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- [00:01]
Salvatore Basel
Harry.
- [00:03]
Podcast Host
You sleep.
- [00:05]
Salvatore Basel
Who can sleep in this heat?
- [00:07]
Podcast Host
Today's something a little different. On Breaking History, we're going to dig into a very important American invention. It's one of those rare technologies that is so ubiquitous today, so seemingly integrated into daily life that its historical impact is almost invisible. We take it for granted most of the time. That is, until it fails.
- [00:28]
Salvatore Basel
Think you could open the window a little wider so we can let some more hot air in? When you're trying to beat the heat, we think you'd have better luck with the Kelvinator Speedy Mount air conditioner on your side.
- [00:42]
Podcast Host
I'm talking, of course, about air conditioning, a system often reduced to convenience, but whose implications stretch far deeper. It has altered architecture, urban development, labor, geopolitics, and even our circadian rhythms. It's a machine that has preserved human life and contributed to planetary instability. A symbol of progress and a vector of inequality. Join us after the break where my producer Poppy Damon interviews Salvatore Bassel, author of How Air Conditioning Changed Everything.
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Salvatore Basel
Kaid Buffal. And backl the five cube that is next year's model. Lee Harvey Odds Irving Berlin. What happened once happens again when news.
- [01:38]
Producer Poppy Damon
Of is a mystery.
- [01:48]
Salvatore Basel
You say you'll never join the Navy, that you'd never track storms brewing in the Atlantic, and skydiving could never be part of your commute. You'd never climb Mount Fuji on a port visit or fly so fast you break the sound barrier. Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Start your journey@navy.com, america's Navy. Forged by the sea Trane Central Air Conditioning presents recipe for Boiled wife. Take one fresh good natured wife. Add three small children and a barking dog. Stir well. Blend in equal parts of heat, humidity, dust and stale air. Test by arriving home from your cool office with a cheery have a nice day. Cool your entire home with trane central air conditioning. I'm Salvatore Basel, and I wrote the book Cool How Air Conditioning Changed Everything.
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Producer Poppy Damon
And can I ask why you wrote this book? It feels niche, but you make it really interesting. How did you get the inspiration?
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Salvatore Basel
The biggest reason? And this was part of my intro to the book. When I was six years old, which was the early 1960s, my aunt Catherine shocked the entire family by buying two air conditioners. This was a seismic event because as far as everyone was concerned, air conditioners were only for rich people. But I also noticed that all of the parties of the family from then on took place in Anne Catherine's living room, and everyone loved it. I walked up to the air conditioner when no one was looking and put my hand up to the grill output and cool air was coming out in the middle of August. And I thought this was the best invention in the universe. So I was hooked from that moment on.
- [03:48]
Producer Poppy Damon
Take us to 1902 and what unfolded that would sort of change history and the history of American inventions. How did modern air conditioning get born?
- [03:58]
Salvatore Basel
Modern air conditioning is actually a combination of a few ideas. Refrigeration and refrigeration. Mechanical refrigeration actually dates back to the mid19th century. There were a few inventors who happened upon a system that we would call a refrigeration compressor. It made cool air. And one of them was a Florida doctor in the 1850s who had a system that was powered by a steam engine. This fellow tried to patent it, but society in general literally would not believe that such a machine existed and he died penniless. However, in another 20, 30, 40 years, mechanical refrigeration was being used. Now, Willis Carrier, this 21 year old engineer, who had just graduated from college and was employed by the Buffalo Forge company, which had started making blacksmith bellows. And because they had been making blacksmith bellows, were then suddenly making ventilation equipment.
- [05:11]
Podcast Host
For factories, the Buffalo Forge company had to solve a problem. There was a printing plant in Brooklyn, New York, which was having a terrible time during the summer months getting its commissions done because humidity would cause the paper to swell and swollen paper would not print cleanly in a printing press. It would cause jams.
