ED: 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 was it?
BRIAN: 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 textiles so that the actual thread itself wouldn't contract or expand depending on the amount of humidity in the air.
ED: So what you're say is that most people would have experienced air conditioning in the factories where they worked?
BRIAN: No, it wasn't really intended for the workers comfort. You know when you put it that way, it sounds, we think today, "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.
ED: Well, I'd like to think that some of those workers were a little bit more comfortable anyway, even if that wasn't the purpose.
BRIAN: Yeah, and Ed 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 Sidney Katz had. Now loyal listeners to BackStory will remember Sidney as the grandfather of our senior producer, Tony Field. Sidney was born in the New York City back in 1917, I asked him where he first experienced air conditioning.
SIDNEY KATZ: The first one was in the movie theater like the Paramount Theater, or Broadway, and you came in there, you came into another world. It was cold and dry.
BRIAN: So did it make you feel, I know 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?
SIDNEY KATZ: I guess it did, yes.
GAIL COOPER: 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.
BRIAN: That's Gail Cooper, a historian at Lehigh University, who's perhaps the foremost academic authority on air conditioning. She told me that in those heady 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 newfangled theater systems actually referred to them as man-made weather.
GAIL COOPER: 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.
BRIAN: Really, I've always wondered about perfume, so when was this that there was perfume systems?
GAIL COOPER: As early as 1917.
BRIAN: Wow.
GAIL COOPER: Some of them came with different kind of lamps to mimic the natural wavelength 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 mimicked stars. And in that sense, air conditioning was just part of that. Moving the best of nature indoors.
BRIAN: Now, you've got to keep in mind this man made weather stuff Gale Cooper's describing, well it applies to the high end of movie houses. But back in Brooklyn where Sidney Katz 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 cooled with fans; big, noisy, mechanical fans.
SIDNEY KATZ: These theaters were built that had basically silent movies. So any other noise was really of no significance.
BRIAN: 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.
SIDNEY KATZ: They had a roof that could be opened up.
BRIAN: You're kidding.
SIDNEY KATZ: No, I'm not kidding.
BRIAN: Kind of like that new stadium in Dallas.
SIDNEY KATZ: I was an usher there and as soon as it got dark, I would go up there, and I would sort of just push it, it probably had a lot of good ball bearings on it, so it was easy for me to open this up. We were right next to an elevated train, so any time the elevated train goes by, you would hear the noise in the theater. But apparently people didn't mind it.
BRIAN: You didn't have to close it each time you saw a train coming did you?
SIDNEY KATZ: No, I guess people just adjusted to that.
BRIAN: Now Sidney never got a job in one of those fancy air conditioned theaters up town, 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.
SIDNEY KATZ: They had one of these large horizontal circular fans up on the roof and this would turn around and under it was a large kettle, not kettle, but a large body of water. So this cooled it somewhat, not great, but it was cooler than the outside.
BRIAN: Did your theaters charge a little less-
SIDNEY KATZ: Oh yes.
BRIAN: Than those front line theaters?
SIDNEY KATZ: Oh yes. We charged, hold on to your hat, 10 cents up until 6:00 and 15 cents after that. On Broadway you made a quarter!
BRIAN: It probably would be fair to say that Sidney thought of each of his three movie theater jobs 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.
GAIL COOPER: 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.
BRIAN: As I recall, at some point these engineers actually wage war on the term fresh air because to suggest that air was fresh outside by implication meant that it was not fresh inside.
GAIL COOPER: 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.
BRIAN: Now, I recall my first air conditioner in Miami being this window unit that made a lot of noise and, in fact, there was only one in our house. It was in my parents bedroom and on really hot nights we'd be allowed to stay up a little bit later and just watch TV. And in fact it seems like air conditioning and TV went hand in hand after World War Two.
GAIL COOPER: They certainly did.
BRIAN: 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 kind of a battle between the engineers who wanted central air because it was efficient and of course they could control all of the elements. And those old fashion people who wanted to be able to exercise individual control over their windows units, so who won? I mean, I look around, I go back to Miami and everybody has central air conditioning, everything is cooled, I mean have the window openers been defeated once and for all or are they coming back with the skyrocketing cost of energy?
GAIL COOPER: 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 down open. And all those big glass walls just absorb the heat and so it's just built right in. And in that sense it's probably hear to stay.
BRIAN: Gail Cooper is a history professor at Lehigh University. She's the author of Air- Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment. Thank you very much for joining us today, Gale.
GAIL COOPER: Thank you, Brian, for having me.
BRIAN: Okay, crank up the air-conditioning because you're going to be on the hot seat.
PETER: I'm ready.
BRIAN: 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.
ED: You know, I think that's a really good point Brian and it's interesting how those two events, the Civil Rights Movement and air conditioning sort of coincided to trigger the emergence of the American South as an 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 the bane of the South becomes its great bounty. So we go from being, "Golly, who'd want to live down there?" To, "The Sun Belt, where it's always the perfect temperature."
PETER: So the climate down there changed in more ways than one, right Ed?
ED: Yeah, the political climate, the racial climate, and the climate climate.
PETER: You know I thought it was really interesting about this fresh air business, right?
ED: Well, when I think about fresh air, Peter, I think all the way back to ye olden times of your period when people talked about miasma and the quality of the ... is that the air or just the general atmosphere?
PETER: The late modern equivalent of colonial miasma is a sick building. A sick building is a climate controlled building and there is this problem that then it becomes a closed system with pathogens.
ED: Legionnaire's Disease, how scary was that, that we're actually inventing these things in the ducts that are going to really be deadly. And it's like, "Yikes, if we can't even condition the air then what can we control?"
BRIAN: I'll tell you what we can control, we can control the end of this show.
PETER: No!
BRIAN: 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 this. The address is BackStoryRadio.org you can sign up for our podcast there, subscribe to our newsletter, and join us on Facebook and Twitter.
PETER: Again, it's all at BackStoryRadio.org. Don't be a stranger.