use mechanical condensation to quote counteract the evils of high
Speaker 1: temperature and improve the condition of our cities. He speculated
Speaker 1: about a massive city that could use one machine to
Speaker 1: cool off the entire place, as well as to cool
Speaker 1: individual buildings. It's not clear whether he ever made a
Speaker 1: working prototype of this air conditioner he had in mind,
Speaker 1: but he did create a refrigerator that could make ice.
Speaker 1: He had this working at the US Marine Hospital in Apalachicola, Florida,
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty four, and he patented it in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty one. That ice was put to use in conjunction
Speaker 1: with fans to try to keep patients with malaria and
Speaker 1: yellow fever cool. By eighteen eighty, people were using fans
Speaker 1: and ice together to try to cool buildings on a
Speaker 1: much larger scale. That year, New York's Madison Square Theater
Speaker 1: was using four tons of ice per day to try
Speaker 1: to cool the theater in the summer. Before trying that
Speaker 1: it would pretty much just not had shows in the summer.
Speaker 1: There's some overlap in the development of refrigeration and air conditioning,
Speaker 1: and in the late eighteen eighties people were also using
Speaker 1: refrigeration to try to cool whole rooms. Pipes were used
Speaker 1: to carry a refrigerant from a central station out to customers,
Speaker 1: and this central station refrigeration was mainly used to cool
Speaker 1: whole rooms for things like meat packing and cold storage.
Speaker 1: A few businesses did try to put central station refrigeration
Speaker 1: to use basically as air conditioning for people's comfort, though.
Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety one, a restaurant called Ice Palace opened
Speaker 1: in Saint Louis, Missouri that used central station refrigeration to
Speaker 1: keep the whole building cool, and it also decorated the
Speaker 1: place with lots of pictures of wintry scenes. Over the
Speaker 1: next couple of decades, several people started designing the systems
Speaker 1: that evolved into modern air conditioning. Alfred Wolf created cooling
Speaker 1: systems for a number of buildings in the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: and early twentieth centuries. In eighteen eighty nine, he created
Speaker 1: a ventilation system for Carnegie Hall or Carnegie if you
Speaker 1: liked that pronunciation, but most people except Carnegie Hall as
Speaker 1: the pronunciation on that one. These included racks for blocks
Speaker 1: of ice, and that same year he used chilling coils
Speaker 1: to cool the air in a dissecting room at Cornell
Speaker 1: Medical College, which seems like an excellent venue for air conditioning.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh two, he created a fan driven system
Speaker 1: for the New York stock Exchange that cost one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty thousand dollars, and it could heat and cool
Speaker 1: the building. In cold weather, steam boilers added heat and humidity,
Speaker 1: and in hot weather, the air moved over coils that
Speaker 1: were filled with a cooling brine to cool and dehumidify.
Speaker 1: At about the same time, engineer Stuart Kramer was working
Speaker 1: in textile mills in the South, especially in the winter.
Speaker 1: That air in these mills would become very dry, which
Speaker 1: was a problem. Cotton thread is a lot more brittle
Speaker 1: and likely to snap when it's too dry. Wool is
Speaker 1: a lot easier to work when it's properly moist. Plus
Speaker 1: static electricity when working with a bunch of textiles in
Speaker 1: too dry air, could be just unbearable. Kramer developed systems
Speaker 1: that combined ventilation with humidification. They basically circulated the air
Speaker 1: while also releasing a very fine mist of water. The
Speaker 1: word that he coined for this combination of temperature and
Speaker 1: humidity control was air conditioning. Kramer was awarded a patent
Speaker 1: for his air conditioning system in nineteen oh six. Concurrently
Speaker 1: with Wolf and Kramer, Willis Carrier was working at Buffalo
Speaker 1: Forge Company and the company made things like blowers and bellows,
Speaker 1: and he had been made head of its new ex
Speaker 1: experimental engineering department. Those three men that we've just talked about,
Speaker 1: his is probably the name that at least rings a
Speaker 1: bell because Carrier is still associated with air conditioning. We
Speaker 1: just got a new air conditioner installed and it is
Speaker 1: a Carrier unit. So. Second, Wilhelm's Lithographic and Publishing Company
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn, New York, was one of Buffalo Forged Company's clients,
Speaker 1: and they were having a problem with humidity. Variations in
Speaker 1: the humidity affected the paper that was running through their
Speaker 1: printing presses. Sometimes this would cause the ink to bleed
Speaker 1: or to smear, or for the paper to visibly warp.
