Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Air Conditioning

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by bestselling author Jason Pargin (‘John Dies At The End’ series, ‘Zoey Ashe’ series) for a look at why air conditioning is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

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Air conditioning, known for being cool, famous for being anti-hot. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why air conditioning is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks! Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I am thrilled to once again be joined by Jason Pargin, my former colleague, my old pal, one of my favorite authors. Jason Pargin is a full-time author. He writes for the New York Times bestseller list under his own name now, previously the name David Wong. I highly recommend his latest novel. It is entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the D**k. It's very funny, very smart, and also some things that

are in that book will actually come up on this episode. You don't need to have read it to enjoy the podcast. I think it will enrich your experience if you have. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Tsotsayaha peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about air conditioning, which is a suggestion from Jason and I think a great one.

Also, one definition thing to knock out up top, in the prep for this, I was astounded to learn that some people use the term air conditioning to mean all heating and cooling and changing of air, right? Because you're conditioning the air one way or another. I thought it just meant making air colder. But I ran a Twitter poll, more than 600 of you responded, and over 81% of you said that air conditioning only means cooling air. So that does seem to be the majority opinion of it. Folks also pointed out that the acronym HVAC stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. So it separates air conditioning from heating in the official acronym. So this show's just about cooling air.

And I think it's something most of us never think about, or we only think about it when we pay that utility bill. It is such an amazing phenomenon in the modern world, and we're going to talk about why. So please sit back or read the newspaper and learn that it's going to be another scorcher because you are a character in a Sears commercial from the 1990s. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, thanks so much for putting this together with me.

And I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Let's talk about our relationship to air conditioning. This is a strangely emotionally fraught issue for me. And I suspect for some of our listeners, too, because when I was growing up and I was born in 1975, so I grew up mostly in the 80s, where I was from, air conditioning was like a real sign of a class divide. I only had a couple of friends that had central air and I thought of that as something rich people had. Like they had like nicer homes and their homes just seemed bigger and cleaner, I guess. So when I walked into a place that actually had even cooling during the summer, I got jealous because it's the way kids are. But in our home, you know, I had friends had no AC at all. They just had window fans or whatever. In our house, we had a window air conditioner, which was the most common situation. And it cooled like one and a half rooms really

well. And the rest of the house was just hot. So it was always going up. But like these days, house was just was just hot so it was always going up like these days you know i have central air in my home now it's common uh i don't think they build a new home without central air probably seems like it yeah to this day when i walk in i almost like appreciate it like i've made it i've made the big time i have central air in my house that's such a feeling that i i feel like especially we've lived through either the middle of that switch or the tail end of that switch where, as we'll talk about now, American homes have AC. And maybe people in some other countries listening to this don't have that experience, but it's just sort of standard. My home growing up in Northern Illinois in DuPage

County near Chicago, we had a window style AC unit, but it vented into the garage, not into the outside. So we needed to open the garage door to run the AC. And it also didn't work super great. So we'd usually just like go to the basement where it was cooler, or like use box fans and stuff. And AC was sort of a wonky thing for our house, which was fine. We like made the best of it and made the most of it. There were other people who had central AC and that felt different, felt fancy. And that's going to be kind of what this show, this episode is about, because it's not from air conditioning. It's not just from a technical point of view. It's a real lifestyle

change that is going to dictate kind of what the future looks like, because it's a perfect example of a technology that's really recent, shockingly recent. I think a lot of people don't appreciate how recent it is, but that now it's just, it's seen as a necessity. And we're going to explain how it kind of became that way we started building and migrating with ac in mind but it's that whole issue of now it's just assumed that's kind of everything because that's how technology works right something that is a novelty and then it starts to become widespread and then it's like well this is a a human necessity you can't live without it which our like even your european listeners will think is crazy there's many countries that get by without AC. And if someone is looking at

a map of the United States and saying, well, now wait a second, Alex said he's from the Northern part of Illinois. That's like the Northern third of the United States in terms of like latitude, right? Yeah. But I'm from Southern Illinois. I am from just a few hours south of where Alex is from. And you had some brutal summers for whatever reason, the jet stream or whatever reason you had brutal winters and brutal summers and also tornadoes. But, but it's a good example of, we weren't, we were not colonizing the desert or, you know, the, the swamp. It was in this, just the Midwestern United States.

But by the time I think both of us were teenagers, the idea of spending a summer without air conditioning was almost unthinkable. Like it would, you would think of it as a real hardship, but my parents grew up without it. My grandparents absolutely grew up without it. My grandparents grew up without it in public buildings. Like the idea of like movie theaters having it wasn't a thing back then. And that's, that's how recent it is. Yeah. And I, that's one of my favorite things about this one. Cause there was a time not that long ago where home AC was astonishing. Like there's a thing I've been seeing on TikTok lately where the audio

prompt is like, show me the thing in your house that nobody else's house has. And then this prompt is basically getting used by fun, rich people who have this massive house and then it has something strange. Like there's a flat screen TV that enters and exits the space like it's on a little moving belt. Or there's a swimming pool that that opens into the living room so you can swim into your swimming pool from your house. You know, like wild stuff like that. That was home AC not that many decades ago. That was that kind of thing. Yeah. And I'm also old enough to remember when uh cable television was that thing when

someone someone was watching someone was watching star wars on their television i was like how did you do that like well we have hbo it's like you have what uh so that's and we're not that old um people but early 30s i'm not i'm not a space alien yeah you mentioned something offhand when we were preparing for this that i is almost a universal experience among my friends which is in the summer camping in the room that had the air conditioner yeah or near it where you bring in blankets or sleeping bags or whatever and sleep on the floor of the one cool room in the house and i don't aside from the few rich kids that had central air, I don't have a friend that did not do that. It was, that was a universal thing. I remember because Northern Illinois also kind of

has this climate you describe in Southern Illinois where it's horrible in summer and winter. It's a, it's a really great balance they found, But it would be very hot in the summer. And then we would sort of all camp in the living room sometimes. And that's actually, like, I asked my mom about it because I wanted to, like, jog my memory of what our AC situation was. And it jogged, like, a nice memory. I don't know. That was a positive thing in a lot of ways, like sort of a special and novel way to sleep. But once you have central AC, you never need to do that.

The whole house is like equally perfect. And why bother? Right. And this is why we sometimes when we talk about class and money, we don't appreciate all of the million little annoyances that come with my like when I say that I was kind of envious of the kids that had central air, when you just have this window unit one, it's extremely expensive to operate. Yeah. That was the whole thing. Like it wouldn't, it wouldn't just make your electricity bill go up

a little bit. It would use twice as much electricity as everything else in your house combined. It was like, we had to be judicious about which days we used it and figuring out, is it hot enough to run the AC? The kids always arguing that it is the parents having to like, knowing they have to like ration it out and it's noisy and a window air conditioner. You know, again, it's like you have one room that's cold as a refrigerator. And then the rest of the house is like three degrees cooler than what it would be without it. So it's an uncomfortable kind of cool. It's, it's all of these things where, and we're going to get into this. We're going to dig into a lot of it because too much heat screws up your ability to think, to work your energy levels, everything like air conditioning. That's actually done. Well,

it's a huge advantage. And to this day, like, like I said, I, if I had kids, they would never, they would grow up just assuming this is like having walls in a roof, you know, at the inside of your house feels like central air. They would not, they would not know that experience of that. I have of like, you know, wow, I'm, I'm rich enough to have central air at my home. Whereas the reality is if you're a realtor, they build a new home and you're showing it off. It's like, now, of course this house doesn't have, you know, AC, like they didn't, you can add it. I think the, you know, the, the buyer would physically attack you. Like they would think they were on a hidden camera prank. Like the idea that they would sell

a house without it, even far North of where both of us are, is almost ridiculous. Yeah. Right. Especially I've also at times lived with people from further south in the United States originally. Like I was in New York with a roommate who was from the south and they, their instinct was just to change the temperature setting in the, in the space. And my instinct was to change all of my clothes. Like, oh, it's hot. I'm going to completely switch outfits. That's my first move to deal with the temperature changing. Because it's just a different mentality from the different climates and also like what point in time and point in culture we were at when we grew up.

