I was living at 537 W. Deming in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago in the summer of 1995. The address and city rate mention because that summer Chicago suffered one of those brutal and nationally notable heat waves. The kind that could claim a high death count.
Where it became interesting, while also enervating, was that air conditioning even in the reasonably nice parts of Chicago wasn’t a foregone conclusion in 1995. My apartment lacked AC, and the implications of what it lacked were awful.
Working from home at the time, I periodically took cold showers throughout the day just to cool off however briefly. Nights were awful too, plus the constant sweating made for endless fatigue. Oh well, I survived the summer.
What’s perhaps interesting is that assuming the apartment building is still upright, it almost certainly has air conditioning today. It’s a happy truth in these times that apartments, houses and cars must have refrigerated air. Americans can’t function without it, and they can’t precisely because what was once so obscure, and yes, a luxury item, is now a common good. Thank goodness!
My own experiences, experiences of family members, and experiences of friends came to mind a great deal while reading Salvatore Basile’s essential 2014 book, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. Basile provides readers with a very useful and grueling history of the efforts of man to wage war against heat.
To read Basile is to marvel at how awful things used to be. And this was true for everyone, rich and poor alike. Think The Great Gatsby, and the “immensely rich characters” who endured “the hottest day of the year with no relief even in a luxury suite at the Plaza.”
A famous novel isn’t enough for you? Consider New York City’s 5th Avenue in the 19th century, where the Plaza is. Basile confirms that “the air inside these homes” was “as hot, heavy, and oppressive as the atmosphere inside any slum tenement.” As for the scent of towns and cities before the advent of “dirty” energy propelling air refrigerants and cleaners, Basile writes that the “signature aroma” during the summer was “a blend of garbage and horse dung.” Translated, the air was neither clean nor healthy in the era before cars and air conditioners.
Do you feel a little richer now, no matter your wealth status? Seriously, how did the people from the past do it? With the exception of the coastal rich reading this review, what would you presently do without air conditioning? No matter how luxurious the apartment, house, office, or public space in which you’re reading this right now, what would it be like without climate control?
It boggles the mind contemplating how people formerly dealt with summers. The simple truth is that many did not. Basile writes of how newspapers had “daily death reports” owing to the summer heat. In other parts of the book, he writes of how people used to fall to their death at night, after rolling off the roof of their dwelling while mercifully catching at least some sleep in the cooler outdoors.
While the global warming obsessed act and write as though oppressively hot summers are a modern effect of cars, carbon consumption and people having the temerity to exist, Basile is clear that going back to the Biblical times and surely before, desperately hot and exhausted people have “enlisted everything from water power to slave power to electric power, ice made from steam and cold air made from deadly chemicals, “’zephyrifers,’” refrigerated beds, ‘”glacier fountains,”’ and all manner of other lengths gone to in hopes of achieving comfort amid heat and humidity. Some would call the desire to beat the heat an obsession, one paved with enormous amounts of failure.
Which is just a comment that if “global warming” is your worry today, that’s the surest sign you’re very well to do, and yes, more than a bit spoiled. Only someone who’s never lived without the comforts of AC would worry about efforts taken by people to mitigate the horrors of suffocatingly hot summers.
Crucial about the obsession with “cool” is that it went beyond comfort. Heat was plainly a killer that men would die from. Women were always expected to carry smelling salts. As for medical experts, they had ideas. Basile cites a piece in The Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal that indicated the best way to endure heat was to drink as little water as possible, that “overindulgence in liquids” and “a too free use of cold water” dangerous practices during hot weather.
Still, what to do? With heat seemingly as old as mankind, how to live? Ice factored large. Rather fascinatingly, Basile reports that before refrigeration or AC of any kind, blocks of ice were viewed as “white gold” and “priced accordingly as the most luxurious table item, often going for ten times the price of beefsteak.” So fancy was ice that it was served on silver platters, which is a reminder that all easily accessible market goods begin as luxuries. Air conditioning was plainly no exception to this rule.
As Basile himself recalls from his childhood in the 1960s, an Aunt Catherine didn’t just purchase one AC for her bedroom, she also bought one for the living room where she lived. The gasps within Basile’s family at this extravagance revealed what was true then: “Air Conditioners Are for Rich People.”
