”Yessir, it shore is hot outside today. I just seen a dog chasin` a rabbit, and they was both walkin`.”
–Rural joke, circa 1900.
Americans have always kidded about the heat. Ours is a nation, after all, where summer temperatures have reached at least 100 degrees in every state, including Alaska, and soared to record highs of 134 in California and 127 in Arizona. It even hit 105 in Chicago one time.
Until only a few decades ago, a sense of humor offered about the only relief–albeit psychological–from the blistering and humid miseries of summer. Most means of actually cooling indoor spaces were either technically crude or too expensive to become common.
But then came modern air conditioning. Glorious, miraculous, ubiquitous, sometimes bone-chilling air conditioning. Americans today are born into it and (assuming a summertime demise) bow out in it. Womb to tomb, they take it for granted, and no wonder. Even fleabag hotels, military barracks and prisons have it.
Yet air conditioning, for better or worse, has done far more than cool us. It has changed our architecture, improved our health, altered our social habits, fattened the profits of electric companies and created whole new industries.
Most important, perhaps, it has had a profound effect on Southern and Southwestern states that were once hellishly inhospitable to any kind of business or industrial and other exertions in the summer months. The Sun Belt`s name became synonymous with progress and profit only after the sun`s heat had been defeated.
The evolution of all this proceeded rather slowly, as such things are measured in America.
Primitive air cooling experiments began during the 1830s when a certain Dr. John Gorrie sought ways to lower the body temperatures of malaria and yellow fever patients at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Apalachicola, Fla.
Gorrie hung buckets of ice from the ceilings of hospital rooms, and when this proved only minimally helpful he turned to the use of a steam-driven compresser to cool air. By 1851, Gorrie`s work led to a patent for the first ice-making machine. (Natural ice was long sawed from rivers and lakes in the wintertime and stored in insulated warehouses. Shipping it to Southern states was costly.)
Commercial applications of cooling leaped forward in the 1870s when the refrigerated railroad car revolutionized the meat packing industry and breweries installed chillers to protect the flavor of beer by keeping it at a constant temperature.
The single most historic use of mechanical cooling in the last century followed the July 2, 1881, assassination attempt on the life of President James A. Garfield. Physicians used fans and 400 pounds of ice per hour to cool the wounded president`s White House bedroom, but Garfield died of his gunshot injuries two months later.
Air conditioning as we define it today was invented in 1902 by Willis H. Carrier, an engineer who at the age of 25 and fresh out of Cornell made a discovery that would forever change the American way of life.
Carrier learned that a plant in Brooklyn printing magazines with multicolored covers had terrible problems in the summertime. Fluctuating moisture in the air made the paper stretch and shrink as it passed through the high-speed presses. Printers could not keep the pages in alignment as successive colors of ink were applied one on top of the other.
With a blaze of insight, it occurred to Carrier that there was a crucial relationship between between temperature and humidity that had to be controlled. He accomplished this by pumping air at a fixed velocity across coils refrigerated to a low temperature. Extracting the right amount of moisture solved the printing problems. Before long, it was solving similar problems in previously muggy Southern textile mills and tobacco plants.
As Carrier refined the mechanics of his air conditioning, its use spread to theaters, museums and other buildings around the nation that formerly relied on air blown across cakes of ice. The old technique cooled the crowds fairly well, but didn`t remove the unpleasant clamminess of moisture-saturated air.
The relative rarity of efficient cooling well into the 20th Century did not deter the dense concentration of people in non-air-conditioned structures as tall as the 60-story Woolworth Building in New York. One unusual sight in big cities that persisted into the 1940s was that of office skyscrapers decked out in awnings from top to bottom.
But while awnings reduced the heat load from direct sunlight, they didn`t help circulate stifling interior air. For that, office workers in urban towers relied on electric fans and wind coming through open windows. Paperweights kept desk work from blowing around, but there was no relief from the dust and dirt that drifted in from outdoors.
As buildings grew taller, architects found it impossible to provide enough ceiling space between floors to house air-conditioning ducts. Carrier solved that problem by designing a system that blew air at high velocity through smaller ducts.
The earliest office structure that was air-conditioned at the time of its construction is generally considered to be the 1928 Milam Building in San Antonio, Tex. Many older skyscrapers were retrofitted for central cooling, and in Chicago among the earliest of these were Tribune Tower (1934) and the Wrigley Building (1936).
It is probably true, however, that most Americans in those years encountered air conditioning for the first time when they went to the movies. Such old theaters as the McVickers in Chicago had primitive cooling as early as 1885, but the masses didn`t get their first taste of hot weather comfort until later when movies became the most popular form of entertainment.
