BackStory; Climate Control: A History of Heating and Cooling

This is Backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. In the 1930s, movie theaters were one of the only places you could get some relief from the summer heat. But back then, air conditioning meant a lot more than just cooling. They began to try to reproduce those other nice things about the natural climate. And some of the early systems came with perfume systems. And if you looked up at the ceiling, they would have little lights that mimic stars. Not all theaters could afford to create their own climate. Here's what climate control looked like in Brooklyn. They had a roof that could be opened up. And as soon as we got dark, I'll go up there and sort of push it. They probably had a good ball bearing on it. Today on Backstory, the lengths to which we've gone to take refuge from the heat and hide out from the cold. The history of indoor comfort in America. But first, some history in the making. Hello Backstory podcasters. I'm Tony Field, senior producer of the show.

I'm here to remind you that if you like what you hear on today's show, you can help the uninitiated find out about Backstory by leaving a positive review on our page in the iTunes store. You should also know that we're now offering individual segments of our show as downloadable MP3s on our website. You'll find those at BackstoryRadio.org. You can find all past episodes of our new weekly show there. And if you're so inspired, there's also a link to send us a financial contribution to help us cover our production costs. Backstory Radio is where you'll find us on Facebook and on Twitter. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Today's episode of Backstory was first broadcast in 2010. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory with the American History Guide. Welcome to the show. I'm Ed Ayers, the 19th century guy. I'm Peter Onof, 18th century guy. And I'm Brian

Ballot, 20th century guy. In these dog days of summer with a thermostat scratching three digits, it can be hard to imagine what it is to be cold. But for the first part of our show today, we're going to ask you to do just that. Imagine if you can, the dead of winter. Are you there? Oh, yeah. I'm not going to hear the wind blowing my teeth or chattering. Okay. Now that you guys are in the right frame of mind, I want to introduce you to a guy named Dan Fylin. About three years ago, Dan bought a house right outside of Portland, Maine. Good neighborhood, plenty of space. There was only one real issue with the house. It came without a furnace. I think that's why we got a good deal on it, where the only people really interested in it, I think. Now, you have pictures of your house up on your blog and it looks, I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but it looks like a completely regular, normal suburban house. Yeah, I think the neighbors don't suspect anything based on the outside appearance of our house. So they're not suspicious that you're constantly lingering a little longer

than you should around their radiators? Well, our friends, of course, know what we're up to, but the neighbors across the street have asked. What they're up to is this. Dan and his girlfriend, Jordan, have renounced central heating. Back in 2008, when oil prices were going through the roof, Dan started worrying that his fellow mainers might actually start leaving the state and leaving for good. And he wanted to reassure people that it was all going to be okay, that we could all make do if we had to with just a little less heat. After all, people had lived without furnaces before, right? On each episode of backstory, we pick a topic from the present world and spend an hour exploring its historical context. Today our topic is climate control, the history of artificial heating and cooling in America. What was life like before the age of the thermostat? What did it mean to be comfortable in early America and when did our modern expectations of comfort take shape? A little later on, we'll hear from a historian who studies the early days of wood stoves and another

who writes about the advent of air conditioning a century later. But first, we're going to hand things back to our 20th century guy, Brian, and his thick skin friend in Maine. Now, this is a situation that will be the first to tell you is far from unique. I mean, plenty of Americans heat their homes using only wood. And yes, the cold house does have a wood stove. But what really sets Dan and Jordan apart is they hardly ever used that wood stove. Then again, they do go to work every day and heated offices, actually overheated offices. I reached Dan one early February morning in his heated office, but I asked him to describe how life was going back at cold house. The house downstairs was about 50 when I woke up, the bedroom was about 44. 44? Yeah, for us, that's been warm. And when you walked into your office, what would you say the temperature was? Oh, my office was probably 72 or so. Oh, my goodness. Actually, ironically, my office was so warm last night I had to crack a window and I forgot to close it overnight. So that probably kept my

office from being in the 80s when I came in this morning. So Dan, what was it like when you stepped out from underneath the covers and 44 degrees? I don't notice that as being unusual anymore. I really don't. I don't run. I don't hurry to get more clothes on. There have been some moments of discomfort. Putting your hands on a cold aluminum laptop first thing in the morning is jarring. Jordan reports that the toilet seat is jarring. But I found that all of those experiences are more than balanced out by the real pleasure of going from a cold experience to a warm one and remembering, oh, yeah, if this seat is really something that we ought to appreciate. Typically, here in the winter indoors, you're literally isolated from the outdoors, from nature, and you don't have much sense. If you have a good modern furnace, you wouldn't know in the morning whether it's 15 below or in above. That's my objective in life, Dan. Is to not know what it's like outside. Right. Right. And I say, we live here

