Synopses & Reviews
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 articulated a comprehensive vision of the new technology, their ideas were challenged by workers, consumers, government regulators, business competitors, and rival professionals.
Beginning with two famous air conditioning installations in 1904 -- the New York Stock exchange and the Sackett-Wilhelms Printing Company -- Cooper describes the efforts of engineers to achieve artificial climate indoors. Such "man-made weather" helped transform the new motion picture theaters of the teens and twenties into sumptuous palaces of luxury and comfort. With icicles hanging from the marquee and a sign claiming "Twenty-degrees colder inside!" theaters educated the public about comfort air conditioning and created a formidable set of expectations for the first residential systems to appear in the 1930s. Only when builders in the postwar era learned to redesign the suburban home around air conditioning did consumers get man-made weather at affordable prices. Until then Americans experimented with the ultimate consumer luxury, the window air conditioner, which followed them wherever they went.
Air-conditioning America is the story of how the grand vision of a new technology was shaped by the realities of the changing world of mass production, engineering professionalism, and consumer demand. It provides new insight into how engineers and technical expertise fit into these complex forces of modern life.
Synopsis
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.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-221) and index.