Speaker 1: In nineteen o two, a young engineer named Willis Carrier
Speaker 1: encountered a situation that many of us are all too
Speaker 1: familiar with, a printer problem. Carrier had been hired by
Speaker 1: a printing company in Brooklyn. Summer humidity was causing their
Speaker 1: paper to swell, to jam in the presses to print incorrectly,
Speaker 1: so rather than a crisp image, they were getting a blur.
Speaker 1: They were wasting tons of paper, missing deadlines. Uh, this
Speaker 1: was a huge problem. Carrier was the son of a
Speaker 1: farmer and something of an eccentric genius, the kind of
Speaker 1: head in the clouds guy who would occasionally pack a
Speaker 1: suitcase with just a handkerchief inside, or order a three
Speaker 1: course meal and not take a bite. Carrier had just
Speaker 1: graduated from Cornell when he was asked to find some
Speaker 1: way to fix the company's printers. He molled over the
Speaker 1: issue for weeks. Then one day, as he was standing
Speaker 1: on a foggy railroad platform contemplating the missed around him,
Speaker 1: an idea struck him. Carrier solution not only solved the
Speaker 1: printer problem, it changed the world, and his invention continues
Speaker 1: to have ripple effects today that impact everything from the
Speaker 1: comfort of your living room, to the size of your government,
Speaker 1: to even possibly the outcome of the U S elections
Speaker 1: this fall. Welcome to Flashback, a podcast from AZZI about
Speaker 1: unintended consequences. I'm your host in history instructor Sean Braswell.
Speaker 1: Up until about a hundred years ago, a climate controlled
Speaker 1: environment was a fantasy, the stuff of science fiction novels.
Speaker 1: Mark Twain once said that everyone talks about the weather,
Speaker 1: but no one does anything about it. Well, in two
Speaker 1: Willis Carrier finally did something about it. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: about something most of us take for granted, air conditioning,
Speaker 1: but it's really about the power of comfort. Comfort can
Speaker 1: move mountains, and more importantly, it can move people. Every summer,
Speaker 1: millions of tourists and school children descend on Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: To take in the sights and sounds of the nation's capital,
Speaker 1: and every summer millions wish they had decided to visit
Speaker 1: during a different time of year. Hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: people celebrating Independence Day in the nation's capital will face
Speaker 1: dangerous heat temperatures in Washington. Monuments and the lofty words
Speaker 1: inscribed upon them just don't seem to matter as much
Speaker 1: when you're baking in a pool of your own sweat.
Speaker 1: Very hot, it's really gross, silly hot. It's warm today
Speaker 1: these days, at least you have the option of going
Speaker 1: to a museum or some other air conditioned area. But
Speaker 1: let's go back in time for a moment, back to
Speaker 1: a simpler time, a far less comfortable time. It can
Speaker 1: be hard for us today to imagine Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: Or many places in America before climate controlled building. In
Speaker 1: the days before air conditioning, American life during dangerously hot
Speaker 1: weather wasn't all that different from American life during beautiful
Speaker 1: cool weather. Salvador Basil is a social historian an author
Speaker 1: of Cool How air conditioning changed everything, And this was
Speaker 1: because people in those days were operating under a Victorian standard.
Speaker 1: They did their best to act as if they didn't
Speaker 1: notice the heat. They were trained this way from birth.
Speaker 1: But a stiff upper lip didn't prevent one from feeling
Speaker 1: the heat or being affected by it. So every newspaper
Speaker 1: in America during the summer months had its daily column
Speaker 1: of heat prostrations and heat strokes and heat fatalities. It
Speaker 1: was an unusual for thousands of people to die during
Speaker 1: a major heatwave. No one thought much of this. The
Speaker 1: upper floors of office buildings, including Manhattan's dazzling new skyscrapers,
Speaker 1: were like ovens. Most theaters lacked ventilation or windows, and
Speaker 1: audience members baked in the summer months, but it went
Speaker 1: beyond that. Getting a night sleep was usually impossible. Some
Speaker 1: people went so far as to climb to their rooftops
Speaker 1: for a breath of air, where a few of them
Speaker 1: fell asleep and rolled off to their deaths. To cope
Speaker 1: with the heat during the day, people would congregate outdoors
Speaker 1: in the shade or at a swimming pool. They drink
Speaker 1: ice drinks on porches, take a quick dip in public fountains,
Speaker 1: take naps under trees and parks, and the nation's capital
Speaker 1: was especially hot as soon as the plaster was dry.
Speaker 1: Everyone in the federal government realized that Washington was one
Speaker 1: of the worst places to locate the nation's capital, and
Speaker 1: it didn't take long for America's leaders to avoid the capital.
Speaker 1: Many presidents used to skip town during the summer months.
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt like to go bear hunting in Colorado. Calvin
Speaker 1: Coolidge once took his entire family, five canaries, two dogs
Speaker 1: in a pet raccoon to the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Speaker 1: Members of Congress also stayed clear of d C in
Speaker 1: the middle of the sun where but working there was
Speaker 1: still a miserable experience. A member of Congress would collapse
Speaker 1: and then possibly die at other law makers simply assumed
Speaker 1: that he had been done in by the temperature. Members
Speaker 1: of Congress did their best to cope with the heat.