and we have a fascinating cyclical climate here. It's really kind of pleasant to my mind to have at least a bit more connection to that. It's nice to know a little bit more about what's happening and kind of experience it with your body. Well, Dan, what do you think about this whole notion of comfort in light of your experience? I mean, how has it changed your whole understanding of comfort? I think a question, I've learned two things. One is that people are marvelously adaptable, psychologically, and also maybe even physiologically. That's one thing. The second thing is not something I really considered at the start, but you need to be able to have some control over the temperature in your house, for example. If you feel like you could turn up if you absolutely needed it or you can move to a warmer room in your house, just that knowledge really gives you a lot more comfort. Right. Being cold and having no control over it and not knowing how long it will go on for is a miserable experience. And if out of financial necessity or a mother's sort of coercion, you don't have

to say in the matter that really changes how comfortable you are, given that the same temperature, I think. That's Dan Fylin, a psychiatrist in Portland, mate. I spoke to him in 2010. We'll link to his blog, Cold House Journal, from our own site, backstoryradio.org. I really can't stay. Better, it's cool outside. I've got to go there. That is cool out there. Well, I tell you, that gives a whole new midden to the phrase room temperature. Exactly. So Peter, what was the room temperature in, say, Colonial New England in the 17th and 18th centuries? Is he reconnecting with an old pattern or is this actually colder than it would have been back? Well, I'd say the front side of Dan is actually not connecting with Colonial experience, but the backside is. What I mean to say is that heat in Colonial houses would be in open hearths and would be very, very

local. I mean, so local that you'd get toasty in front and you'd be still chilly behind. I guess you could turn around. I mean, that wasn't until your century. And I think our modern idea of comfort is to have a more general homogenous universal condition, that is that we're warm all over. And so the technological challenge is how do you deliver heat in a general way so that you can move around a room, for instance, and not suffer these extreme variations going from place to place? And only one name comes to mind. Benjamin Franklin. Right. So tell us about the Franklin stove, Peter. Well, the Franklin stove was one of Franklin's great early life inventions. It was in 1742. Wow, that is. Yeah, while he was still working as a printer before he retired very early in life to become an effective public man. And the Franklin stove was one of several innovations at this period,

but it was notable for its efficient burning of wood. We still do variations on the Franklin stove today. And the basic idea, it's an anti open hearth fire system. It's slow burning. And the heat is rededing out from the stove itself. His most heat in an open hearth will go up the chimney and gone. And that's what this marvelous invention of the stove is doing. It's it's it's it's continuating both the air intake and the air outtake, right? Yeah, exactly right. And that's the secret of comfort because with that modulation and you can regulate the speed of burning or how quickly the coal or the wood is burning, then you can regulate the temperature and it will be more or less even at least compared to that old idea of front and back than a regular wood fire. Well, I feel so patriotically proud that such a wonderful device has the name of one of our founding fathers on it. And I don't doubt

that the Franklin stove was important, but I have to share something with you that you might not like that much, Peter. It's from a conversation I had with a guy named Hal Harris. He's a historian at Durham University in England. And he writes about the early days of cast iron stoves. And Tony, can you cue that tape? The Franklin stove was a failure. It was a failure commercially. It didn't sell. It didn't even work terribly well unless you abandon Franklin to work it. Peter, are you are you okay with that? Well, I'm having some trouble. Yeah, this is upsetting to me. I mean, I actually like Franklin. He's maybe one of my favorite founding fathers, but he didn't invent everything. I recognize that actually was Thomas Jefferson invented everything. There's wonder if there's any more American history. Now they pretty much invented it all. Well, hang in there, Peter, because, frankly, it gets worse. Hal Harris told me that the idea of building a fire inside a metal box to maximize fuel efficiency had been around a long time before Benjamin Franklin designed these stoves in the 1740s. So the Germans had been doing it for decades. And a lot of them