Traveling back in time to the mid-19th century, one John Gorrie created an ice machine meant to cool one’s surroundings in the Florida summers. It recalls a Vanity Fair article about Sarah Palin circa 2008-2009. Rest assured that this is not a political comment. The skeptical article noted that by virtue of the Palins choosing Alaska to live, they were different. No argument there, and again that’s not a political point. Alaska wouldn’t attract the same people who flock to New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Thinking about this, what kind of people chose Florida, Texas, and other intensely hot locations before AC. Weren’t they similarly “different”?
Back to Gorrie, it goes without saying that per Basile, his odd “machine” arrived to “universal disbelief.” Yes, entrepreneurs aren’t businessmen, rather they’re congenitally contrarian people who believe deeply in a present and future wholly at odds with conventional wisdom and imagination. The New York Daily Globe referred to Gorrie as a “crank,” while the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce referred to Gorrie’s machine as a “cock-and-bull story.”
Worse, investors similarly blanched. Basile writes that Gorrie’s “letters to money men, then to scientists” in search of investment for his invention “went unanswered.” Gorrie died in 1855, a broken, broke man.
About Gorrie’s failures to find people and money necessary to bring life to his vision, Basile cites a scientist/economist by the name of William Petty who noted that “when a new invention is first propounded, in the beginning every man objects.” It’s so true, and so heartbreaking with Gorrie top of mind. It’s also a comment on the horrors of government spending. The debt isn’t the crisis despite what we’re told, it’s the “unseen.” It’s what wacky ideas that arrive to “universal disbelief” aren’t coming to fruition because government is consuming wealth such that countless entrepreneurs have fewer dollars to match their ideas with.
Which requires a jump ahead in the book. Basile fascinatingly cites a Wall Street Journal front-page headline from 1944. It read like this: “Cooler Tomorrow/Air-Conditioned Homes, Autos, and Office Goal of Equipment Makers/They Plan for Post-War Sales 500% Above Their Best Peacetime Year.”
This was the post-war prediction. Consider that as of 1940, “fewer than one in 400 Americans had air conditioning in even a single room.” In other words, there was room for the market to grow, but for costs associated with adding AC to the dwelling. Basile reports that a window unit in the late 1940s still went for $400, and then central was closer to $2,000 after the war.
It’s a long way of saying that the Wall Street Journal’s predictions were a little bit bullish, and that’s what’s sad. More important, there’s a government spending metaphor to be had in the sadness. The sanctimonious deficit and debt hawks from the policy world continue to focus on the “crisis” of debt as something in the future whereby lenders cease lending to wasteful, heavily indebted governments. They miss the point.
Government debt, like individual or business debt, is an effect of market actors placing a little or a lot of trust in the future incomings of the borrower. When trust is lost or reduced is not the crisis. The crisis in government spending and borrowing is once again what’s not happening as government consumes with abandon. Basile writes that during WWII, “automotive firms began producing military trucks or jeeps, Ford made aircraft engines, IBM switched from typewriters to carbines,” the obvious point that industry was diverted from inventing the future so that it could produce armaments meant to destroy the people and wealth instrumental in creating the future.
About this, Basile is clear that the development of AC was logically slowed by the war, including the sad fact that Freon became a scarce item thanks to government’s rampant consumption of it. Here’s the crisis. People don’t inherit debt, they inherit a much less evolved future due to all the consumption of precious wealth. As opposed to AC ownership and usage exploding post-war, the rollout was quite a bit slower.
Yes, the crisis is in the advances not taking place because of government consumption that includes borrowing, not the debt itself. The borrowing and spending limits commercial advance that brings down the price of everything, including AC. The debt inherited by future generations isn’t the crisis, but bigger government is, which means the inheritance is quite a bit less progress born of the bigger government. When economists say that government spending boosts economic growth, which is what economists near monolithically say, they look like idiots.
So, while Gorrie died broken, he left behind evidence of effort that surely could lead to something better. And some even grasped the meaning of what could be. Basile cites a New York World editorial, which contended that “there is a fortune in store for the man who will furnish us with an artic opera house.” About the opera part, Basile is clear that the very notion of cooled houses and apartment buildings took a long time to land in the eyes of people. Not only were the rich not biting, but the cost of AC was well beyond the comprehension of the typical person. At least in the 19th century, the accepted wisdom among the few who could see the possibilities of “refrigerated air” was that it would be limited to businesses.