- [05:33]
Salvatore Basel
They were wasting paper. They were missing deadlines. There was a problem. They asked the Buffalo Forge company if they could do something about the humidity. And the Buffalo Forge administration said, we'll put our youngest fellow on it. There was trial, there was error. He tried a few methods which did not work. But then he came up with an idea of refrigeration plus lowering the humidity by condensing moisture onto pipework in the system. Lo and behold, it worked. And this is patented on July 17, 1902. Everyone should remember that date. And it was called the apparatus for treating air. And it was pretty much unheralded in the press. But within a couple of years, the company realized it had something and Carrier began to take off as a source of what they now called air conditioning. Factories were delighted because there were factories that in past years would have to shut down during the summertime, and that was a big waste of money. So they now had a schedule where they could operate year round. This was the big invention. The interesting problem was that carrier immediately saw that there would be a Market for what he called comfort cooling. The problem was that most people in the world had been so used to summer heat, they couldn't imagine that there was a need for comfort cooling, Even though they themselves were happy when they would walk into, say, the printing plant and spend time in that room, which was more bearable than any other room in the building. Carrier's big job for decades was to get the public to decide that they wanted and insisted on having a cool environment in summer weather.
- [07:35]
Producer Poppy Damon
So there's a few things I want to pick up there. The first is when you mentioned the conditions of factories when you said that they had to close down, Was that because of the safety on people or because machines wouldn't work? Like, what was the landscape of sort of, you know, this is peak industrialization. What are the conditions people are working in and how does the hotness come into it?
- [07:53]
Salvatore Basel
Oh, comfort of the people and safety of the people has sort of nothing to do with it. Sorry that the issue was that many manufacturing processes were hampered by summer heat and humidity. Leather, pasta, soap, sweets, various manufacturing processes needed drying times. That if you were in the middle of a New York summer or a Midwest summer, the air was so humid that this was not going to happen. And if you would have a batch of whatever it was that was drying far too slowly, it could be literally ruined. So rather than try to manufacture and cross your fingers for better weather, a lot of companies would just not bother because it was too big of a risk. Employee comfort had nothing to do with it. Many factories during the 19th century would reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit, that's 60 Celsius. And employees were simply, they had to put up with it. Now Henry Ford was one of the first people to install factory wide air conditioning in his plant. And he did notice that employee absences were suddenly greatly lessened because people were healthier and more apt to want to show up to work. But the manufacturing was also improved. Metal tolerances worked out better. Paint dried without being dusty. It was a win win situation. And even though air conditioning in its early years was a huge expense, the expense was always repaid by greater productivity and greater profit.
- [09:40]
Producer Poppy Damon
What kind of person was Carrier? I mean, how much of an engineering mind did he have and how was he able to do the thing that no one else had thought of? Because in a way you're saying it's quite a logical mechanism. So what was it that you think made him have the ingenuity to take all these processes together?
- [09:58]
Salvatore Basel
Carrier was the ultimate genius in a way. He saw into the problem in a way he saw nothing else. This was a man who would pack a suitcase for a trip which turned out to contain exactly one handkerchief because he was too busy thinking about air conditioning and how it could be improved. He stated at one point that he had come across his idea of lowering humidity on a train platform on a cold, damp night. When he saw condensation appearing on the windows of the train, that led him to think, aha, do this and it will be improved. Which I believe is what we call genius in a technical sense. It's when you can see through one problem and. And solve the next problem. That was the kind of person he was throughout his entire career and really most of his life, because he lived for air conditioning, even though he did not have it in his own home.
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Producer Poppy Damon
Why not?
- [11:01]
Salvatore Basel
I have no idea. But he was able to sell it to a number of places. And for many, many years, Carrier was the go to company.
- [11:14]
Producer Poppy Damon
What happened afterwards? We talked about some resistance and then of people like Ford taking it up. Could you give us a kind of potted history about the expansion of AC once it had kind of been used in this ink factory in the way that it was.