And already some of your younger listeners are like, well, what did people do back then when it was 110 degrees in New York or whatever? We're going to get to that. We're going to get to all of that because there's a whole history of how we used to build things that has been lost. Yeah. And I think we can lead into the numbers about that because we also have a lot of numerical measurement of it. On episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics and that's in a segment called i'll give stats to you like you want me to and i'll count them right baby all through the night i'll give stats to you. And that name was submitted by Anthony Gordon. Thank you, Anthony.

There's a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. Now, a lot of people, as I've pointed out in previous episodes, are making you sing these. Yes. But I've yet to hear, at least on the episodes I'm on, I've yet to hear anyone make you like rap one really fast or do like a death metal voice. Has anyone tried to push you in that direction? There was, there was one enter sand man. Uh, and there was one, um, I can't, now I can't remember. Oh, I think it's a Snoop Dogg thing. And then I had to plug in the guest names, uh, Alex Schmitty Schmidt and bread and chatter at the door, I think it's a Snoop Dogg thing. And then I had to plug in the guest names. Alex Schmitty Schmidt and Brad and Chatter at the door, I think was how it went. I'm just off the dome, but that's what I remember.

Okay. I appreciate that then because it feels like that should have been the next number here is 87.6%. That 87.6% is the percentage of Americans who have some type of AC at home. That's also from 2015. So I would guess the number's higher now. But approaching 90% of Americans have AC, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. have AC, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That's a stunning number. Yeah. I had no idea. I guess I just assumed that maybe in, I don't know, Minnesota part,

that there were some older houses that just they didn't need it or that there were a lot of buildings we're going to talk about later that were built in an older style that were kind of designed for better airflow and so it just wasn't necessary. So like beyond the issue of poverty, people not being able to afford it, you know, things like that. I just assumed that you would have a higher percentage of that of just homes where they just didn't the way there's, there's homes in California that don't have furnaces because it doesn't get hot enough. I just assumed that the opposite was true with AC that it's basically nine out of 10 homes now have

some sort of AC. That's great news. Again, I won't live without it. But that's shockingly high. I had no idea. Yeah. And I think a lot of it's grafted on maybe because they also break it out by types. They say that 61.6% have central AC, and then another 26% have window AC. And so as of 2015, only 12.5% of homes had no AC at all. And I think my childhood home there, we moved in in the 90s, and that window style unit going into the garage, we're pretty confident that was added later. Like that realtor conversation you were imagining before. I think they had that experience and said, well, we got to attach some AC in here. Otherwise nobody will buy it. For people who don't understand the significance of a venting into the garage, the air conditioner expels heat. All of the heat, there's no such thing as adding cold to a room you can only remove heat

right because heat is energy yeah so it was it was venting the heat from his home into another part of his home yeah making the garage basically an oven so that's why they had to open their garage to run their ac i can promise you they did not design it that way from the top. It must have been the only window that they had available to put in an AC unit in. I think so, yeah. And also, if people have heard the refrigerators episode of this podcast with Miles Gray, Rivers Langley, on this one we won't talk a ton about how AC tech works, but it's similar to everything we said about the refrigerator. Like, your refrigerator is really a heat remover.

It's taking heat out of a space. And so is your AC. Same kind of thing. Yeah. And the back of your fridge, it expels that heat into the room you're in. The heat has to go somewhere. Yeah. Air conditioners are just big refrigerators.

Yeah. It's sort of a daisy chain, right? Like your refrigerator is making the room hotter and then your ac is making the space outside hotter by by balancing for that it's it's all just a series of mechanical servants uh yeah and i i i i still i don't understand exactly how planes stay in the air and i don't understand exactly still why it's it's possible like i i know exactly what's in an air conditioner and i understand that you've got the compressor and you've got the the refrigerant to run through the tubes and the condenser and all that i still it still seems

weird to me that you could make a space colder it seems like magic still to this day yeah kind of same you don't have to explain the science again. Again, I know the science. It doesn't matter. I know the science of how a plane stays loft. It doesn't matter. I still look at it. It doesn't seem real to me. It doesn't make sense to me. And air conditioners, that they're able to blow coldness into the room. Because again, I can make the room hotter by setting something on fire. There is nothing I can do as a human being to make the room cooler. So what the air conditioner is doing is something alien to my simple caveman brain. Yeah.

Yeah, we're pro-science. And then just some part of the back of our head is like, come on, get out of here. Well, I'm proud of myself that I don't reject the science just because I don't understand it. Like, I don't understand how mRNA vaccines work, but I appreciate that the experts say they do, and I will take their word for it. I don't have to know how they work. That's not my area of expertise. With the growth of home AC, we said that number 87.6 had it in 2015. That number is only going to go up. For one thing, Bloomberg City Lab says that

basically all new homes in the U.S. are built with home AC. Also, the Wall Street Journal and other sources say that the U.S. is facing a 4 million home shortfall or more. So there's going to be a bunch of new construction soon in the country, you hope. And also, somewhat surprisingly to me, AC is pretty common across classes in the US, that US Energy Information Admin data says that about 80% of the lowest bracket of income households still have some kind of AC. Maybe it's a window kind, maybe it doesn't work so well, but it's becoming so common that it's not just a financial limit on whether you have it. Maybe you run it less. Maybe you're concerned about the cost.

But it's growing very standard for Americans. Yeah, and that's a good thing. Again, I want to make it clear. We're going to talk about the environmental impact and the incredible amount of energy that's used for AC. Every year, sometime in like July or Augustust some columnist from some huge magazine or paper will write an article about how we have to kill ac to save the planet and it's like this ac shaming thing and they always put that article out at the hottest time of the year because it gets all the

outrage traffic yeah this is not that i'm running air conditioning right now it's it's late april it's not that hot outside i still have it on on. I can't sleep without it. The fact that lower income homes that almost all of them still have air conditioning is a miracle. The idea of some poor family in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, good God, that they can escape that humidity and they can sleep through the night while keeping their home cool. That is an amazing advancement. I would not live without it. I would not try to take it away from anyone. Yeah, it's just great.

Maybe the most astounding thing about AC adoption in the U.S. is that in 1960, so like, you know, Kennedy's just been elected and stuff. In 1960, so like, you know, Kennedy's just been elected and stuff. In 1960, 13% of U.S. homes had AC. 13%. And by 1980, it was all the way up to 55%. And then, you know, today we're approaching 9 out of 10. Exactly. So just in the last 60 years, essentially, the whole U.S. like sprouted AC units. It's amazing.

