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Air Conditioning
by Malcolm Jones Jr.
Few of this century’s major inventions have been so damned and praised, and
few have made a greater difference in how and where we live.
Frank Lloyd Wright hated it. Las Vegas
would not exist without it. It has been credited
with everything from lowering the incidence of
heart attacks to the rise of the sun belt. It has
been blamed for the disappearance of the front
porch and the exploding size of the federal
government. Few of this century’s inventions
have been so damned and praised as air
conditioning. The rock band NRBQ once wrote
a song called “I Love Air Conditioning,” which
included the lyric “And when I’m tired, and I’m
so confused/Air conditioning I will use.”
There is even a mythology of air conditioning:
for years the (unfortunately) baseless tale
has circulated that the big character
heads—Mickey, Goofy, et al.—at Disney World
and Disneyland are air-conditioned. Like the
car and the television set, air conditioning has
always done double duty. It is both an
appliance and a social force.
People knew they wanted air
conditioning long before they were able to
produce a machine that could do the job. The
early efforts would have made Rube Goldberg
blush. The first serious attempt to build an air
conditioner in the United States took place in
Florida in the 1830s. Dr. John Gorrie created a
system that forced air over buckets of ice
suspended from the ceiling to lower the
temperatures of hospital patients suffering from
malaria and yellow fever. Not much progress
had been made by the summer of 1881, when
President James Garfield lay dying from an
assassin’s bullet. Naval engineers contrived a
box in which melted ice water saturated flaglike
cloths over which a fan blew hot air. This could
lower the room temperature by 20 degrees, but
in the two months that their machine comforted
the dying president, it consumed more than
half a million pounds of ice.
What we would recognize as an air
conditioner—a machine that cools, cleans and
dehumidifies air—was not invented until 1902,
when a young engineer named Willis Carrier
created what he called an Apparatus for
Treating Air. Carrier built his machine for the
Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing
Co. in Brooklyn, N.Y., where humidity was
bedeviling printers' efforts to accurately print
color. Carrier used chilled coils to cool the air
and lower humidity to 55 percent—or to any
level desired and precisely every time. This
exactness was the most wondrous aspect of
the new invention. Carrier’s machine was the
template from which all future air conditioners
would be struck.
Printing plants, textile mills,
pharmaceutical manufacturers, the occasional
hospital—the first air-conditioned buildings
were mostly industrial. (The idea of using
Carrier’s invention merely for personal
comfort lay decades in the future, although the
first air-conditioned home appeared in 1914,
when Charles Gates, son of the high-rolling
gambler John “Bet a Million” Gates, installed a
cooling system in his mansion in—of all
places—Minneapolis.) Carrier’s earliest
systems were enormous and expensive, as
well as dangerous. The original coolant was
toxic ammonia. But in 1922 Carrier achieved a
double breakthrough, replacing the ammonia
with a benign coolant called dielene and
introducing a central compressor that made the
cooling units much more compact. The biggest
step forward came when Carrier sold his
invention to the movies, or, more exactly,
movie-theater operators.
A handful of movie palaces were
air-conditioned in the early ‘20s, but the most
important debut was at the Rivoli on Broadway
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in New York City in 1925. Adolph Zukor
himself, the head of Paramount Pictures,
showed up for the opening. Willis Carrier was
there, too, literally sweating it out because
when the doors opened to let in the first
customers, the system had just been turned on
and the building was still hot. “From the wings
we watched in dismay as 2,000 fans fluttered.”
Carrier wrote of that night. “We felt that Mr.
Zukor was watching the people instead of the
picture—and saw all those waving fans.” At
last cool air began flowing through the air
ducts. One by one, the patrons dropped their
fans into their laps. “Only a few chronic
fanners persisted,” according to Carrier, “but
soon they, too, ceased fanning. We had
stopped them ‘cold’.”
Before long, office buildings, department
stores and railroad cars got central air. In 1928
the U.S. House of Representatives got it,
followed a year later by the Senate and a year
after that by the White House and then the
Supreme Court. But the industry’s biggest
growth spurt came after World War II. The first
window units appeared right after the war, and
sales took off immediately, jumping from
74,000 in 1948 to 1,045,000 in 1953. The
dripping box jutting out of the bedroom window
joined the TV aerial on the roof as instant
fixtures in the American suburban landscape.
Washington journalists have written
endlessly and only half-jokingly about the
effects AC has had on D.C., pointing out that
the federal bureaucracy mushroomed only
after air conditioning appeared on the scene to
keep the city’s famously fetid summers at bay.
(Federal workers used to be sent home
whenever the temperature/humidity index
topped 90 degrees.) But sociologists and
historians have been largely silent about a
much larger change: the rise of the sun belt in
precisely the same decades that air
conditioning became commonplace south of
the Mason-Dixon line.
In the 1960s, for the first time since the
Civil War, more people moved into the South
than left it. In the next decade, twice as many
people moved in as departed. The South
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today is a busier, more crowded, more urban,
more industrialized place than it was 50 years
ago. It even looks different. Walk down the
street of a Southern or Southwestern city at
night, and there’s no one out. All you can hear
is the sound of the heat pump on the side of
the house; all you can see is the blue glow
behind the living-room curtains. Where people
once wore seersucker and linen, the shoppers
of Atlanta and Houston and Phoenix now buy
the same clothes people buy in Cleveland or
Seattle.
With 95 percent of the houses buttoned
up for air conditioning, their porches gone, the
owners inside all year round, there is no longer
any need to accommodate the weather. As
Raymond Arsenault, a professor of history at
the University of South Florida, points out, “Ask
any Southerner over 30 years of age to explain
why the South has changed in recent decades,
and he may begin with the civil-rights
movement or industrialization. But sooner or
later he will come around to the subject of air
conditioning. For better or worse, the air
conditioner has changed the nature of
Southern life.” Mostly, Arsenault suggests, by
making it less Southern.
“General Electric has proved a more
devastating invader than General Sherman*,”
Arsenault writes. The only thing that allows us
to talk about places as different as Miami and
Houston and Knoxville and Tucson in the same
sentence, the only thing, in fact, that allows us
to entertain the notion of something called the
sun belt, is that all those places are less
unique, blander, if you will, than they were
before air conditioning. “The modern shopping
mall is the cathedral of air-conditioned culture,”
says Arsenault, “and it symbolizes the
placelessness of the New South.” Perhaps,
but it is, at last, a cool place.
*Sherman, William Tecumseh (1820-91) Union
general in the American Civil War, well-known for
his military tactics, including a destructive march
through cities along the southeastern coast.