Practically everyone who grew up in the 1920s or 1930s can recall the delicious, sensual thrill of walking past a downtown film palace on a sweltering summer afternoon and feeling the chilled air rolling gently out of the theater doors (deliberately left open as a come-on).
That these exquisitely cooling zephyrs were scented with the odor of popcorn made the tease of that sidewalk experience almost unbearable. Actually entering such a theater for the first time was a childhood thrill that compared well with one`s first kiss, or soloing on a two-wheel bicycle.
But if air conditioning was just an occasional titillation for most people in those years, it was becoming an economic godsend for weather-sensitive industries. Chocolate factories once forced to close during hot weather now ran 12 months a year. Dehumidified air was a particular boon to plants turning out baked goods, ceramics, chewing gum and munitions.
People who continued to swelter at home during the summer would do anything to escape the heat, particularly on suffocating nights when humidity and searing air made sleep almost impossible. And that recalls the time when Chicago had its hottest day in history.
On the morning of Tuesday, July 24, 1934, thousands of sweat-soaked, cranky Chicagoans awoke on the sand and grass of the beaches and parks to which they had fled for relief the evening before. It had been excruciatingly hot for days. Fifteen persons had died of heat prostration and 30 others from heat-related heart attacks and other ailments. The mercury simply had climbed into the 90s and stayed there.
By noon on the hottest day, the temperature reached 100. At the Century of Progress exposition on the lakefront, people showed up just to find comfort in the air-conditioned exhibit buildings.
The temperature hit 103 at 1 p.m. and 104 at 2 p.m. Three more Chicagoans died–one on a park bench, one at the wheel of a truck, one riding a streetcar.
At 4 p.m., it was 105–a record that stands to this day.
Summer sufferers looked with envy at other applications of cooling technology made during those Depression years. Crack cross-country passenger trains were air-conditioned (although most airplanes were not). In 1934, the Crosley Corp. marketed a tent-like, air cooled canopy bed. Five years later, Packard became the first auto manufacturer to offer factory-installed air-conditioners.
Few realized it at the time, but the development of fluorescent lighting in 1938 by General Electric and Westinghouse helped set the scene for the sealed office skyscrapers so common today. Fluorescent tubes gave off far less heat than incandescent bulbs and reduced the strain on cooling systems. They also made it possible to achieve high light levels on big-floored buildings where few people sat near windows (which were unopenable, anyway).
In any event, practically all of the necessary basic technology was available when the real air conditioning boom began after World War II.
Small and efficient window units perfected by the Carrier Corp. and introduced in 1951 were installed in millions of American houses and high-rise office, residential and hotel buildings. The models that protruded beyond outside walls were (and are) particularly ugly, but they were inexpensive and easy to install.
By the 1960s, even central residential air cooling was no longer for the rich alone and began turning up in modest bungalows. Developers of many new apartment high-rises continued to favor window units, however, because they were cheaper. Flush exterior wall louvers made them less obtrusive.
Simple, unornamented International Style skyscrapers that dominated post- World War II skylines consumed great amounts of energy for cooling, partly because of skimpy insulation and big windows that freely admitted solar heat despite their tinted and mirrored glass.
Not until the oil shortages and rising energy costs of the 1970s did architects begin re-thinking things like window size and wasteful cooling and heating systems. For a few years, there was a great emphasis on energy-saving design. The zealousness may have gone out of that movement, but architects and building owners are still far more concerned about energy costs than they used to be. Today`s so-called ”smart” buildings incorporate self-monitoring systems to reduce the use of electricity.
One gloomy irony about residential air conditioning costs is half forgotten. When manufacturers began pushing window units in the 1950s, many utilities joined in by cutting rates to encourage utilization of surplus summer generating capacity. Today, companies including Commonwealth Edison increase their summer rates because that`s when power demands peak.
Yet the comfort may still be a relative bargain, and, indeed, has even been a boon to health–particularly in the South. Health authorities note that prior to 1900, the Southern mortality rate was markedly higher than in other parts of the country. The rate has since decreased, and air conditioning gets much of the credit. It has helped cut infant deaths and extended the lives of people suffering from respiratory and heart ailments.
By other and more spectacular standards, too, the South and Southwest have been far and away the greatest beneficiaries of air conditioning. Most of the Sun Belt would not have attained its swollen population and economic importance without taking the agony out of summer.
Historian Raymond Arsenault has pointed out that the South never felt the tide of European immigrants flowing into America around the turn of the century. The newcomers wanted nothing to do with summer temperatures stuck in the 90s and humidity that hovered at 80 percent or more for weeks at a time. And so the South`s smug, sluggish but stable black-and-white society was neither challenged nor enriched by the energy of immigrant Italians and Poles and Germans.