actually brought stoves with them when they started settling in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the 18th century. So this Franklin stove, it wasn't even Franklin's idea in the first place. No, Benjamin Franklin observed the stoves that European settlers had brought with them. There were a few in Boston when he was a kid. And there were a lot more in Philadelphia and surrounding regions by the time that he was an adult pursuing his career there. He made very, very few design changes of his own. And they were mostly a really bad idea. I'm so glad that the 18th century guy is not here to hear this. As the 19th century guy, I have no stake in this. So please continue. Well, what happened, I mean, even with the Franklin stove is that people took a device that didn't work terribly well and they improved it. They simplified it. They stripped out the features of it that Benjamin Franklin had been proudest of and they turned it into some things that actually worked. And they gave it his name because, of course, by the 1780s, he was a national hero. So the Franklin stoves are not the stoves that were invented

by Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s. They're the stoves that carry Benjamin Franklin's brand name. But he was not the beneficiary of the brand name. No, the people were exploiting it for their benefit. Yeah. And he wasn't worried about that at all. He didn't try to make too much money on it, which is just as well because he wouldn't have. Anyway, so the Franklin stove in its simplified forms turns into something that takes this new technology into more houses. And then what we'll call the kind of the German stove, that gets improved too. Made lighter, made more durable, made more elegant, made more functional, made cheaper, and put all of those things together and you have the basis of a product that can build its own market by 1860. One million stoves are sold in a year and by 1870 it's more than two million in a year. So you're talking about durable appliances that have been sold one into every

four or five American households, raising the internal temperature in winter, first of all into the 60s and eventually into the low 70s. It's something that we'd recognize as comfortable today. Wow. And that's a revolution in people's experience of comfort. That's how Harris, a historian in Durham, England, will hear more from him in a few minutes. And first, we're going to take a quick break. So get up, make quite every adjustment you need to your thermostat. Or better yet, cruise on over to backstoryready.org to see what others are saying about today's topic. We'll be back in a minute with more about the history of heating and cooling in America. This is backstory, the show that takes a topic from the here and now and explores its

historical context. I'm the 18th century guy, Peter Runoff. I'm the 19th century guy, it airs. And I'm your 20th century guy, Brian Ballot. We're talking today about how Americans have warmed themselves up when it's cold and cooled themselves down when it's warm and about all the influence that this has had on people's lives. As we do with each of our shows, we've been inviting your comments on the topic on backstoryready.org. Our producers have invited a few of the folks who left comments there to join us on the phone. First up today, we have Diana in Hillsboro, Oregon. Diana, welcome to backstory.

Thank you very much. And we're talking about climate control today. And what's on your mind? What's on my mind is what amount of labor was devoted to heating indoor spaces before technology made things easier? And what did Americans do with all that free time? Well, when they didn't have to heat spaces, spend a lot of energy, so to speak, heating spaces. They created democracy, didn't they? I think they called radio shows. You get it all wrapped up there from the beginning. Yeah. What happened to the heating of homes when it became easier essentially? Yeah. It used to be really hard. It used to be so hard that you'd have to get your animals to join you for a cozy evening in the house. I'm joking. That Americans always kept their animals outside, but they did burn a lot of wood and crowd around the fire. And cutting wood was a task and a half.

I mean, large parts of New England were actually denuded. Oh, yeah, absolutely. By around 1800, you had to go maybe a hundred miles to get any real forest. Yeah, and Peter or Ed, I mean, how did this work? Did families cut their own firewood with their folks who did this and sold it early on in the 19th century? Well, you would have all those, but every farm would have a wood lot, right? A wood lot, right? And it's kind of like, you know, a fallow field and things like that. There would be part of the farm, a large part of it that would be set aside as a place where you would go and harvest lumber to heat your house with. So that got harder and harder to do, you know, the real secret, you know, thinks it got so cozy in these new ways and homes as they reproduced too much. And then there were too many kids. And then they all had to have their farms. Many of them moved out west and there's tremendous mobility. And energy sources has a lot to do with the movement of settlements. It sits to get to new sources of energy as well as looking for electrical

sockets. Well, you could, that's a kind of a metaphor from your century. So guys, is it too simplistic to say? I'm sure it is, Brian. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'll say it anyway. It goes with that thing. When people started purchasing coal, is it fair to say that they started working in factories or spending more time growing things to pay for the coal rather than going out and chopping the wood? You know, it's the second part of the question. Did people start working? What do they do? You know, it depends on what their resources are. And whether they can afford the fuel, if you could operate effectively the market because you had a source of income, then you're increasingly comfortable. And yes, you have more leisure. You can do more things. And that's what Diana was getting at. It's the origins of the middle class. I'd like to add another dimension. It changed the social structure, which was having servants in the home because we didn't need them. And they then went out to work for the energy

companies. So now it's isolated the middle class to just the family and no longer having servants in the home. Just the way the middle class wanted. The middle class wants to be isolated because new standards of intimacy and a family return to now, it's just the nuclear families, the real family and borders and things like that are just kind of in the way. You don't really want servants to be on a certain point. I think that's one of the things I run clear that I salute slavery in the American South is that when servants decline in the north, the idea of living with people all the time just seems especially wrong. Well then we get so isolated that then we develop psychoses, well at least neuroses, and we need therapy because we're born to death. And so I think that's all of American history and a nutshell right there from the wood light to the psychiatrist couch. That's right. It's been great talking to you today. Thank you. Bye bye. If you're just tuning in, this is backstory. And we're talking about the history of