Speaker 1: Lawmakers would adjourn for the day if the temperature got
Speaker 1: too uncomfortable. They all adopted white linen suits. One congressman
Speaker 1: became famous for the fact that at a certain point
Speaker 1: in the calendar he would remove his two pay and
Speaker 1: spend the rest of the time bald uh. They drank
Speaker 1: a great deal of lemonade made for them in the
Speaker 1: cloak room, along with other beverages, and if things got
Speaker 1: really tough, they would sneak down to the Capital Basement,
Speaker 1: where there was a room of bathtubs, and they would
Speaker 1: take a quick plunge to restore themselves. Sometimes even that
Speaker 1: was not enough, but a number of those men dropped
Speaker 1: dead anyway, And the buildings didn't help. There were rooms
Speaker 1: without air, there were rooms without windows. One Congressional chamber
Speaker 1: was so notorious for heat that everyone called it the oven.
Speaker 1: The result was absolutely unbearable, and it would be unbearable
Speaker 1: for the next seventy years. As they kept trying to
Speaker 1: tinker with the system, nothing helped, at least until Willis Carrier.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to that foggy railroad platform in N two. Now,
Speaker 1: fog is really nothing more than water droplets that have
Speaker 1: condensed out of the air, and as you may know,
Speaker 1: cool air cannot carry as much water as warm air can.
Speaker 1: So Carrier realized that if you could pass warm air
Speaker 1: across a refrigerated object, then you could cool that air down,
Speaker 1: reducing its humidity level, which in turn would cool the
Speaker 1: surrounding air as well. Carrier built what he called the
Speaker 1: Apparatus for treating air. It worked wonders for the Brooklyn
Speaker 1: company that hired him, and this did indeed lower the
Speaker 1: humidity in the printing plant. Interestingly, at the same time
Speaker 1: time the temperature came down, employees wanted suddenly to eat
Speaker 1: their lunch in the workroom, and Carrier realized that he
Speaker 1: was onto something. Of course, Carrier's invention not only removed
Speaker 1: the humidity from the printing room, it also chilled the air.
Speaker 1: But still this was considered something for business purposes, not
Speaker 1: for the average person. But then Hollywood came calling. Up
Speaker 1: until that point, moving pictures had always taken a huge
Speaker 1: loss during the summer. No one wanted to spend the
Speaker 1: hot months in a theater with no ventilation. By the
Speaker 1: late nineteen twenties, the idea of summer movies was firmly established.
Speaker 1: Hollywood was rolling in money, and an amazing thing happened.
Speaker 1: For the first time in human history, people anywhere knew
Speaker 1: that they had a place to go to escape from
Speaker 1: the heat, and that costs nothing more than the price
Speaker 1: of a movie ticket. This was momentous. Theaters advertise their
Speaker 1: a c with marquees frosted over with fake snow penguins
Speaker 1: and polar bears, signs with hanging icicles. Sometimes they just
Speaker 1: propped the lobby doors open wide and let the gush
Speaker 1: of cold air sweep over passers by. Remember you can
Speaker 1: enjoy great motion picture entertainment all summer long in cool
Speaker 1: comfort at this dinner. For decades, most Americans experienced air
Speaker 1: conditioning only in large commercial spaces like movie theaters, department stores,
Speaker 1: and hotels. Finally, in the early nineteen fifties, it made
Speaker 1: its way into the home. R C A America's finest
Speaker 1: air conditioner goes quietly about its business of keeping you comfortable.
Speaker 1: Air Conditioning in the nineteen fifties was not only a
Speaker 1: comfort item, but it was a real homeowner's status symbol.
Speaker 1: Whether it was a central system or a window unit,
Speaker 1: everyone knew that you had it, and everyone was rushed.
Speaker 1: Within five years, Americans were installing more than a million
Speaker 1: units a year. For many the home a C unit
Speaker 1: was a revelation. At the age of six, an aunt
Speaker 1: of mine bought two air conditioners, which was a scandal
Speaker 1: in the family because air conditioners were only for rich people.
Speaker 1: But I also noticed that at the next family party,
Speaker 1: everyone flocked to her living room and stayed there. So
Speaker 1: I sneaked over to the machine and put my hand
Speaker 1: out to the grill, and there was cool air, and
Speaker 1: I was hooked. Ever after, America's new addiction set off
Speaker 1: an extraordinary chain of events. Places in the country that
Speaker 1: had seemed uninhabitable during summer now had millions of new residents,
Speaker 1: places like Washington, d C. Now, most objects tend to
Speaker 1: expand when they are heated up. Next, though, we find
Speaker 1: out how the US federal government did not start to
Speaker 1: truly expand until it was cooled down. Do you have
Speaker 1: an interesting tale about unintended consequences from history or your
Speaker 1: own life, Please share with us by emailing flashback at
Speaker 1: AUSI dot com. That's flashback at o z y dot com.
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