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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. Now, we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We're going to get to it, 100 years of air conditioning. Just to recoup Monday's segment, the 10 warmest years in the historical record have occurred in the last decade. We spoke about it when we did a crawl through temperature averages over the last 100 years, as part of this series on Monday. Here's just 20 seconds of Monday's guest, to take us to the air conditioning conversation.

Climate scientist Michael E. Mann, professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, as he explained to us just how rare the current temperature curve is and why it wouldn't happen without human-caused climate change.

Michael E. Mann: People say, "Oh, well, maybe we're just unlucky. We've had a number of warm years, it's an unlucky roll of the climate dice." You can calculate, in the absence of human-caused warming, how likely something like that would be. We're talking like 1 in 50,000 year events, something that is extremely unlikely to have been observed in the absence of human-caused warming.

Brian Lehrer: That was thing five, on Monday's show. Now, we're up to thing six, which, yes, follows suit, and is air conditioning. 100 years ago, in 1924, a department store in Detroit, called J. L. Hudson's, became the first to use air conditioning to cool its stores. Sales ticked up immediately, and the demand for air-conditioned public spaces soared, most notably, movie theaters. Over the decades, air conditioning became ubiquitous in American homes, as we know, also transportation, also other shared spaces.

It also represented a problem. The chemicals used in the cooling process were the same chemicals that contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer. Joining us now to talk about air conditioning's rise to prominence in American culture, decade by decade, through how, recently, having ACs has gone from being a luxury to being arguably, at least, a human right, is Eric Dean Wilson, Queens College writing instructor and author of the book After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Eric, welcome back to WNYC. Hi.

Eric Dean Wilson: Hi, Brian. Great to be on.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to 1924 and '25 in a second, but the history of the modern air conditioner, I see, goes back to 1902, Willis Carrier, we know the brand Carrier Air Conditioners to this day, invented the first modern electrical air conditioning unit as a way to solve a moisture problem, I see, for a publishing company. Can you tell us that story?

Eric Dean Wilson: That's right. Carrier is probably a familiar name to many people. Willis Carrier was an engineer who was, as a very young man, put on this job to help out a printing press that was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, actually, and the building is still there. It's actually artist studio lofts right now. There was a printing press that was having trouble printing a color magazine in three different colors during the summer.

The reason was that it was so humid, that the colors were running as they put it through the machine, so they were wasting a lot of money and a lot of paper. They figured if they could control the humidity, if they could lower the humidity, then maybe, they would save a lot on printing in the summer, and they could actually print the magazine. They put Willis Carrier on the job. Nothing really like it had quite been done before.

There was one false start in the 1840s, but really, this is the first industrial air conditioner. Interesting that it was not to cool people for comfort, it was for manufacturing. In fact, he was quite successful. It did dehumidify the space, and the magazine ran a successful print run.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and aimed less at temperature than humidity. Of course, to this day, one of the things that people use air conditioners for, in addition to reducing the temperature, is to dehumidify a space, to some degree. You write that, "In 1922, to help improve the performance and reduce the cost of air conditioners, Carrier invents the centrifugal chiller." Centrifugal chiller. It's the first time I've ever said that on the show. Can you tell us about that innovation, and how it greatly expanded the use of ACs?

Eric Dean Wilson: Sure. Yes, you're right to say that humidity is something that is really important to control with air conditioning. Nowadays, we think of air conditioning as simply cooling, but Willis Carrier understood that, really, to control the climate, to control the air, you had to control humidity, the temperature, whether it's hotter or colder, the purity of the air, and then airflow. He really mastered that with this 1922 invention.

Before that, there was air conditioning, but it was a lot clunkier. This was a sleeker, more efficient design that could air condition much higher volumes of space. There's a really funny anecdote about how Carrier had invited a lot of investors to a dinner, to premiere this centrifugal chiller, but he didn't have time to test it before. While he was giving a speech to the investors, he turned it on and heard this really loud banging.