Speaker 1: But a bigger problem was that they were printing in color.
Speaker 1: Colored inks went onto the paper one layer at the time.
Speaker 1: Even a slight difference in humidity affected the paper enough
Speaker 1: that the colors would be out of register. Those layers
Speaker 1: wouldn't line up correctly. It would not look like a
Speaker 1: cleanly printed color document. It would look like overlapping out
Speaker 1: of the lines, messed up color. I'm thinking about the
Speaker 1: various episodes we have done about artists and their work
Speaker 1: getting printed cheaply, and I'm betting probably these problems were
Speaker 1: part of how they ended up such a mess. So
Speaker 1: Carrier developed a system that moved air over a series
Speaker 1: of coils that were cooled with compressed ammonia. Moisture condensed
Speaker 1: out of the air and onto the coils, drying it out,
Speaker 1: which also had the side effect of cooling the air off.
Speaker 1: He ultimately developed a cooling, dehumidification, and air circulation system
Speaker 1: that maintained a temperature of seventy degrees fahrenheit in winter
Speaker 1: or eighty degrees in summer, and a relative humidity that
Speaker 1: was a consistent fifty five percent. This was Carrier's first
Speaker 1: attempt at endoor climate control, and he went on to
Speaker 1: be awarded numerous patents within the field. The first one
Speaker 1: was issued in nineteen oh six that was US Patent
Speaker 1: number eighth eight eight nine seven apparatus or treading Air.
Speaker 1: It described a process for forcing air through a spray
Speaker 1: of water and then through a set of baffles to
Speaker 1: remove any kind of pollutants or impurities, before then heating
Speaker 1: or cooling it and adding or removing humidity. In late
Speaker 1: nineteen oh seven, Buffalo Forge Company established Carrier Air Conditioning
Speaker 1: Company of America as a subsidy. Willis Carrier was vice
Speaker 1: president and chief engineer. Among the first clients were flour
Speaker 1: mills and Jellette. Too much humidity was causing the razor
Speaker 1: blades to rust, and in nineteen eleven Carrier gave an
Speaker 1: address on his rational psychometric formulae at the American Society
Speaker 1: of Mechanical Engineers. This was also published in the Society's journal,
Speaker 1: and the printed version started quote. A specialized engineering field
Speaker 1: has recently developed, technically known as air conditioning or the
Speaker 1: artificial regulation of atmospheric moisture. The application of this new
Speaker 1: art to many varied industries has been demonstrated to be
Speaker 1: of greatest economic importance. When applied to the blast furnace,
Speaker 1: that has increased the net profit in the production of
Speaker 1: pig iron from fifty cents to seventy cents per ton,
Speaker 1: and in the textile mill it has increased the output
Speaker 1: from five to fifteen percent, at the same time greatly
Speaker 1: improving the quality and the hygienic conditions surrounding the operative.
Speaker 1: And many other industries such as lithographing, the manufacture of
Speaker 1: candy bread, high explosives and photographic films, and the drying
Speaker 1: and preparing of delicate hygroscopic materials such as macaroni and tobacco.