- [11:26]
Salvatore Basel
It's interesting that air conditioning had been very quickly picked up by factories simply because that had to do with money. Do this and you will have better production. Don't do this and you won't. Because of that, factories were not going to fight against the idea very much at all. The idea of what Carrier himself called comfort cooling, as opposed to production cooling, that was harder to deal with. That was more of a resistance to that, because there was throughout history, and especially into the Victorian era, the idea of God made hot weather, so you must put up with it. People would quote the book of Amos, he who makes the wind, the Lord God is his name. In other words, that's the guy. Don't anyone else try to fool with this. Also, it was technology that had never existed in a house. And while everyone had had a fireplace since caveman days, the idea of machinery to cool yourself was very foreign and very odd. It was only in the mid 19th century that the idea of an ice box for groceries, that only then did that idea take hold. And it was very slow in taking hold because again, it was technology. So when it came to the idea of your own personal comfort, well, we'll put that aside till later. In 1903, the New York Stock Exchange built its. What is now its current home, its new home. At the time, they were able to install a fairly Elaborate cooling system. And the only reason that it got the green light was that it was pointed out that this would improve productivity. However, what it improved was employee comfort, visitor comfort when it opened, because it was sort of seen as a hybrid between production cooling and comfort cooling. This made national headlines. The fact that this was being done and that it had this feature which was amazing. At the time, however, not many people were visiting the New York Stock exchange. The real break came with the movie industry because nickelodeons had come up in the early years of the 20th century. And nickelodeons usually were tiny theaters which were windowless or draped to be windowless. And because of that they were usually airless. As Hollywood realized that if they were going to become bigger, they would have to become fancier, Movie theaters were being built. But those movie theaters had ventilation systems which sort of helped and sort of didn't. And most of the time they didn't. So during the 1910s and, and into the 1920s, Hollywood felt that the summertime was actually their dead season. People would not go to the movies. It was awful inside a movie theater. There were theaters that would try showing movies on the roof. But that didn't help much. Especially if it was a rainy night or if it was a hot night. You were out of luck again. There was finally a few theaters here and there thought to install refrigeration systems, air conditioning, and in 1925, Carrier was called upon to install a system in New York's Rivoli theater. That system opened on Memorial Day. And it was such a shock, a pleasant shock to the public. The system cost in $1925, $60,000, which was not cheap. They made back the cost of the system in three months because people were so gratified.
- [15:45]
Producer Poppy Damon
Well, presumably people would think even if they didn't want to see the movie, they wanted to sit in the air conditioned room. So they drew people, which is still to this day. Sometimes people like to escape the sunshine. And we have Hollywood blockbusters for that reason.
- [15:58]
Salvatore Basel
And that is exactly the point that very few people have dwelt upon. And I thought this should be noted more. That was the first time in human history that mankind, humankind had a refuge from summertime heat that was dependably cool, available to anyone and for only the price of a movie ticket. It was amazing. Yes, you lucky people, just sit back for a moment, relax and notice the delightfully close, clean, cool and refreshing atmosphere of this scientifically air conditioned theater. Great, isn't it? Remember, you can enjoy great motion picture entertainment all summer long in cool comfort at this theater. Now, within five years, pretty much every theater in the United States had to be air conditioned or they were out of business. Interestingly, Europe resisted it for decades and it has only lately become a popular thing. But I think this was the first taste that the public had had of literally comfort cooling. In the summer, you had the opportunity that you had never had before of a few hours respite. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off terms apply.
- [17:52]
Producer Poppy Damon
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- [18:37]
Salvatore Basel
The the most immediate chain was that in every other service industry that dealt with the public at all now there was an expectation starting that people would want to be comfortable in those surroundings. Department stores, which were fairly unbearable during the summer months, now had to be cool. It was an expensive thing. But again, when stores did it, they saw an immediate uptick in business, in customer satisfaction and profits. This began to filter to even small retailers. And if you looked in business magazines of the late 1920s and even into the early 30s, which was hard, hardcore Depression era businesses were being pushed to provide cooling for customers by any number of machines that were available. Air conditioning was finally beginning to shrink enough so that while it was still unwieldy, it was possible for a business to install something. But this was fairly, in a sense, immediate. So movies, stores, restaurants, all of these places, the public began to expect it, demand it. And the last frontier was the home because.
- [20:04]
Producer Poppy Damon
And what happened? Yeah, what happened when it reached our homes?
