AIR CONDITIONING

Air Conditioning

When you pay your bill for the electricity you have used this month to keep cool, think about all of your ancestors (and you, if you are older than a teenager) that lived before you were born who did not have access to air conditioning. In an article written by Stanley Marcus, he states that air conditioning has affected human comfort in the South more than any other invention in the 20th Century! Some of us can recall sleeping in a screened porch at night, directing fans to blow over a block of ice, cold watermelon to eat, wet towels spread on the bed to cool the sheets, playing on the shady side of the house in the mornings, or using the hose with a sprinkler to cool off in the afternoon.

In the 1830s a Florida doctor, John Gorrie, began experimenting with mechanical cooling in an attempt to lower body temperatures of malaria and yellow fever victims. In early Dallas in the 1860s, William Gaston constructed an ice plant and shared the ice with his neighbors when they ran high fever from malaria. The water for his ice plant came from the clear spring-fed pond on Thomas Lagow’s land (near Fair Park now.)

Willis S. Carrier invented the first air cooling unit in 1902. This now made it possible to ride a train without being covered with soot or to read a book without being bothered by various insects or to cool off in a movie theater. Two of the first movie houses to be artificially cooled were the Palace Theater on Elm Street in downtown Dallas in 1924 and the Texan and Iris Theaters in Houston.

For the families that could afford it, many of the mothers and children went to cooler places like Colorado for the summer. It was said the moral climate for Dallas improved in the 1950s when home air conditioning became the rage and the price of window units was lowered enough some families could now afford them. The wives stayed in town and the men no longer got “in trouble” by being left alone for weeks at a time!

In 1930 a Cadillac in Houston was the first car to be air conditioned. This was with a condensing unit in the trunk of the car and a blower behind the driver’s seat.

Now in 2005 all we have to do is adjust the thermostat and figure out how to pay the bill!