And that so that puts what we the anecdotes we gave earlier into context. 1980, I would have been five years old. It was about 50 50 or 55 percent of homes had it. And you have to assume that was the richest 55 percent. So it was a coin toss. I'm from a poor county. It's I'm you know, I'm from a rural area in Illinois. I'm, it was as far from Chicago as you can get basically. So there,

you know, the, the percentage was much lower than 55%. And, and that's why I was saying that a lot is, it was completely common for my friends to not have air conditioning my grandparents neither of our grandparents had it yeah and then of that 55 only some sliver of that was central air which at the time was probably much more expensive you know and expensive to run or whatever so that's how recent it was a coin toss as to whether or not the house you were about to move into had an air conditioner of any kind in it even a crappy window unit. It was basically half and half as recently as my childhood. That 55% in 1980, it's probably the richest and also tending to be toward the south

because our Bloomberg City Lab source and another source talk about in New England especially, people just not having AC until later, because as much as there's a hot summer there, people kind of said, well, there's winter here, so you don't really need AC. Like it's only hot here some of the time, forget it. Where you live, if you live in the US, you can probably find an approximate date for when AC started to sweep through the area, because there is a summer basically everywhere in the 48 states. And if you watch any TV show or movie from the 40s, 50s, 60s, any hard-boiled detective drama or the show Mad Men, and you see them at home in their suit and tie at dinner, they're in a house that was like 87 degrees inside.

And they are just sweating. They're just drenched in sweat and everyone stink like feet when you when you see don draper or whoever whatever cool dude uh you're watching you know they probably filmed it on an air-conditioned soundstage that real person in real life would have been just sitting there eating dinner just drenched in sweat it's like it's like when dick van dyke falls over that footstool, he just continues falling over puddles of sweat in the house. Like, well, I can't get footing anywhere.

Jeez, this is tough. Exactly, yeah. It'd have to be like in a basketball game where they have a guy run out there with a mop and quickly dry it so people weren't falling down all the time. And that was not considered unusual because again that was an era when the only air conditioning you would find was in movie theaters and some businesses or whatever but still like the idea of now that if you're out out shopping

in the summer and you walk into a store and the store is cool it did not used to be a thing you would walk into the store and it was just as hot in there as it was outside, you know, in the grocery store or whatever it, the idea of it always being cool where you're sitting and relaxing is very, very recent. Yeah. And every staff member in that store is wearing the equivalent of formal wear today, just baking in there for an eight hour shift. That's right. Man. And even the customers were wearing suit and tie because that's how it was back then. Man. The past was awful. We always find that. Yeah. And as far as we talked a little bit about energy before, this next number here is more than four times as much. And more than four times as much is how much more energy it takes to heat

a U.S. home versus cooling it. It takes lots more energy to do the heating in U.S. homes, and probably most homes, but we just have numbers for the U.S. here. That U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows that in the very hottest parts of the U.S., they're still spending the same energy on heating as they do on cooling, even somewhere like, imagine the hottest place you're thinking of Arizona, Southern Florida, somewhere like that. They're still spending as much energy heating as they do cooling. And then everywhere else spends far more energy on heating. Bloomberg City Lab says that's mainly because it takes a lot more power

to heat a room from, you know, 30 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit versus cooling it down from 90 to 70. It's just a much bigger energy cost to do the heating. Yeah. We'd have to dig into the physics of it to explain why, but basically you're adding energy to a room that doesn't have it versus just moving energy out of the room, it's just an easier ask. This is why you'll see them advertise. If you're shopping for a furnace, you'll see them advertising heat pumps that are basically kind of, they're built like air conditioners that are just turned around and reverse. And the whole selling point is that are more efficient because it's applying air conditioner technology to heating. And that's more efficient than trying to light natural gas on fire and just blowing the heat into the room.

So air conditioning actually is it's a somewhat efficient way to change the temperature of a home. It's just that it's such a load on the system because it's it is new. it's such a load on the system because it is new. And as we're going to talk about the task of, especially when you're trying to retrofit buildings, things like that, it's actually not easy to cool them. Yeah, and I had never heard of heat pumps. When we were prepping this, you found a great video from Technology Connections on YouTube where they talk about what a heat pump is. And it's amazing to me.

It's basically taking the back of an air conditioner and making that the appliance and adding heat that way. Because yeah, people figured out this is much less energy. We can do it that way. But I think growing up, I had a Chicago area heating system where, like, I think Chicago is most famous for winter. And so we did have pretty hardcore heating. We just didn't have like amazing cooling. That's the whole thing. If, if the world were getting colder instead of warmer, we would be 10 times as screwed. Oh wow. Like global warming is bad. If we had global cooling for some reason, it would be much, much, much worse. Like the challenge to try to overcome that would be monstrous.

Yeah, the energy would be, oh God. Next number here is 50%, because I don't want to just do American stats. 50% is how many Canadian homes reported having AC. That was in a 2009 Canadian government survey. So it might be higher since 2009. And it also turns out the highest concentration is in Manitoba, has almost 80% of homes have AC, and Saskatchewan and Ontario also. And then there's much less AC in British Columbia, they only reported 23%. And then they lumped Atlantic Canada into one category that only reported 19% of homes having AC. So my best guess is Canada is sort of following that American trend and just catching up to it. Canada's National Observer says that

British Columbia in particular has gone from 10% of homes having AC in 2001, all the way to 34% of homes having it in 2017. So from 10% to a third in 16 years is a huge jump and it seems like canada is going to be air conditioned like the us is and this is very much an american phenomenon right now like america leads the way in this but the rest of the world is going to catch up but there's no other country where ac has the penetration unless like i think even in some like very air desert, those are often situations where a lot of citizens simply can't afford it. I'm going to guess there's not a single other large country where you've got anything close to 90% of homes having it. Yeah, the energy

would seem to say so too, because the last number here starts out as a simple number. It's 4.25%. The last number here starts out as a simple number. It's 4.25%. 4.25% is the United States' approximate share of the world population. About 4.25% of people are Americans. But from there, if you look at our energy use as Americans, The Guardian says that as of 2015, that U.S. population was spending more energy on AC than the entire rest of the world spends on AC

and was also spending more energy on AC than the continent of Africa spends total. So 330 million Americans or so spend more energy on AC than about 1.1 billion Africans spend on everything. We're very into it in the U.S. Yeah, that's why I was saying that there's no other country that can say this. But that is changing. But this is part of the challenge of switching to green energy. I don't know if we always accurately convey this. If you talk about, well, we need to shut down the coal power plants and replace them with solar power plants. It's not that the world's going to have to shut down the coal power

plants and replace it with five times as much energy in, in whatever, when, when solar nuclear, whatever, the amount of electricity of the world was going to need in the next generation is massively, massively higher than what it is now. It's not just a matter of replacing. It's a matter of you have to create abundant energy sources because we're going to need it. The lifestyles in the rest of the world are catching up to us, which is a good thing. But that's part of the challenge that I think is sometimes not clear. It's not, you know, again, it's not just replacing. It's that we have to massively expand.

Yeah, absolutely. And it is like good, especially that AC use could come to some other countries because in particular, they're just like hotter than the U.S. is like someone at the equator should have had more AC than me and in the Chicago area. That would just make more sense. In a just world, right. Well, and I think we can get into the first takeaway here. Takeaway number one. Air conditioning began in the eastern United States as medical and industrial technology

with moral judgment against its home use. One more time, that's air conditioning began in the eastern U.S. as medical and industrial technology with moral judgment against its home use. Because this was novel and amazing technology to people, but it took a long time for people to see it as something you use in your house. Yeah, and it was seen as vaguely shameful, too. We've got several sources here, in particular, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker. And there's a great 99% Invisible episode

called Thermal Delight, produced by Emmett Fitzgerald, and also a book called 50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy by British economist Tim Hanford. It'll be all this whole range of sources as we go. The first really widespread application of air conditioning was for industry. And the key person here is a guy named Willis Carrier, who you might recognize that name from the Carrier Air Conditioning Company.

