It includes all of the people who influenced the design and adoption of the new technology--not just engineers and business people but purchasers and users as well. Professor Cooper's insistence that we consider engineering and technological change in its broadest context not only allows her to make the stories of the invention of air conditioning and how America came to be air-conditioned lively ones. It also helps her explain, more generally, some of the ways that new technologies become part of our lives."--Steven Lubar, Chair and Curator of the Division of the History of Technology, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution "With careful research and wonderful prose, Gail Cooper takes the familiar phenomenon of airconditioning and pushes readers to look at it in new ways. Examining engineers, consumers, and corporations in factories, schools, theaters and homes, Cooper presents a large cast of fascinating characters fighting over 'man-made weather.'" --Susan Smulyan, Brown University

In this groundbreaking study, Gail Cooper shows that, from the outset, air conditioning has been the focus of conflict and controversy — well predating today's concerns about fluorocarbons and global warming. While a technical elite of designers, inventors, and corporate pioneers made a comprehensive plans for the new technology, their ideas were challenged by workers, consumers, government regulators, business competitors, and rival professionals.