How Air Conditioning Changed America

Nathan Connolly: This summer is record breaking heat has had people sweltering in Tokyo subway trains and Oslo apartment blocks. In Los Angeles, it was 108 degrees on July 6th. The day before in Algeria, the temperature reached 124 degrees. In California, which endured the hottest July on record, wildfires still rage. And in heat like this, you just want to get into your home or your office building and switch on the air conditioning. But of course for most of human history there was no such thing. In our series, ‘Days that changed America’, Salvatore Basile discusses the enormous impact of the invention of air conditioning.

Salvatore Basil: I’m Salvatore Basile and I wrote the book. ‘Cool. How air conditioning changed America.’

Reporters: Thank you for checking in with me. It’s Total Weather.

Reporters: We are following the extreme heat wave, creating dangerous conditions.

Reporters: At 9:00 AM Nine, we’re already in the mid 80s.

Reporters: The concern right now is for the elderly.

Reporters: There’s a chance it could even be the hottest day we’ve had so far this year at the 102 mark-

Salvatore Basil: Dealing with hot weather during the 19th century and years before was a very difficult thing for all of humanity. A day that changed America was July 17th, 1902, the day that Willis Carrier, the 21 year old engineer, patented his apparatus for treating air, otherwise known as air conditioning. Something that has changed not only the way we live, but how our cities look and even how we wash our windows. Electric fans had been invented in the 1880s. They were incredibly expensive at the time. Many people couldn’t afford this and they would just retreat to their fire escapes. There were some inventors who would start systems that used fan ventilation, blowing air over ice. There was one theater in New York City that used two to four tons of ice each performance. One of the strangest Ways of getting around heat was what were called refrigerated beds. One of them was developed around the 1860s by an inventor who constructed a gigantic cupboard as a headboard of a bed, with levels that would hold chunks of ice, levels that would hold pieces of activated charcoal to absorb what they call the offensive odors, and the idea was that gravity theoretically would draw air into the bed, over the ice, over the charcoal and inject it right onto the heads of the sleepers.

Salvatore Basil: This bed did not make much headway. A printing outfit in Brooklyn, New York. They’d gone through two years of wasted paper, days where they had to actually shut down because of humidity, heat. They dealt in color printing. If the printing presses did not register the paper exactly, you wound up with a blur and a mess rather than a color image, and they needed to do something. So this company asked if there were some system that could reduce humidity in the plant, and this was given to Willis Carrier. He tried a couple of remedies, one of which was to blow air through a cloth that was saturated with calcium chloride, which would pull water from the air and all it did was spatter chemicals all over the place. That wouldn’t work. So eventually he came up with a system of blowing air over chilled pipes, and it turned out that this worked. Not only did it reduce humidity, but as a bonus, employees were suddenly more comfortable.

Salvatore Basil: The principle of blowing air over cold pipes is basically what you see even today in your own home system. You have a compressor with a refrigerant in coils, the pipes that is chilled and the air is drawn through it, which cools the air and extracts humidity. It’s the same thing. And it began to catch on because companies had realized that summer heat, summer humidity could destroy a lot of their work. There would be investigators who would sneak thermometers onto a floor of a factory and find temperatures of 135 degrees. If you were say a chewing gum manufacturer or a chocolate company, you would literally have to shut down production entirely during the summer, which was ruinously expensive. It began to spread throughout the industrial world.

Salvatore Basil: But at the same time, Willis carrier realized that this could be called also comfort air conditioning, providing comfort to people. This was an outlandish idea because at the turn of the 20th century, most people’s thinking was still Victorian and their idea was, “Tough it out. God made hot weather, so you should put up with it.” No one was able to remove clothing because you just didn’t do that. Consequently, when you had a man who was wearing woolen underwear and a shirt and a waist coat and a frock coat, and at times of summer, overcoat, many of these men would just collapsed in the street. And ladies with multi underskirts and petticoats and a corset, and corset covers, they would collapse as well.