Heady Conculling. Earlier in the show, we played a bit from my interview with Howe Harris, a historian of technology in England. He was describing what he calls the stove revolution of the mid 19th century when huge numbers of Americans left behind the open hearts of their childhoods and started hitting their homes with cast iron stoves instead. We're going to return to that interview now. I asked Harris to give me a sense of what winter was like in the north before the stove revolution really caught fire. Doing the dry end of the dishes, the moment that you turn around from the fire, the towel goes frozen hard in your hands and your bed will be cold and damp everywhere will be cold and damp. You'll just get used to the fact that through the winter you'll have no comfort at all. So that's the before. Here's the after. The after begins for different people in different places and at different times. But by the 1840s, Americans begin to refer to the states as the land of stoves. And as far as they're concerned, it sort of distinguishes their country from the European

countries that they go to visit. Americans have comfort, not a people don't. So what did it mean to live in a comfortable home then? Did they build their houses differently because they expected to have stoves? They came to. Yeah. In the beginning, the change that having a stove would make. Let's say that you install one in your kitchen. The change that will make will be that your fuel consumption will drop by perhaps as much as two thirds. Wow. And you'll get more comfort for that. The whole room will be warm, not just a few feet around the fire. And of course, when people can keep warm like that, then they begin to alter the ways that they live in the houses. If they're wealthy enough, they'll buy perhaps a parlor stove too. Or they'll put a stove in the drafty hallway. And all of a sudden, then the warm will go upstairs. And the bedrooms won't be freezing either. And what that will mean will be that, for example,

people can live in more than one room of a house in winter. Different members of the family can get away from one another. Always a good thing. It is a good thing. I mean, it is a good thing to at least have the choice. And it means that you can do things in winter indoors that are inactive. You find, for example, that clergyman and university teachers are really enthusiastic about stoves by the 1820s. Because in both cases, you're talking about men who spend a lot of the time even in winter, sitting down, reading, writing, sermons, etc. Not things to keep you naturally, terribly, terribly warm. So if you can have a warm study, then the quality of your life is just transformed. So this is such an obviously good and natural thing. Surely no one had anything negative to say about it, did they? They absolutely did. British visitors, when they go into Canada in the 1790s and go into the East Coast towns and cities from the early 19th century,

they complained bitterly about how comfortable it was, how warm it was indoors, how few drafts they were. And they would absolutely certain it was really bad for people's health. But the fact is that quite a few Americans thought the same thing. And part of it is just nostalgia. Early 19th century America is a society experience in very very rapid change. And people can see the familiar forms of life disappearing around them. And they are quite attached to the open fire, to the image of the family clustered around the fire. They just don't get quite the same emotional satisfaction out of looking at a black iron box. So by the 1840s, you have really significant cultural commentators. There's a man called Andrew Jackson Downing. Who invented sort of the American style of home? Absolutely. He invented the American style of

home. It's kind of ironic because quite a lot of the houses that he designed were actually habital because of stove of furnace heating. You know, with larger rooms opening into one another more air inside the house. But he himself was deeply suspicious of the stove. He called stove heated air the favorite poison of America. Thoreau was very suspicious of stoves too. Emerson was suspicious of stoves. You find loads and loads of new England worthies. Who were actually by that time there a generation beyond the introduction of stoves into New England. And they're looking towards a better past and the open fire is the symbol of the better past. So nostalgia takes only 25 years to create? It's quicker than that. In Massachusetts, they're nostalgic for the good old days by the 1820s. That's how Harris, a history professor at Durham University in England, he's created a digital archive of images of the 19th century stoves he was talking about.