In 1902, in Brooklyn, New York, there was a company called the Sackett Wilhelms Lithographic and Publishing Company, you know, because names were long then. And they were printing the pages of a humor magazine called Judge, like a very illustrated cartoon heavy humor magazine. And they'd had two consecutive summers where the temperature got so hot that the paper was swelling in the presses and also the ink was running. And so they just couldn't do a good job printing this magazine. Sackett Wilhelms hired a heating company called Buffalo Forge to try to find a way to cool stuff off. They said, you guys do heat, can you figure out cool? And then Buffalo Forge subcontracted it to Willis Carrier,

who was just this young graduate of Cornell and an engineer. And then Carrier invented electric air conditioning to solve this problem. It was an industrial fan that blew over steam coils filled with cold water, and then the excess humidity would condense on the coils and produce cooled air. You don't really need to know how it works, but the point is this was first invented to basically print a humor magazine at the turn of the century in Brooklyn. Now, some of the listeners are saying a humor magazine in 1902. I bet if I look that up, it's going to turn out to be just incredibly racist. You are right.

Yeah. You can go to the Wikipedia page for Judge Magazine and the very first image. Anyway, it's not relevant to what we're talking about. They are a footnote in this. It's just back then it was a different time. Let's just move on. And then according to Tim Hanford's book, this Buffalo Forge company, they had been paying Carrier as like a contractor. They were paying him $10 a week, which I think was money then.

But they had his idea now. And they said, great, our vision is this can be for specific industrial applications. And that's all. And then Willis Carrier said, AC is going to be everywhere. This is going to change the world. It's going to be for general human comfort. Also, Carrier's first name for it was The Weathermaker, which is a cool name. But according to The Atlantic, Carrier later changed it and coined the name air conditioning.

So they went from an incredibly cool name for the technology to a very lame one. Yeah. So if you're in marketing, would you rather sell a weather maker that makes the customer feel like they're playing God or an air conditioner, which could mean anything that could be air filtration. That could be just adjusting the moisture levels. Like that doesn't even necessarily mean you could just you could call your furnace an air conditioner it's warming the air like that's they went from a great name for their product and somebody insisted on really the worst possible name yeah and by the way somebody may be asking well if this if ac basically runs off the same principle as a refrigerator, did people not have refrigerators at this time? And the answer is no, they didn't. Which I know you guys have done a separate episode about the history of ice, right?

Yeah, we did. Because the refrigerator, when we talk about ice boxes and how... Yeah. Yeah, and so these two technologies roll out basically at the same time. Yeah. Yes, this was the icebox era when you had to buy a block of ice that for those who didn't listen on the episode a block of ice that may have been cut out of a lake somewhere in the northeast and shipped a thousand miles away

on a boat that could actually keep the ice solid for up to a year because of the way they had just had a really good insulation system and you would chop that off and put it in a box. And that's how you cooled your stuff. So, yes, this was before people had refrigerators, too. Otherwise, someone would have said, well, can I have like a giant refrigerator that just cools my whole house? Right. If I could just live inside of this with my food, that would be great. Yeah.

Just give me a machine with a bigger compressor, put it in the window, and blow, instead of blowing into this little box, blow it into my whole house. But that's, yeah, they came about at about the same time. I don't know. I'm assuming after that, refrigerators had quicker penetration because it is easier to make a little one than a house-sized thing. But either way, yeah, this was before both of those. Again, refrigerators also, shockingly recent. Yeah, you start really seeing electric home refrigerators in the late 1920s. And Cornus Smithsonian, that's around when Carrier started selling electric home AC. But also his first big client was not homes, it was movie theaters. Because folks, it's maybe summer if you're in the Northern

Hemisphere. Imagine sitting in a movie theater, no COVID. Imagine sitting in a movie theater now without AC, right? And the theater is just the heat of outside, if not hotter, that would be terrible. And so movie theaters 100 years ago, basically failed to sell tickets in the summer. Carriers sold the air conditioning units, and then they just started marketing cold air almost more than the movies. And it invented kind of how the movie business works now. You know, Star Wars had to come along and stuff, but it's that basic idea of the summer movie. Again, a shockingly recent invention. As recently as the 1950s and 60s, movies that came out in the summer were just movies that took place in summer.

They were like beach movies. Yeah. But Jaws and Star Wars, the idea of the summer blockbuster that in the summer, because again, in the 70s, less than half of the homes had AC even then, right? So if you're in the late 70s, you've got a whole bunch of your audience who wants to just come sit in the AC for a couple of hours. So give them something big and spectacular to watch. And there you go. You have invented the summer blockbuster. Yeah, when I was like a little kid and in the mid to late 90s, still going to movie theaters for that reason.

We would see whatever the kids movie of the time was at one o'clock p.m. Because that that really eased up the day temperature-wise. And then as far as Home AC, Willis Carrier's big commercial breakthrough was the 1939 World's Fair. He put up an Igloo of Tomorrow exhibit, and the fair got 65,000 visitors. And so many of them went to that exhibit and just experienced a cool room, and it blew their minds. And from there, sales took off for the home AC. Yeah. Now, again, I'm also probably unfairly picturing his Igloo of Tomorrow exhibit as being incredibly racist with probably some cartoon Eskimo in there. I don't know. Maybe not.

I just anytime you start saying, well, the World's Fair exhibit in 1939, I think, OK, probably every inch of that was problematic for today. Anytime you start saying, well, the World's Fair exhibit in 1939, I think, okay. Probably every inch of that was problematic for today. But again, different time. And then we said it was industrial and medical. The very first AC type technology is before carriers work, and it was for medical applications. There's a couple stories here. One of them is that in 1851, so a long time ago, 1851, there was a Florida doctor named John Gorey who got a patent for the first ice machine

because he was trying to cool the room around malaria patients who had high fevers. But he thought the real breakthrough was that ice accumulated on the outside of it. And, oh, I came up with an ice machine. That's what's exciting. So he almost invented air conditioning, but he really invented an ice machine instead. I keep wanting to get off on ice. The idea that people didn't used to put ice in their drinks, that that also used to have ice anytime you want it. That's why that was seen as such a miraculous thing.

It's like, oh, my gosh, the idea of just anybody having ice in their home at the touch of like you push a button and it makes ice. That was, again, seen as miracle technology in pre-Civil War days and would not be common in homes until 100 years later, but post-war, right? Right. So, yeah, that's why he was so excited about his machine freezing up. It's like, I have made ice. Holy cow. Yeah, he invented such an amazing thing. He didn't notice he invented air conditioning. Who cares? Because at the time, the ice thing was more exciting, because think about the implications for preserving food, everything. Yeah, it truly battles world hunger. It's really cool.

The next amazing story here of medical tech involves President James A. Garfield. So if you heard the Triangles episode, Garfield is back. Very exciting. In July of 1881, not exciting, he is shot. And then Garfield is shot in July and doesn't die until September. So he's battling for life for 79 days in between. And while he's doing this, the whole country says, how can we make him feel better? Simon Newcomb teams up with U.S. Navy engineers to create an experimental air conditioning system. So one of the first forms of air conditioning in the U.S. was to comfort President Garfield after he was shot. The system was an engine connected to pipes. Those powered a fan to blow air over a giant bucket of ice.

