Breaking History - The Birth of Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

How did air conditioning go from a niche invention for factories to a force that reshaped cities, industries, and even human behavior? In this episode of Breaking History, we dive deep into the surprising, often overlooked story of AC with author Salvatore Basile—author of Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. Hear how Willis Carrier’s revolutionary breakthrough changed the world. ------ Producers: Poppy Damon & Adam Feldman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harry. Ah, you sleep. Who can sleep in this heat? Today's something a little different on breaking history. We're going to dig into a very important American invention. It's one of those rare technologies that is so ubiquitous today, so seemingly integrated into daily life, that its historical impact is almost invisible. We take it for granted most of the time. That is, until it fails.

I think you could open the window a little wider. So we can let some more hot air in? When you're trying to beat the heat, we think you'd have better luck with the Kelvinator speedy mount air conditioner on your side. I'm talking, of course, about air conditioning. A system often reduced to convenience, but whose implications stretch far deeper. It has altered architecture, urban development, labor, geopolitics, and even our circumstances. Acadian rhythms.

It's a machine that has preserved human life and contributed to planetary instability, a symbol of progress and a vector of inequality. Join us after the break, where my producer Poppy Damon interviews Salvatore Basel, author of Cool, How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. I eat for fault and back,

La Beville, the part you got this next year. My old Lee Javier, the odds, Irving Berlin. What happened once happens again? When you love is a mystery. Because I don't get that. Turn into breaking mystery. History.

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Israeli politics, and their global impact. If you're tired of the noise and ready for something deeper, check out Boundless Insights. You'll come away with new insights and a deeper understanding of the issues. Find Boundless Insights, available wherever you get your podcasts. natured wife. Add three small children and a barking door. Stir well. Blend in equal parts of heat, humidity, dust and stale air. Test by arriving home from your cool office with a cheery. Have a nice day. Cool your entire home with trained central air conditioning. I'm Salvatore Basel and I wrote the book Cool, how air conditioning changed

everything. And can I ask why you wrote this book? It feels niche. It feels niche. but you make it really interesting. How did you get the inspiration? The biggest reason, and this was part of my intro to the book, when I was six years old, which was the early 1960s, my Aunt Catherine shocked the entire family by buying two air conditioners. This was a seismic event

because, as far as everyone was concerned, air conditioners were only for rich people. But I also noticed that all of the parties of the family, from then on, took place in Aunt Catherine's living room, and everyone loved it. I walked up to the air conditioner when no one was looking and put my hand up to the grill output, and cool air was coming out in the middle of August, and I thought this was the best invention in the universe. So I was hooked from that moment on. Take us to 1902, and what unfolded that would sort of change history and the history of American

conventions? How did modern air conditioning get born? Modern air conditioning is actually a combination of a few ideas. Refrigeration. And refrigeration, mechanical refrigeration, actually dates back to the mid-19th century. There were a few inventors who happened upon a system that we would call a refrigeration compressor. It made cool air. And one of them was a Florida doctor in the the 1850s, who had a system that was powered by a steam engine, this fellow tried to patent it, but society in general literally would not believe that such a machine existed, and he died penniless. However, in another 20, 30, 40 years, mechanical refrigeration was being used. Now, Willis Carrier, this 21-year-old engineer, who had just...

just graduated from college, and was employed by the Buffalo Forge Company, which had started making blacksmith bellows, and because they had been making blacksmith bellows, were then suddenly making ventilation equipment for factories. The Buffalo Forge Company had to solve a problem. There was a printing plant in Brooklyn, New York, which was having a terrible time during the summer months, getting its commissions done because humidity would cause the paper to swell, and swollen paper would not print cleanly in a printing press. It would cause jams.

They were wasting paper, they were missing deadlines, there was a problem. They asked the Buffalo Forge Company if they could do something about the humidity. And the Buffalo Forge administration said, we'll put our youngest fellow on it. There was trial, there was error. He tried a few methods, which did not work, but then he came up with an idea of refrigeration plus lowering the humidity by condensing moisture onto pipework in the system. Lo and behold, it worked. And this is patented on July 17th, 1902, everyone should remember that date.

