Life blows hot and cold, so it seemed oddly appropriate that a talk with a man who knew the man who invented air conditioning should take place the old-fashioned way, outside, on a steamy day in Skokie, sitting in a patch of shade, under the overhanging roof of a shed. The past, returned. Hot. Sticky. ”Yes, I knew `the Chief,` ” William Bodinus said, settling into a white plastic chair to talk about his longtime friend and employer, Willis Haviland Carrier, a young engineer who, in 1902, one year out of Cornell University, invented air conditioning and changed (or rather, dried) the face of America. A mechanical engineer, Bodinus, now 82, left Carrier when he was 65 and became board chairman at E.H. Gustafson & Co., a manufacturing company that supplies tubing and other specialties to the air conditioning industry. Six weeks ago, half his Skokie plant burned down, but that`s not enough-he`s rebuilding-to deter a man who once ran Carrier`s operations from Pittsburgh to Hawaii.
That`s a lot of cold air, bringing relief from blistering heat to a country where temperatures have soared beyond 100 degrees in every state, including Alaska, climbing to 134 in California, to 127 in Arizona and-on July 24, 1934, at 4 p.m., a time that lives in fiery infamy-to 105 degrees in Chicago, the hottest moment ever recorded in the city`s tumultuous 154-year history.
Four dozen people died that week from heat prostration, heat-related heart attacks and other solar-induced ills. Thousands slept on the beaches. Many fled to the Century of Progress exposition where, as Bodinus remembered, several restaurants, including the Heidelberg, and parts of the Streets of Paris midway boasted that newfangled invention: air conditioning. Others went to the movies, an art form that owed its mass popularity in part to an early decision by Hollywood moguls to air-cool their movie palaces. It was a smart, possibly industry-saving, move. ”Before air conditioning,” a writer in American Heritage magazine recently recalled, ”movie houses and concert halls would close down when it got too hot. In addition, productivity would fall dramatically.” Workers left early, if they came in at all, ”and in some places, like Washington, D.C., business would melt away altogether.”
In Chicago, old-timers remember, summer was a time when shades were pulled. Necks were draped with wet hankies. People huddled around noisy table fans. Or they camped out on screened-in porches, if they were lucky enough to have one. Or they fled, north to Wisconsin or east to the Indiana dunes.
The birth of cool
That was where Willis Carrier came in.
As Bodinus tells the tale, Willis Carrier devised air conditioning one year after he went to work in upstate New York for the Buffalo Forge Co., at $10 a week. His first major assignment was figuring out how to help a printing company in Brooklyn, which was having trouble with four-color printing of a humor magazine, Judge. Between runs in the summer, the paper shrank or expanded as the humidity changed. Colored inks, applied in layers, failed to register properly. Pictures printed fuzzy. The problem, Carrier found, was not the heat, but the humidity.
Carrier assembled a device that moved air over cooled pipes, sucking out moisture much as an iced drink collects dew on the outside of a glass. On July 17, 1902, he completed drawings for the world`s first scientific air conditioning system. As Carrier defined it, air conditioning had four functions: to control humidity, by increasing or decreasing moisture; to control temperature, by heating or cooling the air; to control air circulation and ventilation; and to cleanse the air, by washing or filtering.
Before long, Carrier`s invention was in use in Southern textile mills and tobacco plants, which also had humidity problems, and from there it conquered the modern world.
”I knew all nine founders of the Carrier Corp.,” said Bodinus, a graduate of Lane Technical School and the Lewis Institute, now part of Illinois Institute of Technology. He worked for Carrier for 45 years and until recently served as historian for the Illinois chapter of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers. Its 1,500 members gather once a month to talk shop at such restaurants as the Como Inn.
He was close to Willis Carrier. ”Quite a guy,” he said. ”Ordinary, in some ways. Brilliant engineer and mathematician. Could really handle calculus.”
Both woodsmen, the two spent many hours together hunting pheasants in the western suburbs of Chicago, at the McGraw Farms. Much of their talk was about a subject of mutual interest: air conditioning.
Cool comes to Chicago
”From 1915 to 1921, air conditioning was mostly for industrial purposes,” Bodinus said. ”Printing. Breakfast food plants, like Kellogg`s. Places that needed constant temperature and humidity. Theaters came in the early `20s. That was a big push. The Chicago, in 1922, was an early application.
”In the late `20s, restaurants started putting it in. Little Jack`s on West Madison. The Triangle, a Toffeneti restaurant. The Northern Trust was one of the first air conditioned buildings in the Loop, in the early `30s. The Field Building, built in 1932, was air conditioned, but only on the first five floors, because the lower floors of a building were harder to rent.
