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Before the air conditioner was invented, human beings were at a loss for how to cool themselves. Some of the ideas were arguably doomed from the start: In the 19th century, as Derek Thompson noted in a 2017 article, New England companies shipped huge ice cubes insulated with sawdust around the country. “There were even shortages during mild winters—‘ice famines,’” he wrote. The air conditioner was not only a brilliant innovation; it changed the course of human life. In the U.S., it allowed people to migrate to the Sun Belt, to Atlanta and Phoenix, altering the country’s demographics and politics. Globally, it allowed people in countries with excruciating heat to work more, leading to new sites of productivity and wealth. Today’s newsletter explores how the air conditioner has already shaped our world, and how it continues to change our lives for better and for worse. |
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On Air-Conditioning | | (Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.) | | | |
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| How does money-saver mode make sense? | |
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| | Congress's air-conditioning system, photographed in 1938 (Library of Congress) | | | |
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| A new book by the economist Tim Harford on history’s greatest breakthroughs explains why barbed wire was a revolution, paper money was an accident, and HVACs were a productivity booster. (From 2017) | |
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| | Willis Carrier, the engineer who coined the term “air-conditioning,” holds a thermometer inside a display that demonstrates air-conditioning at the New York World's Fair in 1939. (Bettmann / Getty) | | | |
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| Cooling the air was once seen as sinful. Maybe the idea wasn’t entirely wrong. An Object Lesson. | |
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