And it was called the apparatus for treating air. And it was pretty much unheralded in the press, but within a couple of years, the company realized it had something. And Carrier began to take off as a source of what they now called air conditioning. Factories were delighted because there were factories that in past years would have to shut down during the summertime. And that was a big waste of money. so they now had a schedule where they could operate year-round. This was the big invention. The interesting problem was that carrier immediately saw that there would be a market for what he called comfort cooling.

The problem was that most people in the world had been so used to summer heat, they couldn't imagine that there was a need for comfort cooling, even though they themselves were happy when they would walk into, say, the printing plant and spend time in that room, which was more bearable than any other room of the building. Carrier's big job for decades was to get the public to decide that they wanted and insisted on having a cool environment in summer weather. So there's a few things I want to pick up there. The first is when you mentioned the conditions of factories, when you said that they had to close down, was that because of the safety on people or because machines wouldn't work? What was the landscape of sort of, you know, this is peak

industrialization? What are the conditions people are working in? And how does their hotness come into it? Oh, comfort of the people and safety of the people had sort of nothing to do with it. Sorry. The issue was that many manufacturing processes were hampered by summer heat and humidity, leather, pasta, soap, sweets, various manufacturing processes needed drying times that if you were in the middle of a New York summer or a Midwest summer, the air was so humid that this was not going to happen. And if you would have a batch of whatever it was that was drying far too slowly, it could be literally ruined. So rather than try to manufacture and

cross your fingers for better weather, a lot of companies would just not bother because it was too big of a risk. Employee comfort had nothing to do with it. Many factories during the 19th century would reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 60 Celsius. And employees were simply, they had to put up with it. Now, Henry Ford was one of the first people to install factory-wide air conditioning

in his plant, and he did notice that employee absences were suddenly greatly lessened because people were healthier and more apt to want to show up to work. But the manufacturing was also improved. Metal tolerances worked out better, paint dried without being dusty. It was a win-win situation.

And even though air conditioning in its early years was a huge expense, the expense was always repaid by greater productivity and greater profit. What kind of person was carrier? I mean, how much of an engineering mind did he have? how was he able to do the thing that no one else had thought of? Because in a way, you're saying it's quite a logical mechanism. So what was it that you think made him have the ingenuity to take all these processes together? Carrier was the ultimate genius in a way. He saw into the problem. In a way, he saw nothing else. This was a man who would pack a suitcase for a

trip, which turned out to contain exactly one handkerchief because he was too busy thinking about air conditioning and how it could be improved. He stated at one point that he had come across his idea of lowering humidity on a train platform, on a cold, damp night when he saw condensation appearing on the windows of the train. That led him to think, aha, do this, and it will be improved, which I believe is what we call genius in a technical sense. It's when you can see it through one problem and solve the next problem. That was the kind of person he was throughout his entire career and really most of his life, because he lived for air conditioning, even though he did not have it in his own home.

Why not? I have no idea. But he was able to sell it to a number of places. And for many, many years, Carrier was the go-to company. What happened afterwards? We talked about some resistance and then of people like Ford taking it up. Could you give us a kind of potted history about the expansion of AC once it had kind of been used in this ink factory in the way that it was? It's interesting that air conditioning had been very quickly picked up by factories simply because that had to do with money.

Do this and you will have better production. don't do this, and you won't. Because of that, factories were not going to fight against the idea very much at all. The idea of what Carrier himself called comfort cooling, as opposed to production cooling, that was harder to deal with. That was more of a resistance to that because there was, throughout history, and especially into the Victorian era, the idea of, God made hot weather, so you must put up with it.