”Then, the department stores. Mandel`s was one of the first, in the mid-`30s. And the Fair Store. Marshall Field`s put it in in 1940. Their machinery was taken out during the war and sent south to a synthetic rubber plant.”
Those were days when office building windows, often decked out with awnings, could be opened and paperweights held down desk-top correspondence. Not all office workers cottoned to new machinery that required that windows be closed. ”Some had the idea it wasn`t good for your health,” Bodinus said.
”Others preferred to have a fan and blow air on themselves. It was hard to be comfortable in skyscrapers, which often had little cross-ventilation.”
That was particularly true inside the fortress on the north bank of the Chicago River, built in 1929 as a warehouse for Marshall Field & Co., a building that was later to become the world`s largest office building, the Merchandise Mart.
Ubiquitous cool
”In 1937, Field`s decided to convert the 7th floor into office spaces, to air condition the areas and provide good lighting, since most of the space was interior and had no windows,” Bodinus recalled. ”This was the beginning of the eventual air conditioning of the entire building,” an installation that, when completed in 1955, was the largest in the city, with a capacity to provide the cool air equivalent of 8,500 tons of ice melting every day.
”Window units for homes started to come in, I would say, about 1934,”
Bodinus went on. ”They were quite expensive, about $300, which would be about $3,000 today. By 1937, the prices came down. It was quite a business.”
It still is. So is air conditioning for hotels, hospitals, cars, truck cabs, farm vehicles, prisons, even nuclear submarines, which, without air conditioning, would be pretty smelly after six months undersea.
Just as electric light cut the division between day and night, some theorists suggest that air conditioning has contributed to establishing a uniform global environment, making the world suitable the year round for business and industry, whether conducted in the oppressive heat of Bahrain or the mild discomfort of Milwaukee. Clearly, air conditioning has changed how we live. But how? And at what cost?
”For one thing, air conditioning induces us to narrow our summer world, to draw up routes for ourselves from one cool island to another,” notes Bernard Beck, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University. ”We have changed the rhythms of our universe quite quickly,” he adds, though air conditioning has not been around long enough to measure long-term effects, such as increased anxiety from disturbed biological patterns or ills caused by repeatedly plunging from bone-chilling buildings into desert heat, as happens in such Sun Belt cities as Phoenix.
Critics of cool
Not everyone thinks that air conditioning is such a great thing.
Henry Miller, the celebrated expatriate author, drove cross country in 1940. He wrote ”The Air Conditioned Nightmare,” a metaphor for everything he found alienating in America.
”When you get everything air conditioned, it shuts people off from the outside environment,” suggests Houston-based historian David McComb, seeking to explain a soaring murder rate in a city where air conditioners are used 10 months a year. ”Houstonians are a little out of touch with their fellow men. It`s easier for them to be hostile.”
Although no one knows exactly what the fallout will be, scientists are worried about damage to the earth`s ozone layer caused by rising fluorocarbons from certain types of refrigerants now being phased out.
Nor does everyone approve of the idea of the New South, a section shaped by air conditioning, whose old values, traditions and customs, many now lost, were shaped by several centuries of languid summers and oppressive humidity.
Historians argue that the New South and its western cousin, the Sun Belt, have risen to prosperity on the cool strength of a Northern invention. Others ask if a Tennessee Williams, looking for the odd and perverse in a climate-estranged society, would write ”Cat on a Chilled Tin Roof”?
”We take air conditioning for granted. We don`t think about it very much,” notes James Alter, a longtime supplier and consultant to the industry who now writes technical commentary for Air Conditioning News.
Alter remembers what Chicago summers used to be like. ”We cooled off with fans, or cold drinks, or went to the beach.” There were more open windows, more dust covers for furniture and, with less privacy, fewer loud family arguments. These days, he notes, air conditioning allows for sealed buildings and cars without window vents, both cheaper to build.
Strangely, people often need a hot blast to remind them of the benefits of cooling their homes. In his business, Alter says, sales staffs pray for oppressive heat in May or early June. ”You can have the hottest Labor Day in the world,” he says, ”and people aren`t going to buy air conditioning.”
These days, it is hard to escape the cool. Although older people speak of summer, and the joy of heat, with the same selective nostalgia they wrap around trains and ocean liners, air conditioning has become, in the words of one architectural historian, ”glorious, miraculous, ubiquitous.”
”I remember working on the Ogden Armour mansion in Lake Forest in the 1930s,” William Bodinus said, rising from his chair in the shade.
”Expensive. Had to build the system up piece by piece. Needed a custodian to run the thing.” He also remembered his last job. ”Sears Tower, in the 1970s. Three 5,000-horsepower refrigerating machines, at two levels. Water pressure gets too high in lines over 400 feet. We were air conditioning up to 1,500 feet.”
Clearly, a big chill.