So it's like a fan blowing the air that comes up over ice. The Atlantic says that the device lowered the room's temperature from 95 Fahrenheit to 75 Fahrenheit, which is 35 Celsius to 23.8 Celsius. So it lowered at 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It also used hundreds of pounds of ice per hour. So you basically had to be the dying president in order to get this machine otherwise it's way too much ice but that was an early form of it that we had see this is this is the air conditioner i would invent where you just pile up ice and put a fan in front of it like this is this is the caveman version of air conditioning like this is what a child would come up with if they didn't, you know,

because all the other stuff about condensers and all of that sounds like mumbo jumbo. But I definitely understand just get a mountain of ice and blow a fan across it and blow the cold into the room, blow the cold from the ice into the room. And I love that that's exactly what they did. And because he's a president, it's just like get us all of the ice into the room. And I love that that's exactly what they did. And because he's a president, it's just like, get us all of the ice, all of the ice from the entire tri-state area to cool this one room down. Because hundreds of pounds of ice in 1881, that was not a trivial thing to come up with. Oh yeah. There were whole caravans and laborers and people saluting as the ice left their lake. Cause they're like,

thank God I'm saving the president. Like this was, this is like in the movie Air Force One, when everyone in the country is focusing on one plane. It's that kind of effort. It's that exciting to people. And meanwhile, the average person's walking across the scene, they've got an electric fan. Right. where do you get one of those i just i just want that just to move the air around that'd be amazing and the guy with the fan is like thank god i own every railroad in the united states otherwise i couldn't have this it would be impossible well and uh and yeah as far as this medical technology, there was also one forerunner of Carrier named Alfred R. Wolf, who came up with an electric air cooling system that was built for the dissecting room of Cornell Medical College in New York City. And it was seen as, oh, this is just like an experimental technology for a medical room. It would be bonkers to have it in your house.

How would you even do that? And a lot of that is because as US home AC grew in popularity, it was sort of butting heads with, I hear a lot of people call it like a Puritan mentality or like a hard work mentality that Americans get into. Because pre 20th century, you could build a fire if you were cold. But before the 20th century, if you were an American and it was too hot outside, you were supposed to just kind of take it. According to the Atlantic, quote, extreme heat was seen as a force that humans should not tamper with, and the idea that a machine could control the weather was deemed sinful. Also, quote, into the early 1900s, the U.S. Congress avoided the use of manufactured air in the Capitol,

afraid voters would mock them for not being able to sweat like everyone else, end quote. And this persisted into my childhood. Again, my grandparents did not have air conditioning, and they didn't get it. Like, they didn't get it, and they didn't understand why this is a thing everybody has to have. It's like, you know, it's the weather. Of course it's warm in the summer, you know, and the idea that you would spend money in money that is permanently gone, whereas, you know, instead of just wearing a lighter shirt

or whatever seemed like a crazy waste. Especially if you think about people that grew up during the Great Depression, that kind of thing, like just their attitude towards spending money and what you would spend it on. Because if you buy a sweater, you can have that sweater, but you may have owned it for the next 20 years. If you buy some electricity, it's gone. Like you, you spend the money and it's gone instantly. So it just seemed like a very wasteful thing to do to spend a ton of money cooling your house. It seemed even then, even in 1982, seemed like kind of a frivolous thing that a,

like you should just have to tough it out. Like you're spending money because you're not tough enough to take God's thermostat. The temperature that God has given us for this day, like, you know, animals don't need air conditioning. You know, why do you need it? Yeah. Yeah, and so refrigerators start to penetrate sooner because it's smaller and it lets you, like, feed your family more effectively.

AC was a shift that happened later, but it does gradually lose its association with industry and start to be seen as a home thing around the middle of the 20th century. The Atlantic says that it shrank in size. And so then from there, advertising switched from men in the workplace being in the pictures to women at home. And then in the 1950s, it became sort of like buying that Cadillac with the tail fins or buying a TV. It's one of those things that is something you buy if you are a moving-to-the-suburb, successful 1950s American. The Atlantic says that air conditioning arrived en masse in American homes post-war, with more than 1 million units sold in 1953 alone. There's also a thing where cars get AC a little bit later than homes do.

This Atlantic article says that, quote, AC for cars became a status symbol, so much so that some people without car AC supposedly drove around with their windows up in 100 degree heat to give the impression that they had it, end quote, which I completely believe about Americans. That is something we would absolutely do. I have observed people doing this in my youth. Oh, really? And this factor right here is why I wanted to do this episode. It's why I suggested this subject. Because growing up, I can't emphasize enough the degree to which air conditioning and the type of air conditioning you had was a status thing. And that you were emotionally aware of your status if your home didn't have it. And of the neighbors who did have it, you were aware of their status.

And on hot days, all of their windows are closed. So you could see it when you walked past. Their doors are closed. Everybody else, you know, the way you survive on a hot day, it's all your windows are open, your doors are open, you've got fans running, and you're sitting on the porch hoping to get a breeze because that's the only way you can make it through. So then to watch your neighbors just be able to be inside watching TV, not sweating their butts off, it's status. And that's

the, since those post-war years, this is what the show Mad Men is about. When we switched to here's a thing that will improve your life to here's a thing that will improve your status in the community and show everyone how successful you are. Air conditioning became one of those things. So as you mentioned earlier, there are some parts of the world where they need it badly for health and well-being reasons, especially parts of the world that are getting hotter these days. But there's also a thriving middle class in the rest of the world for whom getting air conditioning is going to be that same kind of a status symbol. And we'll talk a little bit later about, you know, India and China and countries that are starting to catch up. It's kind of going to be the same thing because everybody knows what it means.

And it is an objective advantage. If you have air conditioning, you sleep better. Sleep quality means everything in terms of your health, your job performance, everything. So it's such an advantage. And that is, I think, what drove the adoption as fast as it happened is it became a thing where if you are a successful American family, you got a car, you've got the house, you've got the picket fence, and you've got AC. And it is such a tangible benefit too. It is dead on that it's not just people like showing off that they have a thing like you, you sleep better and

function better and that's meaningful. So it's, it, it's no surprise that it took off and it's no surprise that changing the name down to air conditioning instead of something awesome, like weather maker did not a spoil a branding it still worked out yeah and then fast forward to today where if i'm sweating at night i can get up and i can turn the air down one degree and then i can sleep because central air regulates your home temperature so tightly my tolerance for what is too hot is like three degrees one direction in Fahrenheit and and then too cold is like four degrees it's there's like a range of like four degrees at which I'm comfortable which is absurd for any creature on earth because I cannot say that you know, this is, I have to have it.