Salvatore Basil: Every newspaper had a daily column of deaths from heat. They would list the people’s names and carefully list where they had dropped.

Reporters: Philadelphia. 20th July 1905, 15 fatalities and 90 prostrations due to hot spell. August 22nd 1908, Humboldt, Kansas. Five deaths an attempted suicide and more than a dozen prostrations were results of the intense heat.

Reporters: Several of the deaths reported were those of persons who had fallen while asleep from fire escapes. The victims are Arthur Teague, aged six-

Reporters: John Seckel aged 35 years-

Reporters: Mary Michelle.

Salvatore Basil: It wasn’t until about 1960s and 70s that air conditioning began to drop in price enough that it became universally popular. This was something that was for rich people. This was for fancy occasions, but at home you had fans. I grew up in a house that used about seven or eight fans in various rooms. When I moved to New York city myself, I bought the cheapest fan I could and I carried it from room to room with me. Memorial day 1925, which is another date that changed history. It was Willis Carrier again, who developed a type of compressor system which made it possible affordable for a theater to be air conditioned. This was installed at the Rivoli theater in New York, blazing on the marquee refrigerating plant, and while it took a while for the system to really get running, once it did, everyone was astonished because they weren’t fanning themselves, they weren’t uncomfortable. And while the initial system had cost them, and this is 1925, $65,000, they recouped that cost in extra ticket sales in three months.

Salvatore Basil: And the reason that this day is so important is because it is the first time in human history that the ordinary person, not royalty or any of the above, had an affordable refuge from the heat. And in America at least people took to it instantly. Now, the nationwide growth of affordable air conditioning began in the early 1950s. Areas of the United States that were previously considered not that inhabitable, became attractive. By the late 60s, the population of Phoenix tripled. Dallas, Texas doubled, Tucson quadrupled. The majority of these people who moved there were older and politically conservative. By 1980 southern states had gained 29 electoral college votes and this helped sweep Ronald Reagan into the white house. Indeed, there is a new political demographic which was something of a surprise and everyone had to deal with it.

Salvatore Basil: One of the things that air conditioning has done which is underrated by much of the population, is that it has changed the look of every city. Where skyscraper architecture in the 1920s and 1930s had always dealt in very slim soaring spires because you could not have office space that was that far from an open window. It was simply not possible. Now with the advent of air conditioner, the idea of the boxy glass building with windows that would not open was considered the new norm, the new ideal. If you had what was called deep space in a building, this was now perfectly all right, because it was cool. You could have windowless offices. And because you had windows that would no longer open, one of the things that you did have to have was the gondola that hung outside every single office building for window washing.

Salvatore Basil: The international energy agency estimates that we now have in the world 1.6 billion air conditioning units and that, that will increase by 2050 to 5.6 billion. Now this is a huge demand on energy resources. There are people who have asked that Americans and people around the world trY to do without air conditioning, which is ridiculous. In modern life, air conditioning touches every part of your daily existence. If it is steaming in mid-August and you had a decent night’s sleep, it’s probably because you have air conditioning. And if you work in a steel and glass office building, your windows don’t open, and the air conditioning system is the reason that you don’t suffocate. And if it’s summer and you grab a candy bar, you can thank air conditioning for your snickers. If you see a movie or visit a restaurant, your whole environment is air conditioned. And if any of this makes you sick and you go to the doctor, your doctor’s examining room is undoubtedly windowless, and without air conditioning, none of that could exist.

Salvatore Basil: It is everywhere nowadays. So rather than getting rid of it, we need to learn how to make it better I would say. Willis Carrier was devoted to the idea of air conditioning. He died in 1950, but he was still on the job. He was still pushing all the time to try and extend the reach to, try and improve the process. I think we should be grateful to him. I know that I am.

Nathan Connolly: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @Backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Joanne Freeman: Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Paddington Bear and [inaudible 00:31:31] And as always thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Brian Balogh: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the national endowment for the humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell memorial foundation and the Johns Hopkins university. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Voice over: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of Richmond. Joanne freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale university. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.