We'll link to it from our own site, backstoryredio.org. Well, the point I took from that interview it was that we're just going to be nostalgic regardless. I mean, that's sort of genetically hardwired. That kind of nostalgic, earlier part of the show. But what's interesting here is the tension between comfort and family values. Because when we had comfortable accommodations and rooms of our own, that is Virginia Wolf could go off to the room. Then we didn't have that kind of enforced togetherness that we get nostalgic for. If the only place you can avoid freezing is huddled around an open fire, then you can make believe it's not freezing. And you can say, oh, wasn't it wonderful in those days when we were all huddled around the fire keeping our front sides warm and our back sides cold. And when when comfort comes along, we disperse. So we're getting

nostalgic for conditions of necessity in which we had no choice. And in a way, that's the sort of downside of choice. In some ways, we're nostalgic for not having choices. And that's what family values really are all about. So in many ways, America becomes the land of comfort, partly because I guess there's so many darn trees here we can afford to. And that really was the source of fuel all the way through the 18th century. I think it's the availability of fuel supply. But I also think it's because it was seen very early on. And I say it's coming out of the revolutionary enlightenment period as a kind of cultural entitlement. Comfort is something to which you can aspire. It takes an aspirational society to make something like comfort so important as a social phenomena. Speaking about the revolution in the alignment, it's not comfort in the sense of being carried about on, you know, feathered pillows, right? No, no, that's a great point.

What you're describing is a distinction between aristocratic comfort and what you can command the labor of others. And at great expense and the great expense of other people's labor, you can achieve a kind of condition that other people can only serve they can't aspire to. One of the aspects of American comfort that's so important is that it's within your power to make yourself comfortable, but your control over the climate in your room, over the way it's lit, over the way it's furnished. So this is the home depot of comfort. I mean, we're doing it ourselves. We're doing it ourselves. I think it's very democratic. I can't help but notice a strong regionalist bias, all that we're talking about, which is the whole idea is getting warm. And there's large parts of the country where getting warm is not really a problem, is getting cool. And then we do see that southerners in their architecture certainly try to do what they can to give their comfort. What they don't have is any technological means. Stove simply isn't worth as much in the south,

right? So I think what you see is the south both holds on to this older version of servant-based comfort partly because of slavery and partly because of being a more rural environment. But what it does mean though is that in the 19th century when northerners are looking for indexes of southern backwardness, it's the absence of plumbing, running water, electricity, all those kinds of things, it actually becomes seen as the very embodiment of what a backward place looks like. They're not even comfortable. Yeah, well guys, we've talked about discomfort in the north and discomfort in the south. The next story we're going to turn to really combines a tooth. In 1805, a 23-year-old in Boston came up with a business scheme that sounded completely nuts on the face of it. His name was Frederick Tudor and his plan was to cut large blocks of ice from nearby ponds, okay so far, that's what they did, but Tudor wanted to

ship them to the Caribbean. Boston newspapers had a field day with the idea, but Tudor had the last left. He somehow succeeded in making it with his ice to Martinique and selling what remained in the form of, you got it, ice cream. He would go on to export New England ice all over the world. Backstory producer Catherine Moore has the story of the man who eventually became known as the ice king. Small successes aside, there were problems. Besides ice's stubborn tendency to, you know, melt over time, the truth was that even here in the United States, no one really knew what to do with this stuff. In those days, the gold standard for drink temperature hovered somewhere between tepid and milk warm. Ice drinks would have struck in bivers as strange, even unhealthy. But Tudor maintained that once a man, even a skeptic, drink from the cool cup of the ice king,

he would never be satisfied with lukewarm dregs again. He even tried a little experiment at a Charleston, South Carolina boarding house. Sideling up to the communal table, he presented a four-gallon jar of ice water. This was the subject of ridicule to the household. Every one of the borders, declared that they would not touch the water and endanger their health. I found that the high resolution and firm determination was soon overcome without any persuasion of mine. That after time, every man drank the water, no other, and that four gallons was not enough. Like Americans discovering the cappuccino, they just didn't know what they had been missing. Once they found out, though, there was no going back, they were hooked, and Tudor happily played the part of the drug pusher. At first, he donated ice to barkeeper so they could charge the same price for warm and cool drinks. A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again. When we have persuaded 100 persons by means of

our same price plan, these 100 will soon carry with them 100 more, and that ratio will compound faster than we can calculate. Tudor knew from the outset that the pleasures of his ice were habit forming, but ultimately his success would depend on the perception of ice as a necessity, not a luxury. So even while he shivered in debtors' prison, even while his journal entries reign with increasing despair, even while he manically hacked off chunks of an iceberg to stock his Caribbean ice houses during a warm New England winter, he kept his prices low, low enough that even the masses could partake on a daily basis. And where luxury, necessity, and availability meet, comfort is born. By 1857, Tudor was a millionaire. Americans were clinking chilled glasses in celebration of his queer genius, and the ice box had taken its place among the necessities of comfort in American homes. Nearly 150,000 tons of ice were shipped that year from Boston