- [20:07]
Salvatore Basel
It was, it was what I would call clumsy. The first home air conditioner had been brought out by Frigidaire. This was what they call a split system, which was two machines, one which would go in the basement, one which would go in your room. The two of them together weighed 600 pounds and required piping and a water source and drain lines and could cool a room to an extent and cost as much as a car. And this came out in mid-1929, which was exactly the wrong time for such a thing to happen. So Frigidaire lost millions of dollars on this project. They held onto their stock until the early 1930s and then they kept trying to push it to businessmen in stock brokerages offices because they said this would be an aid to business, turn on the cold, as they would keep saying. But this didn't help the whole market. During the 30s, the systems began to shrink and to become a little less unwieldy and a little less expensive. It wasn't until the post war years, the late 1940s, that what we would know as window units, began to show up. And while they were expensive, they began to drop in price bit by bit. And by the early 1950s, for some reason, 1953, which happened to be the year of a giant heat wave worldwide, everybody called it the big bake. By that year, there was suddenly a huge uptick in purchase of home air conditioning units. Another thing about home air conditioning units, a window air conditioner in the 1950s, which was very much a status symbol era, that was a great status symbol because it showed from the outside of a house you could defend a purchase as being for the family's comfort and the family was grateful. But it showed that you had cash and it was now affordable. So in 1940, 1/4 of 1% of Americans had some sort of air conditioning in their homes. By 1960, it was up to about 20%. And now by I think 1990, it was over 90%. It just skyrocketed.
- [22:35]
Producer Poppy Damon
So I just want to end with a couple of closing thoughts. One thing. What happened to Willis Carrier? Take us through. We heard his early invention. He was only 25. What happened to him in the rest of his life? And how did he wind up?
- [22:47]
Salvatore Basel
He was actually only 21 when he, when he. I mean, amazing, but 21.
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Producer Poppy Damon
21, wow.
- [22:56]
Salvatore Basel
When he had brought out his apparatus for treating air as a young man, within a year or so, his company let him go. He was, however, dedicated enough and stubborn enough to say what the hell with this, he brought along his team from that company and started the Carrier Air Conditioning company. And it was single minded pursuit of literally putting air conditioning everywhere. His motto at one point was a good day every day as far as the weather. He felt that air conditioning everywhere would ultimately become the key to making life comfortable. And indeed, he was responsible for air conditioned trains and I believe, air conditioned cars and air conditioned airplanes and buildings of all sorts. Now the. So he spent his life working toward that one goal. He became, in his way, famous for it. And he went through a long and happy career just pursuing that. I would call it a real success story because air conditioning is now considered one of the great inventions.
- [24:15]
Podcast Host
And so, after revolutionizing modern life with an invention that would change everything from comfort at home to productivity at work, even how we design cities and build economies, Willis Haviland Carrier, the godfather of air conditioning, passed away quietly on October 7, 1950. He died of a heart attack at the age of 73. As we've heard, by the time of his death, air conditioning had moved far beyond the industrial factories where he first imagined was in movie theaters, department stores, office buildings, and it was beginning to find its way into American homes. Carrier didn't just engineer a machine, he invented a new way of living. And while he may not be a household name, his legacy hums in the background of every cooled room that we walk into.
- [25:08]
Producer Poppy Damon
There's also some pushback these days because of environmental factors. There's people sort of being quite sparing with their use of it, for one thing, not just because of the cost, but worries about the planet. Where do you think it leaves us now in how we should reflect on the legacy of air conditioning?
- [25:27]
Salvatore Basel
I do think that as the current air conditioning system has been based on a refrigeration compressor, and that has been that way for 120 years at this point, I'm pretty confident from the research that I've done that there are going to be newer and more climate friendly and more energy efficient systems which will be much less harmful to the environment. There have been attempts at air conditioning which have used much friendlier products than hydrocarbons or fluorocarbons, water for one of them, and a system of acrylic membranes that were able to draw moisture out of the air. Some of these systems have flopped, but some of them have been in process. And I would like to believe that something will break through pretty quickly.
- [26:30]
Producer Poppy Damon
Was part of the motivation to write your book that when we switch on our air conditioning, we pay a little bit of mind to the inventor in 1902, Willis and how he's changed the world.
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Salvatore Basel
I hope so. I happen to grow up in the city that housed the carrier company, so I always knew about him. I was surprised that most people didn't. And so I would like to think that people would realize now that he was. He was somebody I'm happy to know Irving Berlin what Happened Once Happens Again.
- [27:22]
Podcast Host
Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five star rating and a nice comment too. Also, if you love this episode, there's more great content@the FP.com Please become a subscriber today and until then, I'll see you next time.
- [28:07]
Salvatore Basel
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