Whatever the answer, it was necessary even if AC was beyond the capacity for most to even imagine as a necessity. About our nation’s capital, Basile writes that “from its earliest days, the city’s 100-plus-degree summers appalled everyone from tourists to presidents.” No, 100 degree stretches aren’t a late 20th century, early 21st notion.
Which means people persevered in pursuit of relief from the heat. It was mostly about wafting air over enormous amounts of “white gold,” and into public rooms. At Madison Square Theatre in New York, Basile reports that two to four tons of ice were melted for cooling purposes per performance.
Back down in D.C., President James A. Garfield was shot in July of 1881, but had to recover at the White House at a time when “temperatures flirted with the hundred-degree mark.” A machine meant to cool Garfield’s room was certainly brought to the White House, and it “consumed a staggering 436 pounds of ice each hour.” After Garfield died (seemingly the brutality of the heat, along with the total lack of medical sophistication loomed large), Basile writes that the Independent Ice Company sent an invoice for 535,970 pounds of ice…
Stating the obvious, this was the White House. Government has the resources care of the taxpayer that others don’t. Which is a quick way of saying that 99.9999% of the sick in the U.S. and around the world could not convalesce in cooled, clean-air comfort. Translated, the deaths piled up. Basile indicates that a major heat wave in 1901 took 9,500 U.S. lives. As for babies, the journal American Medicine mused that “all the sick babies slaughtered by a heat wave could be saved by putting them in a cool room, but unfortunately we use the cooling machinery only to keep their poor little bodies from decay after the heat has killed them.” About all the dying, Robert Ogden Doremus asked, “Does anyone doubt that citizens would be happier, merchants more prosperous and physicians able to save more lives with the thermometer at 70 degrees instead of 90 or 100?”
The problem was that there was no consistent way to achieve what Doremus was talking about, particularly for the masses. Sorry, but a lack of economic growth is the epitome of cruel.
At the same time, people could dream. Basile cites Cold, a journal from before AC came to be, which wrote of “the possibility of having in every city a refrigerated club room with telephones and all modern conveniences for the use of hay fever-ites during the term which ordinarily causes them so much agony.” To think that something so basic was once seen in such moon-shot fashion.
Still, progress revealed itself in fits and starts. Luxury hotels continued to consume staggering amounts of ice to cool common rooms. This was surely an improvement, but sleep in the bedrooms was still “miserable.” Basile writes that as the 20th century dawned, “trying to cool a room had proved to be impractical, ridiculously expensive, and error prone.” Translated, what was very costly most often didn’t work.
Thankfully, one Willis Carrier entered the picture in 1902 with his cooling “apparatus.” He envisioned it as something for “cooling theaters, churches, restaurants,” but in Basile’s words, “no one went for it.” Change is hard, even the good kind. Just the same, it was happening. In 1913, Carrier even installed his “Apparatus” in a residence: it was 7 feet fall, 6 feet wide, and 20 feet long. Is it any wonder that those aware of Carrier’s vision viewed it with immense incredulity?
The good news is that businesses rely on customers, repeat customers most of all. And businesses, movie theaters in particular, saw cooling as a way to keep their seats full year-round. Air conditioning gradually became an expensive, but necessary investment for entertainment venues. In 1925 Paramount’s New York City head Adolp Zukor had cooling machinery installed at the Rivoli Theatre. Upon exposure to the cooler air, he concluded that “the people are going to like it.” Zukor was right. Rivoli quickly earned back its $65,000 investment.
In 1924, department store Hudson’s spent $250,000 to cool its location in Detroit. As Basile describes it “For the first time ever in human history [emphasis Basile], there was a hot-weather refuge available to overheated people.”
Just the same, these were public places. Basile largely chalks this up to disbelief, but does so with full acknowledgment of costs. Frigidaire’s “Room Cooler” was released in 1929, it could cool a room ten degrees, but Basile reports that the cost of a “Room Cooler” was $800.