People would quote the book of Amos. He who makes the wind, the Lord God is his name. In other words, that's the guy. Don't anyone else try to fool with this? Also, it was technology that had never existed in a house. And while everyone had had a fireplace since caveman days, the idea of machinery to cool yourself was very foreign and very odd. It was only in the mid-19th century that the idea of an ice box for groceries

that only at then did that idea take hold. And it was very slow in taking hold because, again, it was technology. So when it came to the idea of your own personal comfort, Well, we'll put that aside till later. In 1903, the New York Stock Exchange built its, what is now its current home, its new home at the time. They were able to install a fairly elaborate cooling system. And the only reason that it got the green light was that it was pointed out that this would improve productivity. However, what it improved was employee comfort, visitor comfort.

When it opened, because it was sort of seen as a hybrid between production cooling and comfort cooling, this made national headlines. The fact that this was being done and that it had this feature, which was amazing at the time. However, not many people were visiting the New York Stock Exchange. The real break came with the movie industry because Nickelodeons had come up in the early years of the 20th century, and Nickelodeons usually were tiny theaters, which were windowless or draped to be windowless, and because of that, they were usually airless. as Hollywood realized that if they were going to become bigger, they would have to become fancier. Movie theaters were being built, but those movie theaters had ventilation systems,

which sort of helped and sort of didn't, and most of the time they didn't. So during the 1910s and into the 1920s, Hollywood felt that the summertime was actually their dead scene. reason. People would not go to the movies. It was awful inside a movie theater. There were theaters that would try showing movies on the roof, but that didn't help much, especially if it was a rainy night or if it was a hot night. You're out of luck. Again, there was finally a few theaters here and there thought to install refrigeration systems, air conditioning. And in

1925, Carrier was called upon to install a system in New York's Rivoli Theater. That system opened on Memorial Day, and it was such a shock, a pleasant shock, to the public. The system cost in 2025, $60,000, which was not cheap. They made back the cost of the system in three months because people were so gratified. Well, presumably people would think, even if they didn't want to see the movie, they wanted to sit in the air-conditioned room. So they drew people, which is still to this day, sometimes people like to escape the sunshine. And we have Hollywood blockbusters for that reason. And that is exactly the point that very few people have dwelt upon.

And I thought this should be noted more. That was the first time in human history that mankind, humankind, had a refuge from summertime. Heat, that was dependably cool, available to anyone, and for only the price of a movie ticket. It was amazing. Yes, you lucky people, just sit back for a moment, relax, and notice the delightfully clean, cool, and refreshing atmosphere of this scientifically air-conditioned theater. Great, isn't it? Remember, you can enjoy great motion picture entertainment all summer long in cool comfort at this theater. Now, within five years, pretty much every theater in the United States had to be air-conditioned or they were out of business.

Interestingly, Europe resisted it for decades, and it has only lately become a popular thing. But I think this was the first taste that the public had had of literally comfort cooling. the summer. You had the opportunity that you had never had before of a few hours respite. TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs, no matter the stage of business you're in. Visit TD.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with the TD Small Business Banking Account Manager.

What do you think were some of the surprising consequences of it? So we see, you know, as you say, the chain effect was that the public expected this, people were going to the cinemas. But what sort of other things came out of this invention that maybe people don't realize in the years that followed? The most immediate chain was that in every other service industry that dealt with the public at all, now there was an expectation. starting that people would want to be comfortable in those surroundings.

Department stores, which were fairly unbearable during the summer months, now had to be cool. It was an expensive thing, but again, when stores did it, they saw an immediate uptick in business, in customer satisfaction, and profits. This began to filter two even small retailers, And if you looked in business magazines of the late 1920s and even into the early 30s, which was hardcore depression era, businesses were being pushed to provide cooling for customers by any number of machines that were available. Air conditioning was finally beginning to shrink enough so that while it was still unwieldy, it was possible for a business to install something. But this was fairly, in a sense, immediate. So movies, stores, restaurants, all of these places, the public began to expect it, demand it, and the last frontier was the home.