Like I've become so used to it and so accustomed to it because I work indoors. The whole reason I got into computers after high school was because I knew computers have to be in air conditioning. And therefore I will always be in air conditioning. That was my whole motivation because there's no such thing as a hot computer job, or at least, you know, there wasn't at the time. And the perception is that you will always be in an air conditioned office or else the one air conditioned room in the office is the one that's got the computers because they have to be kept cool. So I've been in these controlled climates for so long that I've totally lost my tolerance for temperature changes. If I went back in a time machine and tried to live in the year 1965, that would be the one thing that would kill me is the inability to, I don't know if I would ever acclimate to it. I never thought of computer work as a way to get air

conditioning, but I remember the computer lab in our grade school being the air conditioned room. Like that, that was the one that had it because they it because they felt the need to keep the computers cool. It was probably smart. They probably needed it. I don't know if you can do polls of your listeners somehow or if on Patreon or Twitter or somehow you can do it. I would love to know what percentage of your listeners went to an air-conditioned high school

because I did not and you did not, right? Yeah, especially because the terrible summer in Chicago was basically outside of the school year so they we we also had no windows but we just had heating and then that was it you know good luck yeah uh and and i know that a lot of high schools are very old buildings still to this day and they've not been retrofitted so i know that's still not an unheard of phenomenon but i'd be curious. I'd be curious to know what percentage of year, because I thought at least as a kid, that the whole reason you got

summer arts off, that summer vacation was a thing was because that building became uninhabitable in the summer. Same. Like it just, because if you, you can't run a bunch of box fans in the room because you can't hear the teacher. They make too much noise so it was like coming back to school in late august was still way way too hot and they would let us out early they we got like 1 30 on those days because it was before the hottest part of the afternoon or before the building got you know it had time to preheat and become become the oven that it wanted to be but and again to again, to this day, when someone tells me like, oh, the air conditioning was down at our high school. It's like, wow, your high school has air conditioning.

What must that be like? To not just be drowsy all summer. Right. Was the hollow deck also down? Was the swimming pool also down? Amazing. When I watched the movie, The Breakfast Club as a youth, I couldn't even hear what they were saying because I would just look at that library they were in and think, Jesus Christ, does that school have like a helicopter that takes you to class? Like, good God, that place is a palace. What do those kids have to be angsty about? If I went to the high school, it's like I'm already successful just by going to this high school.

Anyway, that place had air conditioning. I can guarantee it. Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway. Before that, we're going to take a little break. We'll be right back. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun

or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, and I think we can go from here into our other takeaway for the main episode. Takeaway number two. Air conditioning reformatted and rearranged our entire world. And I think I think this is the kind of thing that makes sense once you think about it, but I never think about it unless I'm making this podcast that buildings, towns, cities, transportation, all of that in the pre-AC world was totally different. Like even more than you might be thinking sitting at home.

Yeah, because I think this is the one question I said earlier. People had to been asking, well, how did you live before air conditioning? Like, how was that a thing? How did you live in Louisiana or in Southern Florida in July and August? Like, how do you just exist where everywhere you went, they didn't have it? How were people just dying of heat stroke all the time and dehydration? And the answer is one, yes, they were. But two, there's a million ways you're going to get into that they used to

build around airflow and things like that and i guess i'm thinking of westerns if i every single person listening while i mentioned a western and a western saloon i mentioned what the door of that place looked like you're all picturing the exact same thing. It's this ridiculous little partial butterfly door thing that isn't like a whole door. Well, I'm going to assume that was for airflow because the idea of closing that place up and, you know, the Western territories or whatever, that would have been crazy. I think when I saw Western movies and shows, I thought it was so that that hinge sound would announce that someone entered. But it's definitely those two weird like cutting boards on hinges because that lets air through. That's obviously why they did it. Now, I literally do not know if that was a real thing or if that was just a Hollywood invention.

But it's an example of the idea of like keeping the bugs out of a room, I think, was just non-existent. You had to be open to the outdoors. It just didn't, you know, so we're going to talk about airflow. You're also talking about tons of mosquitoes in your house, but I, this is another reason why, you know, malaria has killed half of all humans that have existed is because the mosquitoes, you can't keep them out. You can't seal yourself up like you can now. The first reformatting here is this architecture stuff, because central air fundamentally changed it. Cannot overemphasize that. Before central air, the only way to cool a room was to open it to the outside. If a room did not have windows or skylights or some kind of

other port to the outdoors, there was not a way to cool it. I guess you could set up a box fan once you have electricity, or you could just hold a fan and use the power of your own body. But otherwise, that's it. You could not do it. And so buildings were built differently. The folks at 99% Invisible are a great source for this because they do architecture a lot. And their episode called Thermal Delight, they talk about vernacular architecture, which is when design principles develop locally to meet local needs, that's usually climate. So in dry, hot places like the US Southwest, they used lots of stone, lots of adobe, other heavy building materials, because that absorbed the sun's heat and allowed less of it into rooms. There's another 99% visible called Shade,

where they talk about the colonial design of Los Angeles when it was a Spanish colony. The Spanish had a code called the Law of the Indies that put everything on a grid system at an angle where you get maximum sunlight in winter and maximum shade in summer. They had to think about the way they built stuff because they could not just literally flip a switch and fire AC at a problem. They had to construct buildings so that they match the climate because that was how you had to do it. This incidentally is one reason why it's so hard to project what the future will look like. It's so hard to project what the future will look like.

Because if you go back 100 years and ask them to draw a picture of modern day New York, they wouldn't be thinking in terms of, oh, this invention called air conditioning is going to totally change how we build buildings. Oh, yeah. And if I asked you to draw a picture of New York as it will look in the year 2150, you're going to be just as wrong because you've seen sci-fi movies. It's like, oh, they'll all be glass and glass skyscrapers. It's like, well, but there's some invention that will fundamentally change building just as much as air conditioning changed it over the last century, where it totally alters design principles and you're going to get something that's not invented yet. A new type of glass, a new something. the zombies will have arrived something will occur and everything will

be built around that so no you can't every vision of the future is wrong because you're still imagining that the same challenges will exist only it'll it'll be like the new buildings now the whole city will just be like the newest building. But in reality, there will be something that's just as fundamental as the invention of AC. And we just don't know what it is yet. Yeah, really. Because we talked about dry, hot places. There's also the economist Tim Hanford.

His book talks about humid, hot places having their own principles. having their own principles. In particular, the U.S. Southeast became famous for a style of house called a dog trot house, where you have two sets of rooms, and then that's bisected by an open-ended corridor that's covered on the top so you don't get rained on. But it's a breezeway. It's letting air into the whole house by having an open space in the middle of it, because you don't have a box called AC that fixes everything. And then also 99% visible, speaking of high-rises, they say that the first medium-rise buildings of the 20th century are nicknamed alphabet buildings

because if you look at them from the air, the floor plans are sort of winding to allow as much airflow as possible to all the different rooms in it. So you have a lot of E-shaped buildings or H-shaped buildings or a few other letters where there's lots of gaps for air to get in because AC is not going to be common unless you're a dying president. So that's why they built it that way. Yeah. And a lot of these open designs and you talk about like the dog trot houses,ot houses, you've seen this stuff in movies. I realize some people listening to this actually live in a place like that.

But for those of you who can't picture it, any time there's a movie with, I don't know, it takes place in certain parts of Spain or in Mexico, usually, unfortunately, it'll be like a drug kingpin's house, but it's very open. And there's like very these open passageways in between sections of the house. That's why it's all stuff that those are designs based on airflow and letting the breeze blow through the middle of the house, basically. As far as the next steps in architecture, once they had central air conditioning, you could do glass outsides, you could completely wall in rooms. And 99% Invisible points to Los Angeles again as a particular example of everything changing. Because as soon as you have AC readily available, LA switches to some air conditioned high rises and clusters, long air-conditioned car journeys between them, and kind of no shade anywhere. Like you can switch to these goofy decorative palm trees

that came from somewhere else. They're not native to LA. But you can switch to that when you're just in air conditioning. Like you don't need any shade around you because you've already got a box that fixes everything. And it's why if you think about traditional architecture in India versus traditional architecture in South Carolina versus traditional architecture in Massachusetts, those used to be very, very different things. Whereas a building being built today, they could take the exact same floor plan and just build it anywhere. Yeah. Because it's, it's all going to be based on the idea that it's going to have a central HVAC system. It's going to be glass.