Farming long dominated the South`s economy because of the lengthy growing season and the Southerner`s aversion to the insufferable summer heat of factories. Certainly the South always had its share of intellectuals and shrewd businessmen, but it also had a slower life rhythm and a culture inextricably tied to agrarianism and the outdoors.
Air conditioning played a large role in drastically changing all of that. Doing business in Dixie ultimately became just as comfortable as doing it in New York or Denver. Offices, factories, houses and shopping malls in Florida or Mississippi were as cool as their counterparts in Illinois or
Massachusetts.
Going into the 1960s, uncooled Southern interiors became almost unthinkable. Farmers rode around in air-conditioned tractors, and the late Jimmy Hoffa insisted that truckers be given air cooled cabs on long-haul Southern runs.
Dixie and the Southwest reversed their out-migrations of old as legions of Yankees moved south. Sun Belt supercities boasted new clusters of skyscrapers, civic centers and domed stadiums complemented by air cooled downtown tunnel or skywalk systems.
Houston was long a hot, poky cowtown where humidity of almost frightening oppressiveness rolled in off the Gulf of Mexico. Today, it is the nation`s fifth largest city and has an annual electrical cooling bill that exceeds the gross national products of some Third World nations.
Phoenix, with an average July temperature of 91, was the size of Arlington Heights before World War II. In chilled condition, it is now larger than Boston or San Francisco.
Not all Southerners smile on this social and economic revolution, whatever its pocketbook benefits. The New South has become part of the newly homogenized and transient America, where regional values, traditions and customs have been eroded or forgotten. William Faulkner`s South is no more.
Look-alike franchise architecture has aggravated the visual side of this. So has a scarcity of designers willing to develop a vernacular architecture that deals creatively with climatic problems instead of relying wholly on chilled air. Why can`t architects in a state like New Mexico revive some of the old low technology that still keeps the interiors of ancient mud-bricked Indian pueblos as cool as you please?
Even so, no technology ever resulted in unmixed blessings, and Willis H. Carrier`s invention must be counted as one of the century`s happiest triumphs over nature. People in the Midwest and South still kid about the heat, but there`s a smugness about the humor. We pump chilled air into just about everything these days, and even if it lacks the ambrosial scent of popcorn, there`s always an oasis of some kind just around the corner.
SOME BURNING MEMORIES OF SUMMERTIME SURVIVAL
Memories of early air conditioning–or the lack of it–tend to be rather vivid and colored by nostalgia. Here are a few recollections of Chicago area residents who lived through some torrid times:
Sonya Guttman, a fundraiser: ”In the old days, we pulled all the window shades down on hot days and grandma kept a wet hanky around her neck. People ran cold water over their wrists to help cool off. Maybe you had a noisy little electric fan on the table, but you weren`t supposed to sit too close to it or you`d catch a cold. Only a few commercial places were air-conditioned. When we went out to dinner in the summertime, a restaurant just had to be air- conditioned, or we wouldn`t consider going there.”
Dr. Albert Schonberg, a dentist: ”In the hot, tiny offices where I first practiced, the patient always sat facing the window and his legs were just a couple of feet away from one of those early, primitive window unit coolers. If I aimed the cold air low, the patient`s feet froze. If I aimed it high, it just went over his head.”
Lynn Abbie, a writer, teacher and preservationist: ”When my sister and I were kids, we`d escape the heat by going to a double-feature matinee at the old Commodore Theater on Irving Park. Remember when only movie houses were air-conditioned, and they`d have all those signs in front with icicles and igloos and Eskimos and the words, `It`s Cool Inside`? That was in the 1930s, and all the kids at the matinee belonged to the first Mickey Mouse Club.”
Mac Austin, a printing executive: ”I used to regard those first residential cooling units as fireplaces in reverse. If you got too close, you were chilled to death. If you got too far away, you roasted. But today`s sophisticated equipment is a dream if you`re in the printing business. At our shop, we maintain five different levels of temperature and humidity.”
Livingston Fairbank Jr., an attorney: ”Back in 1949 I was a law student in Charlottesville, Va., and I tell you it was blisteringly hot down there. I remember the joy of going downtown to an air-conditioned movie house and sitting through the same show twice just to cool off–then staggering back out into the 90-degree weather again. In later years, the first home air conditioning seemed like an exquisite luxury.”
George Machay, a contractor: ”We were living in a little three-room place in 1961, and boy, was that a hot summer. I finally put a window unit in the living room where we had a hide-a-bed, but once you got out of range you were dying again.”
Ann Zarwell, a retired secretary: ”I`m old enough to remember when nobody had ice cubes and everybody slept out on the porch when it was hot, if they were lucky enough to have one. I`m also old enough to remember when there was only one brand of deodorant on the market, and I`m not sure what you did if you didn`t like it. But that wasn`t so awful, was it?”