to markets as far away as India. Staring out from his cabin on Walden pond, one of the sights of Tudor's ice harvesting operations, Henry David Thoreau marveled that the water he observed might someday be mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. In his twilight years, Tudor opened up an amusement park at his country estate, which featured, along with ice cream, of course, a cool natural spring. He called it meolas, saloam spelled backwards because it reminded him of the biblical pool where Jesus cured a man of blindness. By the time he died in 1864, Tudor had cured Americans of their blindness, to the thing they didn't know they had needed all along, the cold comfort of ice. That's backstory producer Katherine Moore. It's time for another break. When we get back, we'll move on to the technology that made my childhood

in Miami at least somewhat bearable. That's right, air conditioning. More backstory coming up in a minute. This is backstory, the show that turns to the past to understand the world around us today.

I'm Peter Ono, historian of 18th century America. I'm Ed Ayers, historian of 19th century America, and I'm Brian Ballot, historian of the 20th century. Today on the show, we're taking on the history of climate change, but not the kind of global climate change that we're used to hearing about today. No, we're talking about how people have gone about changing their own immediate climates, be it heating, air conditioning, or as we just heard a minute ago, sending huge blocks of ice thousands of miles. We're going to go back to the phones now. Next up on the line we have Travis, calling from Fountain Valley, California. Travis, welcome to the show. Thank you. We're talking about climate control. Crank up our thermostat. Well, you guys should probably know then what I do for a living is that I am a mechanical engineer

who designed air conditioning. Oh, right. We have been waiting for you. Travis, do you make house calls? Because it's incredibly hot here in the studio. Well, what I like to tell my wife is that I can't actually turn any nuts and bolts, but I can draw you a really lovely picture. We have a lot to come with historians. We don't actually make things happen. We can talk about it right now. We'll give us a picture of what's on your mind. Well, I had a story that a client of mine told me years ago, and I thought maybe you guys could confirm or deny or or flush out the story a little bit for me. What he was talking about was he called him the alphabet buildings. And this is a client of mine. So he was an architect. And he said that if you were to fly over a major metropolitan area in the US and in some year prior to, and I don't know what year that is, that what you would see from above is a whole bunch of buildings shaped like elves and us and the o's and the ages and teas that he would call the alphabet buildings.

And the rationale there was that prior to commercial air conditioning, most buildings could only be 40 to 50 foot wide so that everyone could be within 25 foot of a operable window that they'd have access to some outside air and not get stuffy and not get overly hot. So you're questioning the validity of that? So I'm questioning the validity of the story. And then I'm also wondering what that year is, whether it's sometime in the 20s or sometime in the 30s. Really glad you asked that question because Brian is sitting here. He can't wait to try to answer it. You have to come up with a specific year. Okay. I think the Metropolitan Museum in New York was 1905, 1906 that it was air condition. The very wealthy in New York began to get air conditioning in the first decade, second decade of the 20th century. And it is true that the skyscraper, sooner rather than

later, so we're talking about the 20s and the 30s, becomes air conditioned. What that had to do with the shape of the building Travis, I'm going to ask at that. Because these buildings were generally built in the 19th century, the second half of the 19th century. And if you think of the classic example of the building of the sort you're talking about, it's the tenement. And the shape of those was dumbbell. Yeah. Okay. And it was exactly for what your friends said, which it was a way to have a shaft, a space in the middle of the building. You could put as many people as possible in there. What you're looking for is many exposed surfaces as possible. So there can be as many windows as possible. So you can put as many families as possible per square foot. And until you have air conditioning, that's all you can do. And so I think that's why these buildings fit in that niche between large scale urban housing for largely immigrant families. But before you start having the possibility of air conditioning those spaces. So I'm guessing it's the period between 1870,

1930. Yeah. It would be the window I would think. Yeah. I agree with that. And Travis, what kind of systems do you work on? Personal ones, individual ones, large systems? We're generally in the larger commercial range. And the reason that the idea is so interesting to me is that I rarely work on a building whose floor plate is less than say 60 foot on one side and 70, 80 foot on the other side. And so the idea that at some point that was just not possible until the advent of large scale commercialization and availability of commercial air conditioning is just interesting to me. Yeah. Thanks for calling. Thank you, Travis. Okay. Appreciate it guys. So Brian, you mentioned skyscrapers and department stores as a couple of the first places where people would have experienced air conditioning back in the first few decades of the 20th century.

