Air-conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) Book

In this groundbreaking study, Gail Cooper shows that, from the outset, air conditioning has been the focus of conflict and controversy--well predating today's concerns about fluorocarbons and global warming. While a technical elite of designers, inventors, and corporate pioneers articulated a comprehensive vision of the new technology, their ideas were challenged by workers, consumers, government regulators, business competitors, and rival professionals.

Beginning with two famous air-conditioning installations in 1904--the New York Stock exchange and the Sackett-Wilhelms Printing Company--Cooper describes the efforts of engineers to achieve artificial climate indoors. Such "man-made weather" helped transform the new motion picture theaters of the teens and twenties into sumptuous palaces of luxury and comfort. With a sign claiming "Twenty-degrees colder inside!" and icicles hanging from the marquee, theaters educated the public about comfort air conditioning and created a formidable set of expectations for the first residential systems to appear in the 1930s. Only when builders in the postwar era learned to redesign the suburban home around air conditioning did consumers get man-made weather at affordable prices. Until then Americans experimented with the ultimate consumer luxury, the window air conditioner, which followed them wherever they went.

Consumer acceptance of artificial indoor climate was hard won, however. Just as mechanical ventilation became complex enough to successfully imitate the natural climate, a group of physicians, teachers, principals, and parents known as the "open air crusaders," attempted to ban all mechanical ventilation from public schools in favor of the open window. Cooper chronicles how the lure of the open air was always air conditioning's biggest rival, from roof-top school rooms to open air theaters to the front porch. Americans were slow to give up the social rituals of hot weather living--the cold drink, the cool clothes, the summer vacation--for the comforts of either the window air conditioner or the central system.

Air-conditioning America is the story of how the grand vision of a new technology was shaped by the realities of the changing world of mass production, engineering professionalism, and consumer demand. It provides new insight into how engineers and technical expertise fit into these complex forces of modern life.