General Electric rolled out its own room cooler in 1930, but it cost $950. Basile reports that $950 could purchase two Model A Fords at the time. It’s worth adding that the machines weighed 550 pounds. 36 were ordered over two years.
Willis Carrier entered the home market in 1931 with his “atmospheric cabinets,” but they cost $900 plus $500 for installation. Interesting here, Basile reports that Lehman Brothers purchased six of the units. Which is the point. AC was for rich people, rich businesses, or both. As Basile puts it, AC “was firmly beyond the reach of most householders.”
All of which speaks to the elemental importance of the rich to progress. They don’t just become rich by creating the future, their investments help the rich of tomorrow discover an even greater one. From there, the rich are crucially venture buyers in addition to investors. With money to spend, and sometimes lose, they discover applications for wealth previously unknown.
Basile cites a well-to-do Houston businessman who hated the horrible summer tradeoffs for drivers in the city: he could either suffer “convulsive sneezing” with his Cadillac’s windows down, or overwhelming heat with the windows up. Instead, this intrepid soul strapped a “a trunk-shaped Kelvinator refrigeration unit, powered by its lawnmower-sized gasoline engine” to the car’s rear luggage rack. He could drive without intense heat or sneezing.
The rollout was slow, and surely expensive, but it was upward. And it was because the alternative was horrid, and plainly lethal. Plus quality of life matters. A San Antonio businessman explained his joy at the Milan Building being equipped with AC in 1928, “I feel better, and finish the day’s work with more energy.” Amen.
The crucial truth is that AC inched ahead, and the realization of its importance to better living and living standards grew. By 1954, National Homes offered central cooling in its structures for $500, which was down from $2,000 at the end of WWII. And as prices fell, AC ownership predictably grew.
Economists imagine that economic growth causes rising prices, but the happier truth is that the surest sign of growth is rapidly falling prices. Air conditioning vivifies this point. With central cooling a $500 concept by 1954, by 1955 1 in 22 U.S. households could claim some form of air conditioning, only for usage to soar from there.
Basile reports that by 1960, AC penetration in the U.S. was 13 percent, 37 percent by 1970, 57 percent by 1980, and 87 percent as of book’s publication in 2014. Basile exults that “conditioned air was making the whole world happy.” Yes!
Better yet, and as the numbers indicate, the happiness was broad based. Wealth inequality isn’t a pejorative as the various ideologies say, it’s instead a sign of the beautiful democratization of former luxuries. And it’s not just in the U.S.
Basile writes that by 2008, formerly desperately poor and starving China was marked by the purchase of 20,000,000 AC units. By 2010, the number had risen to 50,000,000. No doubt in 2025 the number is quite a bit bigger. Comically but also happily, Basile writes that in India an AC is a dowry item.
No doubt readers have been wondering the whole time what Basile wrote about the alleged “global warming” implications of what has elongated live while making the world more livable, and downright happy. Basile acknowledges the warming commentary, but doesn’t seem very taken by it. As he points out, “people need a weapon against heat.”
He somewhat puzzlingly predicts that electricity will run out before people turn off their air conditioners, and it’s puzzling only because he recognizes that the oddballs of the world, the Gorries, Carriers and others drive progress by seeing what others don’t or can’t. It surprised this reader a little that Basile didn’t conclude that electricity supply would take care of itself in the way that AC has, and will continue to. As he notes, people thought Carrier et al were nuts, and he addresses the latter with consistency as a way of making the point that as you read his excellent book, this review, or hopefully both, there are some oddballs out there happening on even better, surely more cost and electricity effective ways to control heat.
Which is where this review will conclude. Looking back to 1881, Basile cites a New York Tribune editorial that said “we believe the time is not far distant when people will wonder why their ancestors were so stupid as to live without cooling apparatus in their houses.” Yes, two times over. First off, it’s a bet that in the future people look back on this age of global warming alarmism to marvel at the people who really believed earth was better and life cleaner before the technological advances that made living comfortably in the summer a reality. Second, it has this reader wishing he were young. Really, what inconveniences will be erased by the Carriers and Gorries of the future? Basile’s book indicates that it’s inevitable. Uknown is what’s inevitable. All we know is that it will be great.