But that's not where air conditioning really started, wasn't it? That's right, Ed. The first time that air conditioning was actually used was in factories. And it was used for lots of different products that could not be mass manufactured if the temperature of those products continued to change. So in the case of magazines, for instance, the ink would run, they used it for text styles so that the actual thread itself wouldn't contract or expand depending on the amount of humidity in the air. So what you're saying is that most people would have experienced air conditioning in the factories where they work? Well, it wasn't really intended for the workers comfort when, you know, when you put it that way, it sounds we think today, you know, oh yeah, right. Workers need to be comfortable except this had nothing to do with the comfort of the workers working in those factories. It was all about consistency in a society that was incredibly driven by mass production. Well, I'd like to think that some of those workers were a little bit more comfortable

anyway. That wasn't the purpose, right? Yeah. And when it comes to actually experiencing directly what we associate air conditioning with cooling, probably most people would have had the kind of experience that Sydney cats had. Now loyal listeners to backstory will remember Sydney as the grandfather of our senior producer, Tony Field. Sydney was born in New York City back in 1917. I asked him where he first experienced air conditioning. The first one was in a movie theater like a timeout theater. Uh huh. Well, that's great. Are you coming in there? You came into another world. It's cool and dry. So did it make you feel? I mean, we talk about the movies as being a great escape in the 30s. Did that cool air add to that sense of unreality and escape for that hour and a half? Oh, I guess it did. Yes. Movie theaters were very early adopters. There was a sense that the movie theater was to give you a

sense of luxury and the perfect climate was part of that. That scale Cooper, a historian at Lehigh University, who's perhaps the foremost academic authority on the history of air conditioning. She told me that in those heavy early days of artificial cooling, it wasn't about replacing the experience of being outdoors. It was about perfecting it. The engineers who designed those new fangled theater systems actually referred to them as man-made weather. Not only did they control temperature and humidity, but they began to try to reproduce those other nice things about the natural climate. And some of the early systems came with perfume systems. Really? I've always wondered about perfumes. So when was this that there was perfume systems? As early as 1970. Wow. Some of them came with different kind of lamps to mimic the natural wave length of light outside. They came with fans that reproduced natural breezes. And if you looked up at the ceiling,

they would have little lights that mimic stars. And in that sense, air conditioning was just part of that, moving the best of nature indoors. Now, you've got to keep in mind this man-made weather stuff, Gail Cooper's describing, well, it applies to the high end of movie houses. But back in Brooklyn, where Sydney cats grew up, things were a little more, let's just say, primitive. And he should know. When he was a teenager in the 1930s, he worked as an usher in three different neighborhood theaters. The first one was called with fans. Big, noisy, mechanical fans. These theaters were built in a relatively sound movie. So any aberrant noise was really of no significance. That was the first theater, he worked in. The second one had something a little closer to that whole man-made weather thing Gail Cooper was talking about, just without the man-made part. They had a roof that could be opened up. You're kidding. Kind of like that new stadium in Dallas.

I was in a show there, and as soon as we got dark, I'll go up there and sort of like I could push it, they probably had some good ball bearings on it. So it was easy to open this up. We were right next to the elevator train. You didn't have to close at each time you saw a train coming, did you? No, no. I guess people just adjusted to that. Now Sydney never got a job in one of those fancy air-conditioned theaters uptown, but the third one he worked in was air-cooled. That's how the theater described it, on a big banner hanging under the marquee outside. And they had one of these large, horizontal, secular fans up on the roof. And this sort of turned around, and under it was a large kettle, that kettle, but a large body of water. So this cooled it somewhat, not great,

but it was cooler than the outside. Did your theaters charge a little less than those offline theaters? Oh, yes. No fact. We charged, hold up. Ten cents up until six o'clock, and fifty cents after that. On Broadway, you paid a quarter. It probably would be fair to say that Sydney thought of each of his three movie theater jobs as a little better than the one before. And that's because each one was a little cooler than the one before on those hottest Brooklyn summer evenings. But in the early days of air-conditioning, not everybody agreed that it was such a great thing. And it was no small task for the air-conditioning industry to win their skeptics over. Fortunately, they had science in their corner. Here's historian Gail Cooper again. In 1922, research engineers published what they called the comfort chart, which was a chart of temperature and humidity levels at which most people were comfortable.