It's going to have the same principles that it's going to be very tightly sealed. None of the windows will open, like no matter where you put it. And so it's added a kind of uniformity to architecture. And the other thing, I hate to even bring it up, but one issue with the pandemic was that as we have found out, all of the worst outbreaks were indoors and among people working side by side, talking about meatpacking plants, prisons, nursing homes because now those are completely sealed buildings in the name of efficiency and a lot of them do not have any kind of filtration system or hepa system to like filtrate stuff out of the air so they used to talk about sick building syndrome where you build

buildings where the windows don't open they're're tightly sealed, well insulated. It's all about maximizing your energy use. But they were not thinking in terms of these people all sharing the same expelled air. So you have an airborne virus, and you're just cycling that same air from person to person to person. It turned out to be just a scientifically perfect breathing ground for a coronavirus. Whereas those same people could go out and out on the beach and it turned out

that was fine because there's air circulation. So even now we've not had the conversation we need to be having that there's tons and tons of schools that really, really should be retrofitted with better air filtration because the next pandemic that comes, that would be one of the lessons we learn because the HEPA filter will take that stuff out of the air that we weren't just as we now don't build with anything but central air in mind. We definitely don't build with pandemics in mind, but we should. I mean, when you think about what this pandemic took out of the economy, like what it cost us, you could rebuild every building with that.

You could add, you could add HEPA filters to every building in America. And it would have saved money because of the hit that that delivers to an economy over now a freaking year and a half so far. So that's another thing where you could have the same podcast, you know, a year from now, just talking about the history of air filtration and how badly we dropped the ball on that, because it was all about trying to save money on energy bills and not about the health of the people working there. But, and I'll, and another big change here to talk about besides the rooms and buildings we're in

changing is where we live changed. There's been massive migration, in particular in the United States, sparked by and allowed by air conditioning. And in the US, the big change is that in especially the second half of the 20th century, the Sun Belt filled with people from the North, many of them retirees. I hear the Sun Belt talked about, and it's basically the Southern third, not quite half of the United States. And one source here is The Atlantic. It's an article called Keeping It Cool, How the Air Conditioner Made Modern America by Rebecca Rosen. The Atlantic says that Florida, Southern California, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and New Mexico all experienced above average growth during the

latter half of the 20th century. The Sunbelt's share of the U.S. population went from 28% in 1950 to 40% in the year 2000. So in half a century, it went from a little more than a quarter of the country to 40% of the country because air conditioning made those places more comfortable. to 40% of the country because air conditioning made those places more comfortable. And this is why we saved this point for last, because it's by far the most important. It's not just the United States. You're going to see this everywhere. But it totally changed the migration patterns.

It totally changed where the big cities are. It totally changed the politics, the electoral map. Yeah. Air conditioning, it totally rewrote the pattern of where people settle and which cities were growing. And now like the, what we think of as like the modern growing South, it is entirely due to people willing to live there in the Southwest, you know, due to air conditioning. In the rest of this, I was thinking, because I'm in Durham, North Carolina, and a lot of the reason is the college here. But a lot of other people here, I think, are partly here because of air conditioning. And in places further south in the US, it's more extreme. In a 10-year period in the later 20th century, Tucson, Arizona's population went from 45,000 to 210,000. 10 years, they got,

you know, four or five times as many people. And then in those 50 years, the state of Florida went from 1 million people to 7 million people. That's not all Disney World. That's just a lot of people saying, oh, now there's AC, I'm moving to Florida. let's put seven times as many people there and make it the third biggest state in the country yeah because AC made it tolerable think about a city like Las Vegas where it is entirely tourist from other parts of the country imagine you know Las Vegas in pre-air conditioning days in 1950s 1960s was basically a medium-sized city of i don't know 50 000 people something like that yeah and exploded in the ac area to i think it's metro vegas areas like 2.5 million basically a city that grew up in the middle of the desert

overnight imagine that trying to be a tourist mecca of casinos and theaters that have no AC and hotels have no air conditioning. Like imagine somebody vacationing there from Indiana or Iowa and they go to the desert to where inside this hotel room, it's 147 degrees. Like it's unthinkable, but you don't think about that. When somebody asks you, well, like how did Vegas become a thing? It'd be like, well, you know, they had the gambling and their organized crime,

like set up a bunch of stuff and they just create a bunch of attractions. Like, no, it was air conditioning, air conditioning made all that other stuff possible. If air conditioning doesn't come along, Vegas doesn't exist. Or it continues to be just a small little town that nobody's ever heard of. Because I'm talking to you, I'm thinking of Tabula Rasa and the Zoe books, too. Or there's also these cities that spring up in oil countries in the Middle East. Because of air conditioning, we can just invent a city in a hot place, and there's nothing

stopping us. Yeah, that's the premise of those books. It's a charter city where basically they just found an empty patch of land and started in a new city there, which is a thing that occurs around the world now, where suddenly there's just all of these billions of dollars of investor money flows in, and they've built all of these massive skyscrapers. Again, it's I am assuming that those those giant towers have air conditioning on every floor. And before we look at the rest of the world more, the other big change that this U.S. migration did is it, you know, flipped the political map. It's a natural flip because everybody moved. But the modern southern red states, quote unquote, are because affluent northern people moved to the air conditioned sunbelt.

And then you had a few conservative types of people all at once creating a wall of Republican states. And you saw that in particular in 1980 when Reagan flipped Texas and the entire Southeast except for Georgia and won the election. Jimmy Carter kept Georgia because that's where he's from. But ever since then, the South has tended to be a block of Republican states. The air-conditioned people in Florida have decided pretty much every election, one direction or the other. There's even breaking census news because in the U.S., we rearrange where the congressional seats are based on the new census every 10 years. And according to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, the 2020 census gave Florida one more House seat. And that's a big change,

because it's the first time since 1940 Florida has only gained one House seat. It's usually gained multiple House seats every decade in between. And so that's a huge change, that Florida is only growing pretty fast this past 10 years because air conditioning just sort of invented it out of thin air. Yeah. And it's a state that is you hear about every four years on election night because

it is a state that is made up of like five different populations that are very distinct. Yeah. And and, you know, you have sections that are retirees. You have sections that are, you know, Latino. You have sections that are like in the panhandle, where it's just truly just a part of the South. But it's when talking about what direction Florida is going, it's really hard to understand it until you realize that Florida, Floridians are from all over.

It is a destination. And so you've got the people who were already there. You have the people who migrated there, the people who retired there. And it makes for right now a state that almost decides every election. But it's becoming at the moment more and more Republican just again because of the migration patterns. And then this phenomenon, not the exact Sunbelt phenomenon, but these migration changes are happening worldwide too. We already talked about like Dubai and Abu Dhabi type cities where you can just have a city spring up because you can air condition the desert. There's also some other huge new cities that I think are less obviously caused by AC because we don't think of their location as

deserts. But they are relatively warm places that have huge new cities now that are demanding AC. According to The Atlantic, the city of Shanghai in China now has more than 25 million people. But from 1987 to 2013, which is 26 years, In those 26 years, the population almost doubled. And I looked up the general climate there. It's coastal, it's humid, it's subtropical, which means near the tropics. Shanghai, the yearly temperatures are somewhat similar to Savannah, Georgia, if you know that part of the US, it's sort of like the US Southeast, which means it's hot. And so the massive amount of construction in Shanghai means a massive amount of new AC. And The Economist says that in general in China, from 1995 to 2004, in that decade length period, the amount of homes in Chinese cities with air conditioning went from 8% to 70%.