And what happened? Yeah, what happened when it reached our homes? It was what I would call clumsy. The first home air conditioner had been brought out by frigid air. this was what they call a split system, which was two machines, one which would go in the basement, one which would go in your room. The two of them together weighed 600 pounds and required piping and a water source and drain lines and could cool a room to an extent and cost as much as a car. And this came out in mid-1929, which was exactly the wrong time for such a thing to happen.

So Frigdair lost millions of dollars on this project. They held on to their stock until the early 1930s, and then they kept trying to push it to businessmen in stock brokerages, offices, because they said this would be an aid to business. Turn on the cold, as they would keep saying. But this didn't help the whole market. During the 30s, the systems began to shrink and to become a little. less unwieldy and a little less expensive. It wasn't until the post-war years, the late 1940s, that what we would know as window units began to show up. And while they were expensive,

they began to drop in price bit by bit. And by the early 1950s, for some reason, 1953, which happened to be the year of a giant heat wave worldwide, everybody called it the big bake, By that year, there was suddenly a huge uptick in purchase of home air conditioning units. Another thing about home air conditioning units, a window air conditioner in the 1950s, which was very much a status symbol era, that was a great status symbol, because it showed from the outside of a house, you could defend a purchase as being for the family's comfort and the family was grateful, but it showed that you had cash. And it was now affordable.

So in 1940, one quarter of 1% of Americans had some sort of air conditioning in their homes. By 1960, it was up to about 20%. And now, by I think 1990, it was over 90%. It just skyrocketed. So I just want to end with a couple of closing thoughts. Well, one thing, what happened to Willis Carrier, take us through, we heard his early invention, he was only 25, what happened to him in the rest of his life and how did he wind up? He was actually only 21 when he, I mean, amazing, but 21. 21, wow.

When he had brought out his apparatus for treating air as a young man, within a year or so, his company let him go. He was, however, dedicated enough and stubborn enough to say, well, the hell with this. He brought along his team from that company and started the carrier air conditioning company. And it was a single-minded pursuit of literally putting air conditioning everywhere. His motto at one point was, a good day every day as far as the weather. felt that air conditioning everywhere would ultimately become the key to making life comfortable. And indeed, he was responsible for air-conditioned trains, and I believe air-conditioned cars, and air-conditioned airplanes, and buildings of all sorts.

Now, so he spent his life working toward that one goal. He became in his way famous for it, and he went through a... long and happy career, just pursuing that. I would call it a real success story, because air conditioning is now considered one of the great inventions. And so, after revolutionizing modern life with an invention that would change everything from comfort at home to productivity at work, even how we design cities and build economies, Willis Havelin Carrier, the godfather of air conditioning, passed away quietly on October 7, 1950. He died of a heart attack at the age of 73.

As we've heard, by the time of his death, air conditioning had moved far beyond the industrial factories where he first imagined it. It was in movie theaters, department stores, office buildings, and it was beginning to find its way into American homes. Carrier didn't just engineer a machine. He invented a new way of living. And while he may not be a household name, his legacy hums in the background of every cooled, room that we walk into. There's also some pushback these days because

of environmental factors. There's people sort of being quite sparing with their use of it, for one thing, not just because of the cost, but worries about the planet. Where do you think it leaves us now in how we should reflect on the legacy of air conditioning?

I do think that as the current air conditioning system has been based on a refrigeration compressor, and that has been that way for 120 years at this point. I'm pretty confident from the research that I've done that there are going to be newer and more climate-friendly and more energy-efficient systems, which will be much less harmful to the environment. There have been attempts at air conditioning,

which have used much friendlier products than hydrocarbons or fluorocarbons, water for one of them, and a system of acrylic membranes that were able to draw moisture out of the air. Some of these systems have flopped, but some of them have been in process, and I would like to believe that something will break through pretty quickly. Was part of the motivation to write your book that when we switch on iron conditioning, We pay a little bit of mind to the inventor in 1902, Willis, and how he's changed the world? I hope so. I happen to grow up in the city that housed the carrier company, so I always knew about him. I was surprised that most people didn't, and so I would like to think that people would realize now that he was somebody I'm happy to know.

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