As I recall, at some point, these engineers actually waged war on the term fresh air, because to suggest that air was fresh outside by implication meant that it was not fresh inside. A house that didn't have fresh air might be subject to tuberculosis. It was a different time, and people worried about health. They thought of the inside as sometimes being unhealthy. So you had open-air schools that did not heat or close the windows. They often had classes outside year round. There were even open-air schools in Chicago, and they issued each student a fur-lined sleeping bag. So they could sit in their desk all bundled up. But engineers pointed out that in the urban environment, air that comes in off the streets is not necessarily healthy or clean. They thought, in fact, their machinery could restore to air its natural purity, and that it was

better than fresh air. Now, I would call my first air conditioner in Miami being this window unit that made a lot of noise. In fact, it was only one in our house. It was my parents' bedroom, and on really hot nights, we'd be allowed to step a little later and just watch TV. In fact, it seems like air conditioning TV went hand-in-hand after World War II. They certainly did. And it hummed along and it dripped. But we also turned it off. We would open the windows to sleep at night until I read your book. I didn't really even know why that was, but obviously my parents were of a generation who thought fresh air was better. Reading your book, I realized it was a battle between the engineers who wanted central air because it was efficient. Of course, they could control all the elements. Those old-fashioned people who wanted to be able to exercise individual control over their window units. So, who won? I mean, I look around. I go back to Miami

and everybody has central air conditioning. Everything is cold. I mean, have the window openers been defeated once and for all? Or are they coming back with a skyrocketing cost of energy? Well, in the post-war period, we built air conditioning into our office buildings and into our homes. We have an architecture that is dependent upon mechanical ventilation. And you can't turn off the air conditioning system because the windows don't open and all those big glass walls just absorb the heat. So, it's built right in and in that sense, it's probably here to stay. Gail Cooper is a history professor at Lehigh University. She's the author of Air Conditioning America, Engineers and the Control Environment. Thank you very much for joining us today, Gail. Thank you, Brian, for having me. Okay, I crank up the air conditioning because you're going to be

on the hot seat. I'm ready. It seems to me that one of the most dramatic changes in the south, I'd say the most dramatic change is the civil rights revolution. And I'd say that for the whole country, actually. But second, air conditioning made for a huge change because of the demographic impact it had on the south, not just the south, but sunbelt areas in general. You know, I think that's a really good point, Brian. And it's interesting how those two events of the civil rights movement and air conditioning sort of coincided to trigger the emergence of the American south as a okay international corporate headquarters. You know, and that civil rights removed the moral stigma that would have kept companies away. And air conditioning removed the humidity stigma that kept people away. And suddenly, what had been sort of the bane of the south

becomes, it's great bounty. So we go from being, God, Lee, who'd want to live down there to the sunbelt? Come down where it's always been perfect temperature. So the climate down there changed in more ways than one, right? The political climate, racial climate, and the climate climate. You know, I thought it was really interesting about this fresh air business. Yeah, right? Well, when I think of fresh air, Peter, I think all the way back to ye olden times of your period when people talked about my asthma and the quality of the air, or just a gentle atmosphere. The late modern equivalent of colonial asthma is a sick building. Yes. A sick building is a climate controlled building. And there is this problem is that then it becomes a closed system with pathogens. Oh, remember Legionnaires disease? How scary was that? Yeah. That we're actually inventing these things in the ducks that are going to really be deadly. It's like, yikes, if we can't have a condition in the air, then what can we control?

I'll tell you what we can control. We can control the end of this show. And we've reached it. But remember, the conversation continues online. Drop in at our website and let us know what you think of all of us. The address is backstoryradio.org. You can sign up for a podcast there, subscribe to our newsletter, and join us on Facebook and Twitter. Again, it's all at backstoryradio.org. Don't be a stranger. Today's episode of Backstory was produced by Tony Field and Catherine Moore. We had help from Alison Quants, Eric Verkirky, and Matthew Gibson, aka The Voice of the Ice King. Our production staff also includes Jess Angabretzen, Eric Menow, and Nell Beschenstein. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Frank Cyrillo is our intern, or rather, was our intern. Today, we bid a fond farewell to Frank with best wishes for his future career as an American

historian by day, Ninja by night. Backstory's executive producer is Andrew Windham. Major support for Backstory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, and Anonymous Donor, and the History Channel. History made every day. Peter Onif and Brian Ballot are professors in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Windham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.