Speaker 1: The question of humidity is equally important. While air conditioning
Speaker 1: has never been properly applied to coal mines, the author
Speaker 1: is convinced that if this were made compulsory, the greater
Speaker 1: number of mine explosions would be prevented. The paper goes
Speaker 1: on to detail all kinds of formulas about temperature, humidity,
Speaker 1: and dew point, how they're interrelated, how they can be adjusted,
Speaker 1: and what the effect of those adjustments would be. So
Speaker 1: that introduction to the paper and the paper itself highlight
Speaker 1: a couple of things. One is that initially air conditioning
Speaker 1: had a slightly different meaning than it does today. Today
Speaker 1: we most associate air conditioning with keeping things cool and
Speaker 1: not too humid. Another is that, almost without exception, it
Speaker 1: was not about the workers' comfort. It was about the
Speaker 1: products they were making and the temperature and humidity needs
Speaker 1: of the materials and equipment they were working with, in
Speaker 1: order to make them more productive and to make the
Speaker 1: business more profitable. You can be hot and sweaty, but
Speaker 1: the paper cannot correct. We're going to get into how
Speaker 1: air conditioning finally became a household commodity after we first
Speaker 1: paused for a little sponsor break in the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: The general public didn't get to experience much air conditioning
Speaker 1: in the United States unless it was something that was
Speaker 1: being employed at their work to make their work were profitable.
Speaker 1: The Saint Louis World's Fair used mechanical cooling at the
Speaker 1: Missouri State Building in nineteen oh four. Roughly twenty million
Speaker 1: people attended the fair, and for a lot of them
Speaker 1: this was the first ever experience they had with air conditioning.
Speaker 1: Home air conditioning was still way out of reach. The
Speaker 1: first home air conditioner was installed in nineteen fourteen at
Speaker 1: the Charles Gates Mansion in Minneapolis, and it's not clear
Speaker 1: whether or not that air conditioner was ever actually used
Speaker 1: because no one was living in the mansion at the time.
Speaker 1: That same year, Buffalo Forge Company decided to pull out
Speaker 1: of the air conditioning business. Willis Carrier and some of
Speaker 1: his colleagues founded Carrier Engineering Corporation the following year, with
Speaker 1: Carrier as its president. Still at this point, air conditioning
Speaker 1: was mainly focused on industry and not comfort, and the
Speaker 1: availability of air conditioning meant that factories were being opened
Speaker 1: in places where the climate had not been very conducive
Speaker 1: to it before that. Industrial systems did sometimes have a
Speaker 1: side effect of making things more comfortable for workers, though.
Speaker 1: For example, the use of air conditioning in tobacco processing
Speaker 1: kept the tobacco leaves at the right humidity level, but
Speaker 1: it also really cut down on the amount of dust
Speaker 1: that the workers were subjected to. There are, also, of course,
Speaker 1: other cases where it was the opposite, where this new
Speaker 1: air conditioning system would make it feel to employees like
Speaker 1: it was cold and damp, and they would want to
Speaker 1: open the windows, and if they opened the windows, that
Speaker 1: would ruin the entire point of having had this air
Speaker 1: conditioning in the first place. It was in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties that people started experiencing air conditioning that was specifically
Speaker 1: installed to make them more comfortable while also still being
Speaker 1: all about profitability. Because this was at movie theaters. There
Speaker 1: had been theater cooling systems that combined ice blocks and
Speaker 1: fans before this, but they often weren't all that effective.
Speaker 1: They might wind up with some parts of the theater
Speaker 1: being cold and damp while others were hot and damp.
Speaker 1: Carrier Engineering Corporation installed the first modern air conditioning system
Speaker 1: at a movie theater, Metropolitan Theater in Los Angeles in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty two, and this was the start of three
Speaker 1: huge trends. Number one, air conditioned movie theaters. Number two
Speaker 1: movie theaters heavily advertising their air conditioning, and number three
Speaker 1: big movies coming out in the summer when everybody would
Speaker 1: be going to the movies to get out of the heat.
