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Okay. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories.
Some inventions announce themselves with fanfare. Others change the world so completely, we stop noticing they're there at all. Today we tap a thermostat and hear a familiar hum in the background of life in our homes, schools, offices, hospitals, and cars, asking for almost nothing in return except that we remember it when it breaks. But this invisible force didn't just make life more comfortable, it reshaped America and eventually. The world.
Here to tell the remarkable story of the invention we couldn't imagine living without is Salvatore Basil, author of Cool, How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. Part of the mindset in the nineteenth century. was that he was something that people would ignore rather than deal with. It was considered that there was no way to deal with it. The idea was if you don't think about it, it doesn't happen.
You act as if it hasn't occurred.
So you'd take a handkerchief, mop your brow when needed. If you were a lady, you fanned yourself. And a lot of people got into physical trouble that way. Throughout the United States, Nearly every newspaper during those months had a daily column of. heat prostrations.
Heat deaths. and with very heavy clothing of the era. and pre-automobile horses. Mm-hmm. Also the fact that refrigeration of food was Ice if Yeah.
And the rest of the time, if anything was discarded, it just rotted. And depending on the temperature, it rotted a lot. And we've all dealt with garbage heaps, so we know what that is like. Multiply that. by the number of people in any given city.
and you get an idea of A pretty unpleasant atmosphere. In the 1850s in Florida, Uh doctor. who dealt with fever patients. His name was John Gorey. Had by complete chance, he was a tinkerer, a big tinkerer.
He happened on a way to build what was actually a compressor. powered by a little steam engine.
Well it turned out it not only worked and produced cold air, it could even produce ice. And in those days, that was so revolutionary, and he thought this would be a great boon to the comfort of mankind. a machine that could actually produce cool air. No one believed him. He patented it, he tried to sell it, he died penniless.
so far ahead of the time that people would not believe it.
So, fast forward to the beginning of the twentieth century. The Industrial Revolution is going on full force. There is a great deal of manufacturing. And what a lot of manufacturers are discovering is that summer heat can play havoc with productivity, with quality, with schedules. In Brooklyn, New York.
There was the Williams Printing Company. Which specialized in color printing. And in those days, color printing was a process that required multiple passes. through a printing press of the same paper. in order to lay each color on it one time.
But paper in a humid, warm and humid environment. will swell it.
So every time every sheet of paper was going through the printing press. It was not a whining. correctly. And because these misaligned papers were producing a blur rather than. an actual proper color image.
This company was losing a lot of money and they were getting behind and not making deadlines. This is a problem.
So they contacted a ventilation company in Buffalo, New York. The Buffalo Forge Company. and said, is there anything that can be done about this? And Buffalo Forge. Sent their newest, youngest employee, who was, I think, 21 years old at the time.
Willis Carrier. He in his memoirs later said, At the time I had never thought of any such thing as air humidity. But he began to investigate. He became fascinated by the subject. he began to tinker himself and came up with A mechanical system.
That could remove humidity from air.
Now they installed this. And not only Did the humidity problem improve drastically? But the company management realized that most of the employees wanted to hang around the press room. eat their lunch there, spend as much time as they could there. because the air was actually cooler.
Now carry your thought Oh, we might have something here. No one else was thinking that way. He began to promote this machinery, which he called air conditioning. As it turned out, There were takers, but they were mostly from the industrial sector. and they were people who wanted to improve their productivity.
Process air conditioning, the use of air conditioning to make manufacturing easier, to make productivity higher. That move forward very quickly. The idea of comfort air conditioning hadn't yet Sunk in. He patented his invention in 1902. Within 10 years, many, many factories had installed it.
Henry Ford in his first large-scale plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Had installed air conditioning throughout. This is amazing. During World War I, Air conditioning helped munitions companies, gunpowder. metal work with close tolerances, this all benefited amazingly.
But comfort air conditioning was something that, even though Carrier had tried to push it, No one was quite hearing that message. Until In the 1920s, Hollywood.
Now Hollywood was using air conditioning, but they were using it in their laboratories to dry film quickly. During the teens and twenties, Hollywood had decided that the summer was actually the dead season. No one wanted to go sit inside an unventilated Nickelodeon for a few hours and be smothered. because there was no ventilation. And what ventilation was bringing in possibly hot air from the outside.
Then, on Memorial Day weekend, 1925, The Rivelli Theatre in New York City unveiled a system that Carrier had installed. There was a sign up that was advertising this system. The sign said refrigeration or refrigerating system. It was a little clunky, but that was the idea. The people flooded into the theater, but the system had started late, so it wasn't really cool.
And as Carrier himself had written, he was standing at the back of the auditorium with Adolf Zucker, the head of Paramount. And watching all the people fanning themselves. And he was very nervous about this. But then you could feel the coolness start to come through. And he said, one by one, the fans stopped.
And by the end of it, there was this auditorium full of happy people. And Zucker just turned to him and said, Yes, and people are going to like it. Uh This was a very expensive for the time system. It was $60,000, which was a huge amount of money then. But that system was so effective and so amazing to the public.
that within three months the Rivoli recouped the entire cost of the installation. It was an astonishment. Once the system got moving and was definitely popular, the theater began to post two thermometers: one with the outside temperature, one with the inside temperature, next to the box office window. And they began to advertise that there was this system. And there was a newspaper ad showing the gigantic compressor and a couple sort of pointing up at it in admiration.
Remember, you can enjoy great motion picture entertainment all summer long in cool comfort at this theater. And you've been listening to Salvatore Basil, author of Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. And my goodness, it first started with protecting paper and film, but then came its impact on humans in the movie theater. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of how air conditioning came to be. Here on our American stories.
Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
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Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Uh And we continue with our American stories and the story of the invention we couldn't imagine living without.
Telling the story is Salvatore Basil, author of Cool, How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. Let's pick up where we last left off. It was so foreign to people that they were rather shocked that there was an idea of indoor comfort. There was a movie house owner in Texas who published a page full of angry letters from people who had caught cold from his air conditioning in his movie theater. And he was proud of this.
Now that is a way of dealing with it. For the first time in human history, The average person Had somewhere they could go that was Very affordable, the price of the movie ticket. and guaranteed to be cool. That had never happened. anywhere.
So within five years, Air conditioning took off in movie houses. Like a rockhead. By 1930, even though it was the Depression, if you were a movie house and you were not air-conditioned, you were going out of business. America at Large was beginning to realize, oh, This is definitely a benefit for the summertime. I get a respite.
I don't have to sweat through the entire season. And that's when Other businesses began to say, I think I'd better install this technology. Department stores. Trains. Bit by bit, It became widespread.
and it began to refashion itself into something that was small enough for use in a home. Frigidaire came out with the first what they called a room cooler in 1929. It was actually two machines which weighed a total of 400 pounds and required ductwork between them and a water source. And at that time, it cost as much as a car. It was just a very expensive machine.
So, when the first air conditioners came out for home use, they were incredibly clunky, incredibly large and heavy, that it took a long time for the technology to become something that people could deal with. At the time, Frigidair was advertising it for home comfort.
Well, very soon after that, the stock market crashed. The U.S. hit the Great Depression. They jumped that advertising campaign. And they began to advertise to executives because executives seemed to be the only people in the United States who had any sort of money to play with.
and they kept saying, this will improve productivity. This will help you do a better day's work. There were very few advertisements for people to buy their own units because, again, The upper end of earners had been trained from birth not to pay any attention to hot weather. They were trying to push this in the idea of you'll get the same breezes you would get at Bar Harbor. It was an atmosphere thing.
Leading citizens getting relief. It's silly to suffer from the heat when you can afford the type of constant comfort conditioning featured by a frigid air built. Backed by General Motors' greatest name in American industry. When I was six years old, My aunt Catherine shot the family when she bought two air conditioners. And this was gossip among the relatives for a long time because air conditioners were only for rich people.
But then again, Aunt Catherine's house became the in-spot for family parties. And I thought that might have been only my family. But it turned out that was a pretty universal attitude. There was a lot of tut-tut-tutting. Almost as if If you're air-conditioned, are you giving in to it?
And like every other technology throughout history, The cost, which was huge, began to come down. World War II. put a stop to this for the time being because all the technology was needed elsewhere. But by the 1950s, Window air conditioners were possibly affordable. Even whole house cooling, which had been quite expensive before the war, came down and by that time it was no longer looked upon as something that was only for rich people.
It was becoming more universal. Post-war, an air conditioner was usually hanging around $400 and discounted was $300. but that was still a lot of money. By the early 1950s, There was a number of factors. A.
more prosperity, b more competition with manufacturers, Also, it was an era of keep up with the Joneses.
So status symbols were becoming during the 50s very popular. And this was helped in 1953 by a monster heat wave which enveloped about two-thirds of the world's surface and lasted into September. Because of that, 1953 was a year that air conditioners throughout the United States began to show up for about $195. That became in the shall we spring for it yellow scope. into that category.
And that is when it started to climb. Also, because of the 50s being a status symbol decade, having an air conditioner hanging out of a window. was a big plus. Oh, I'm doing it for the family's comfort. But also it You're a hot talk.
With almost every type of technology throughout history, whenever it's brand new, it is big and very expensive. And then it begins to shrink. and that it becomes available for the home size. and then it will usually take off. and air conditioning is a textbook example of this.
It is something that has changed the world. Take the city of Phoenix, Arizona. Between 1950 and 1960, 10 years, that was the decade during which air conditioning really hit its stride. And during that one decade, the population of Phoenix quadrupled. The rest of the South, it made living in these places possible when it hadn't been before.
What air conditioning has done. is make it possible to live almost anywhere. It had also changed entertainment to the extent that radio and television as we know them would not really have existed without air conditioning. because both of those media started had attempted to start without being air conditioned and very quickly realized that studio life was insupportable without some sort of cooling. and air conditioning made it possible to have what we see today broadcast to us.
You had Henry Ford with a fliver, you had Thomas Edison with a light bulb.
Well, this carrier was a great frontman for air conditioning. if only because He was so devoted to the idea of it. that he was focused beyond focused. This was a man who would order a meal and not eat any of it because he was making calculations. or go on a trip and there was nothing in the suitcase but one handkerchief.
because he was busy making calculations. He was always trying to improve that product and he was fascinated by that product. And people were able to feel through him that they were not being huxtered or pressured. to adopt the idea. His first motto was Every day a good day.
That's really a very powerful slogan, considering that so many days were not good, weather-wise.
So he went this way through his entire life. His business grew, of course. he was determined to continually improve it. And he died in 1950. never having installed air conditioning in his own house.
I maybe never got around to it. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Madison Derricott. And a special thanks to Salvatore Basil, author of Cool, How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. And indeed, it did. My parents often told me that, boy, in the 1940s, when they were young, the only place they could cool off was the movies.
And by the 60s, well, competition and good old-fashioned free enterprise brought something unimaginable to only rich people and accessible only to rich people to every household in America. The story of how air conditioning changed everything. Here on our American stories. Introducing B of A Rewards, a new way to reward your every ambition. It all starts with a Bank of America checking account and grows from there.
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Bank of America Corporation, all rights reserved. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. in the car We learned how to love dogs from the dogs that loved us and waited for us to get home from school.
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