Again, I know that's a lot of numbers. Just to say it again, from 1995 to 2004, in 10 years, homes in Chinese cities went from 8% of them are air conditioned to 70, 7-0% of them are air conditioned. Yeah. And you mentioned that that like this the location of that city you also have to realize that cities by nature are hotter yeah that pavement absorbs heat there's not as much shade and trees and then you have all these buildings expelling the heat from the air conditioning because again the heat has to go somewhere so cities are naturally they're kind of what they call them, like heat islands or thermal islands or whatever, like they are hotter than the surrounding countryside.

Yeah, that's right. And so it's a huge concentration of new construction in relatively hot places because of climate and urbanization. And so they all want AC. And the future of energy in the world is going to be huge new cities, huge population growth, where people want to have this American convenience. Tim Hanford's book says that 11 of the world's 30 largest cities are in the tropics, like near the equator. And then also, India is a particularly interesting case for this. If there's like a last number for the main show, it's that the size of India's potential demand for AC is 12 times bigger than the US's. This is according to a 2015 study from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

If you combine India having four times the population of the US with three times the hot days of the US, they have a whole metric for what they call cooling degree days, which is where you need AC because of the temperature. India has four times the people and three times the hot days. And so potentially, they'll want 12 times the amount of air conditioning the US has. But as of 2016, only about 5% of Indian homes had AC. So in the next couple decades, countries like that are going to start using the amount of energy the US does or a lot more. And I am not going to be the one to tell them, no, you can't have it. Yeah, same.

We're not going to go backward in lifestyle, God willing. We're not going to ask people in developing countries and developing economies to go backward, that these people are able to have their first air conditioning of their lives in their homes. Hundreds of millions of people have just gotten their first indoor plumbing, their first electricity in the last few decades. Their quality of life is skyrocketing. Like their lives are objectively better than they were before. And in terms of the economy, in terms of how the country functions, the fact that you're able to settle and live in parts of the country that you had previously avoided because they were too hot.

When those that geography may have tons of other advantages where the only reason people weren't settling there was because of the heat during the summer. The fact that you're able to settle there and have their version of Tucson or Las Vegas or whatever, these cities that kind of spring up, people move there for a reason and they were avoiding it previously for a reason. It helps a lot to be able to manage climate and be able to open up places where people can go and live and work. It's all great for individuals. It's great for families. It's great for children and so on. There's even more stuff we're going to add in the bonus episode about the, the objective ways air conditioning helps you, helps your brain function, everything else.

But the needs, the world's energy needs in the next 20 to 30 years are jaw-dropping. That's the challenge of green energy and climate change, is that we need not to start another hot-button issue, but people arguing in favor of nuclear power, this is what they're trying to convey, is that you're not comprehending how much electricity we're going to need once everyone else starts to have a more what we think of as like a Western type lifestyle. And they will have it unless disaster strikes that those changes are going to occur.

There's going to be more cars. There's going to be more air conditioners. It's going to be more meat consumed in places. I also feel like America has done a really good job of broadcasting that we have all of these things, right? Like, it's like, we can't undo decades of American pop culture reaching the entire world. And even the pop culture overstates how nice it is here. But either way, like, we can't just act like we haven't had that stuff now. They saw everything in our shows and movies.

Yeah, we have exported our culture all over the world. And look, if I'm going to the grocery store, I'm going to drive a car. I'm not going to ride my bicycle and then try to strap four grocery bags onto the handlebars of my bike. I'm not going to do it. I'm sorry. So I'm not going to ask the equivalent person in China to do that. If they want a car, who am I to tell them they can't have a car?

If they want to have air conditioning, do they have anything else that I've got, who am I to tell them they can't have it? They're not going to take that advice from us because the lifestyle we have here compared to what they have and the lifestyle we have advertised to the world, like this is what you want to shoot for. Yeah, they're going to have it. And that's good. But this is the challenge. The challenge is that we project life will get much better. That stuff can't all be powered by coal. I realize this is not an episode about coal, but that's why air conditioning is relevant in 2021, because we are about to massively, massively expand the amount of it that's

happening and it cannot be burning coal to do it. It can't. That's the part that's a deal breaker. Man, now I'm, well, for one thing, we have a stat that as of 2015, China got about 70% of its energy from coal. So yeah, so that expansion of AC in China is a big emissions hit. The other thing I'm thinking about, coal is probably a great topic for the show. Gonna put that in my pocket. That would be fun to do. Because this is one of those things where if you had,

if you could bring an equivalent person from 1921 and show them the wonders of what we have, show them my PlayStation 4 and my computer and my smartphone and show them all of these marvels. And that person from 1921 says, well, how are you powering all of this? Are you harnessing the sun or the atom? And I'd be like, oh no, it's coal. It's the same as what you're doing in 1921. And same thing as your grandfather did in 1821 it's coal we have a giant we have a

giant power plant where we burn coal and it just generates heat and spins a turbine and that's and that's this these magical technologies it's all just powered by coal he would think we were nuts like well isn't it isn't it dirty still doesn't it just oh yeah it's it's it's threatening to collapse civilization. It's actually worse than you thought in 1921 when you were choking on the dust and it was eating your lungs alive. It's actually worse. It's threatening to

turn the oceans into acid. But no, yeah, we'll get off of it eventually. Maybe by 2121 maybe we'll be off of it by then. It's like, that's nuts. Do an episode on coal and how we have to stop using coal. I really want to say all that to F. Scott Fitzgerald or whoever the 20s person is and then be like, anyway, how was the trip from the 20s?

You know, just try to like casually keep the segue, keep the conversation going. Do you want a Coke Zero? We zeroed out Coke. that's the main advance yeah does it still have cocaine in it then no folks that is the main episode for this week my My thanks to Jason Pargin for camping out in the living room of this idea. Really, really fun to talk about. Anyway, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff

available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is several surprising ways air conditioning determines your life. We mean that in an astounding way. And you can visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than three dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And not for nothing, this is episode 42 of the show. We are doing a membership drive in the run-up to episode 50, so please consider

backing the show, because there's more benefits than ever before before and we can make a lot of exciting things happen if you become part of making this happen. Also, thank you for exploring air conditioning with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, air conditioning began in the eastern United States as medical and industrial technology with moral judgment against its home use. And takeaway number two, air conditioning reformatted and rearranged our entire world. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. He's great. Jason Pargin is on Twitter at JohnDiesAtTheEN. That is John Dies at the End minus a letter. His latest book is entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the D**k.

That's written under the soon-to-be-retired pen name David Wong. You can find it at your local bookseller or in the episode links. And I want to take time to give you like an extra push to please check out the novels of Jason Pargin. Because for one thing, they're great. You'll just really enjoy them. Also, Jason is a full time novelist. He depends on that for his income and livelihood. Jason's also the only guest on this show who brings in research and like works with me on the prep and everything. And the only way to compensate him for that other than other than if this membership drive works out, then there will be that too. him for that, other than if this membership drive works out. Then there'll be that too.

But the main way to compensate him for that labor of doing research for this show and appearing on this show is to check out his writing. And hey, also, it's great writing, so everybody wins. You'll have a good time. Anyway, thank you for considering that. Also, there are many great research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article in The Atlantic, it's called The Moral History of Air Conditioning, and it's by Shane Cashman. An amazing episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, it's titled Thermal Delight, hosted by Roman Mars, produced by Emmett Fitzgerald. A great book, it's called 50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy. That's by British economist Tim Hanford. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budos Band.

Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.