Speaker 1: By the start of World War Two, most of the
Speaker 1: movie theaters in the southern United States had air conditioning,
Speaker 1: and the US isn't the only place where movie theaters
Speaker 1: were the first public buildings to be air conditioned. The
Speaker 1: first public building to be air conditioned in Hong Kong
Speaker 1: was King Cinema that happened in nineteen thirty one. After
Speaker 1: movie theaters, the next public buildings to be air conditioned
Speaker 1: in the United States were mostly large department stores, especially
Speaker 1: in the South. Smaller stores followed, and then came office buildings,
Speaker 1: with the first air conditioned offices often being banks. The
Speaker 1: United States government started air conditioning some of its buildings
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen twenties. The House of Representatives chamber
Speaker 1: was air conditioned in nineteen twenty eight, and then the
Speaker 1: Senate in nineteen twenty nine, and then the White House
Speaker 1: and Executive Building in nineteen thirty. The Supreme Court was
Speaker 1: air conditioned in nineteen thirty one. There had been some
Speaker 1: debate about whether these systems should be installed, Even though Washington,
Speaker 1: DC summers are famously punishing in terms of the heat
Speaker 1: and humidity. There were worries that people would see legislators
Speaker 1: and Supreme Court justices as weak if they were going
Speaker 1: to work in comfortable air conditioned buildings. Over these same years,
Speaker 1: Carrier and other engineers were continuing to refine air conditioning technology.
Speaker 1: Has included more efficient compressors for the refrigerant and refrigerants
Speaker 1: themselves that were safer to use. That compressed ammonia that
Speaker 1: was being used in the earliest air conditioners was extremely toxic.
Speaker 1: What breathing ammonia air isn't good for me? Even so,
Speaker 1: by the nineteen twenties, home air conditioning was still pretty rare,
Speaker 1: unless a person was perhaps so healthy that they could
Speaker 1: afford to install one at their unoccupied mansion in Minnesota.
Speaker 1: But that started to change as corporations started to develop
Speaker 1: more compact and affordable models. Brigid Air debuted a room
Speaker 1: cooler in nineteen twenty nine. In nineteen thirty one, HH
Speaker 1: Schultz and JQ. Sherman launched an early version of the
Speaker 1: window air conditioner that was too expensive to actually be workable.
Speaker 1: The Thorn room air conditioner came out in nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: and most of today's window air conditioners still look a
Speaker 1: lot like it. Yeah, the window air conditioning technology has
Speaker 1: not changed all that much since this happened. Hotels had
Speaker 1: started installing air conditioning not long after movie theaters did,
Speaker 1: but at first it was only in the lobbies and
Speaker 1: the public spaces. The first hotel with air conditioned guest
Speaker 1: rooms was the Detroit Statler in nineteen thirty four. Even
Speaker 1: though window air conditioners were starting to become a lot
Speaker 1: more affordable, the Great Depression took a toll on the
Speaker 1: whole industry. One exception was in the American Southwest, which
Speaker 1: was also struck by the dust bowl. At about the
Speaker 1: same time, people who could find the money to do
Speaker 1: so installed air conditioners to try to keep the relentless
Speaker 1: dust out of their homes. In nineteen thirty nine, the
Speaker 1: Carrier Company went to the New York World's Fair with
Speaker 1: its Igloo of Tomorrow which both demonstrated and educated people
Speaker 1: about air conditioning. That same year, Packered debuted the first
Speaker 1: air conditioned car, but that was pretty slow to be adopted.
Speaker 1: Only ten percent of cars sold in the United States
Speaker 1: had air conditioning in nineteen sixty six, but by two
Speaker 1: thousand it was ninety eight percent. Also in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: swamp coolers started to be manufactured to cool the air
Speaker 1: in dry environments. Unlike most of the systems we've been
Speaker 1: talking about, which used coils filled with some kind of
Speaker 1: refrigerant to cool and dehumidify the air, swamp coolers cool
Speaker 1: the air by adding moisture. Greyhound started air conditioning its
Speaker 1: buses in night eighteen forty, and in nineteen forty two,
Speaker 1: power plants in the United States started implementing summer peaking
Speaker 1: to handle the increased electricity demand caused by all this
Speaker 1: air conditioning. The first really affordable window units hit the
Speaker 1: market in nineteen fifty one, which put air conditioning on
Speaker 1: the way to becoming almost ubiquitous in the United States.
