Articles
Sitting in the PE office on a particularly hot summer’s day, we turn with relief to the respite of air-conditioning. It is a technology that is rarely relied on heavily in everyday life in Britain. However, for those living in much hotter climes, the invention has provided more than relief from mild discomfort – it has saved lives, and even spurred on a cultural and demographic change.
At least that is what author Salvatore Basile claims, in Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything. While it may seem a bold claim, Basile does a good job of convincing the reader of the great importance of this much overlooked technology. He takes us on a historical tour, looking at what urban life in the US was like before mechanical cooling came about, as well as the various guises of air-conditioning technology over the years – from ancient Persian wind towers to the large blocks of ice used to cool the air for audiences at Madison Square theatre in New York.
What is interesting to discover is not only the kinds of air-conditioning technologies developed over the years – which the author describes with a fair level of technical explanation – but also the not-so-warm reception to the idea from the general public. People were initially wary of a machine that claimed to do something as dangerous as create cold air – a condition many would be inclined to avoid, linked as it was with discomfort and deadly illness.
However, for those who could not afford to escape the sweltering heat of inner-city life in summer, the risk of living and working in such conditions could be just as deadly, Basile reveals. Accounts of employees in literal sweatshops keeling over from heat stroke, or New Yorkers plummeting to their deaths after trying to seek cooler air on apartment-block rooftops, ultimately led to a social revolution, he says, with workers and poor tenants demanding the right for their buildings to be air-conditioned.
The book is littered with interesting and humorous anecdotes about inventors and their successful, and not-so-successful, cooling contraptions, as well as newspaper clippings, illustrations and patent drawings. These, and Basile’s entertaining writing style, artfully draw you into the surprisingly interesting story of how air conditioning changed everything. Or at least, how it changed everything in the US.
Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, by Salvatore Basile, is published by Fordham University Press, and costs £24.99 (hardcover).