Speaker 1: Even though John Gory's first attempt at creating a cooling
Speaker 1: system was all about patients in a hospital, hospitals were
Speaker 1: slow to adopt air conditioning. By nineteen sixty two, only
Speaker 1: fifteen percent of hospital patient rooms in the United States
Speaker 1: were air conditioned. That same year, a Federal Housing Administration
Speaker 1: official was quoted as saying, quote, within a few years,
Speaker 1: any house that is not air conditioned will probably be obsolescent.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find data about public schools, but just as
Speaker 1: a side note, I was in public school in North
Speaker 1: Carolina from nineteen eighty to nineteen ninety three. I was
Speaker 1: almost never in an air conditioned classroom. Nor was my
Speaker 1: college dorm air conditioned. I'm a few years ahead of you,
Speaker 1: but by that point I was in Florida and everything
Speaker 1: was air conditioned. So yeah, So the only classrooms I
Speaker 1: remember being air conditioned were in one case, being in
Speaker 1: a newly constructed part of the school that was like
Speaker 1: brand new. We also had these things that were called
Speaker 1: portable classroom units. Oh yeah, really trailers. The trailers were
Speaker 1: air conditioned most of the time with like a little
Speaker 1: window unit, and that was really it. So we had
Speaker 1: this whole system of if it was going to be
Speaker 1: too hot for it to be safe in the classroom,
Speaker 1: we had an hour early dismissal. Huh. Fascinating. Yeah, so, uh,
Speaker 1: that's the story of how hot it was. There would
Speaker 1: usually be an oscillating fan mounted up on the wall,
Speaker 1: and just the kids in the classroom seats would just
Speaker 1: sort of sway back and forth trying to catch the
Speaker 1: air from the oscillating fan for as long as possible. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: I was like the weirdy kid, like, can I stand outside?
Speaker 1: It's cold in here. Central air conditioning debuted in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. That was also in the middle of an
Speaker 1: energy crisis. This prompted the US federal government to put
Speaker 1: together its first federal energy efficiency standard for air conditioning.
Speaker 1: So to be clear, when central air conditioning debuted, there
Speaker 1: were plenty of places that were having the whole building
Speaker 1: air conditioned, but this was like a custom designed system
Speaker 1: most of the time, rather than having a model for
Speaker 1: central air conditioning that could be applied to a lot
Speaker 1: of different homes. Like we said earlier, air conditioning was
Speaker 1: adopted much faster in the United States than in the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. In nineteen eighty, half of the
Speaker 1: world's air conditioning was installed in the United States. This
Speaker 1: means that the United States has also been using a
Speaker 1: lot more electricity on air conditioning than the rest of
Speaker 1: the world has, even as other nations have started adopting
Speaker 1: air conditioning a lot more rapidly in more recent years.
Speaker 1: In twenty fifteen, the United States was using more electricity
Speaker 1: for air conditioning than the entire rest of the world
Speaker 1: war and was using more electricity just for ac than
Speaker 1: the entire continent of Africa was using for any purpose
Speaker 1: at all. According to the Energy Information Administration's Residential Energy
Speaker 1: Consumption Survey that was released in twenty eleven, eighty seven
Speaker 1: percent of households in the United States have an air
Speaker 1: conditioner or central air. By comparison, eleven percent of households
Speaker 1: in Brazil and two percent of households in India had
Speaker 1: air conditioning at the same time. However, the popularity of
Speaker 1: air conditioning is spreading, and it's already approached the saturation
Speaker 1: point in some other countries, including China, South Korea, and Japan.
Speaker 1: In twenty ten, fifty million air conditioning units were sold
Speaker 1: in China alone. This has, of course led to environmental
Speaker 1: concerns as a global adoption of air conditioning starts to
Speaker 1: align with what already happened in the United States. According
Speaker 1: to some estimates, electricity demand for air conditioning could increase
Speaker 1: tenfold by the air twenty fifty. That is on top
Speaker 1: of concerns about refrigerator and their effects on the environment.
Speaker 1: Listeners of a certain age will probably remember concerns about
Speaker 1: the chlorofluorocarbons like free on, which were banned in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen eighties because of their role in depleting the
Speaker 1: planet's ozone layer. And then there's the fact that air
Speaker 1: conditioners pump hot air out and cool air in, so
Speaker 1: the air just gets hotter around any building where air
Speaker 1: conditioning is used, which then requires more air conditioning. So
Speaker 1: in some places architects and designers are looking at ways
Speaker 1: to incorporate some of those elements of vernacular architecture so
Speaker 1: that it doesn't take quite so much electricity and mechanical
Speaker 1: air conditioning to cool the place off. The existence of
Speaker 1: air conditioning has also had a huge impact on so
Speaker 1: many things, including architecture, human behavior, and demographics, everything from
Speaker 1: fewer premature deaths during heat waves to the existence of
Speaker 1: computers since their components can't really be manufactured without temperature
Speaker 1: and dust control. The advent of air conditioning has been
Speaker 1: credited with people retiring to the South, particularly to Florida.
Speaker 1: It's also been credited with leading to more industrialization and
Speaker 1: urbanizing parts of the American South. There is still some
Speaker 1: debate about correlation versus causation, but in general, air conditioning
Speaker 1: has been cited as one element in a massive Southern
Speaker 1: population boom in the last fifty years. As one example
Speaker 1: that ties all of this together, during the post World
Speaker 1: War II Baby boom, huge numbers of white, middle class
Speaker 1: Americans were buying houses in the suburbs. Many of those
Speaker 1: newly designed houses were built to be cooled through air conditioning.
Speaker 1: Particularly popular in the region of the southern US that's
Speaker 1: known as the Sun Belt was the ranch house, one
Speaker 1: story flat, often with a large picture window in the
Speaker 1: living room but small, narrow windows elsewhere. It had none
Speaker 1: of the vernacular design elements that we talked about earlier
Speaker 1: meant to help a building stay cool because it was
Speaker 1: meant to be cooled with AC. And then there's another
Speaker 1: trend that wraps back how air conditioning really started out
Speaker 1: to help industries. According to research by economist William Nordhaus,
Speaker 1: around the world, as a general trend, the hotter the
Speaker 1: average temperature, the less productive people are. In the past,
Speaker 1: this trend has been used to prop up racist stereotypes
Speaker 1: about people from the hottest parts of the world. But
Speaker 1: really there's just a lot of data that being hot
Speaker 1: makes it harder to be productive. Just as one example,
Speaker 1: this summer that we're recording this podcast, the Harvard THH.
Speaker 1: Chan School of Public Health published a study about how
Speaker 1: students who lived in non air conditioned buildings in Boston
Speaker 1: performed more poorly on cognitive tests than their peers who
Speaker 1: had air conditioning. So, at least in theory, air conditioning
Speaker 1: or some method of cooling makes countries with a really
Speaker 1: hot climate more productive than they could be without it.
Speaker 1: So it's still about productivity and profitability as much as
Speaker 1: it's about people's coming. The two are kind of inseparable. Really. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's part of how it all works. Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
Speaker 1: out of the archive, if you heard an email address
Speaker 1: or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course
Speaker 1: of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current
Speaker 1: email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our
Speaker 1: old house stuffworks email address no longer works. You can
Speaker 1: find us all over social media at missed in History,
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