He continued with his speech as if nothing were happening, but he thought, "Oh my goodness, I'm done for." As it turns out, the loud banging was caterers in the next room, dragging a metal table across the floor, it had nothing to do with the centrifugal chiller. It was quite successful, and it made possible, really, for the first time, the chilling of enormous spaces, for instance, movie theaters.

Brian Lehrer: You write about the Rivoli Theater in Manhattan, in the summer of 1925. Can you briefly tell us that story, and what you think it represents about this moment?

Eric Dean Wilson: Sure. Yes, absolutely. We now take for granted the summer blockbuster, but that really wouldn't have been possible without air conditioning. At the time, when movie theaters first came out, before 1925, of course, if you think about it, in order to see a movie, you have to shut out all the windows. It's a very enclosed space. It can be really stuffy. The Nickelodeons of the early 20th century were really foul-smelling places.

In order to make a movie theater really happen, you have to be able to have some kind of airflow. The Rivoli Theater in Manhattan was really interesting because it was the first time that a public was sold cooling as an enticement, as a comfort. The irony was that cooling a large space like a movie theater was actually really hard to do. During the summer, sometimes they'd open the doors, and if you were passing by, in 90-degree weather, you could feel the air conditioning, and it felt really good.

Once you were inside and you sat down, about five minutes into the movie, you would be extremely uncomfortable, because you were so cold. They hadn't really yet figured out how to control it for comfort. Again, interestingly, going back to the very first use of it, the air conditioning here wasn't necessarily for survival, it was for profit, for better sales of movie tickets.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if we can bring in some of your oral histories here. When did you first experience air-conditioned public spaces? If you have had a before and after period in your life, either because of your personal family circumstances, whatever they were, or because you're just old enough to have experienced a before and after era of air conditioning in any way, do you remember when you or your family first got air-conditioning at home, for example? 212-433-WNYC. Share a little bit of oral history.

We always are going to try to do oral histories from you in these 100 Years of 100 Things history series. What about memories of public transportation, or the first air-conditioned car you owned? We're going to talk about that development with our guests. Tell us your oral AC Histories now, at 212-433-WNYC. You can also text to 212-433-9692. The problem with ACs of that era, we're still in the 1920s, was that the chemicals used in cooling, Eric, weren't the safest.

You write, in 1928, scientists at General Motors synthesized chlorofluorocarbons, CFC refrigerants, for Frigidaire. By the 30s, CFCs, also known by their DuPont trademark, Freon, became the main industrial chemical used in air conditioners. Can you explain what CFCs are, and why they were initially used, and we'll get to what they did to the ozone layer?

Eric Dean Wilson: Absolutely. There was air conditioning before Freon, but it often used refrigerants that were either poisonous or exploded, or sometimes, both. It didn't happen all that often, but it was always a possibility, say, of an ammonia leak in a movie theater, which, if you've ever smelled ammonia, that's quite unpleasant. In the '20s, Frigidaire knew that it could make a lot of money if it found some kind of refrigerant that would be stable, cheap, and efficient at cooling.

It did so with this very quirky inventor, named Thomas Midgley Jr., who actually also happens to be the inventor of leaded gasoline. One historian called him a two-time environmental loser.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, gosh. Oh, geez. Loser hardly begins to--

Eric Dean Wilson: [crosstalk] Not [unintelligible 00:10:51] to be Thomas Midgley Jr.

Brian Lehrer: Loser hardly begins to say it, right?

Eric Dean Wilson: [chuckles] That's right. He's one of the real kooks of inventor history. He found it, really, the story goes, within a matter of three days, and it made Frigidaire, as they suspected, a lot of money, as well as Thomas Midgley Jr. At the time, it was seen by all available evidence as incredibly safe. That is safe to smell, safe on a direct interaction with humans, but, of course, it wasn't exactly as safe as we thought it was.

Brian Lehrer: Now that we're in the 1940s, I want to play a clip that our producer for this segment, Amina Srna, dug up, that it's unbelievable by today's standards. It's amazing that this still exists somewhere. This is a 1941 promotional film by the company Carrier, called Weather by Carrier: The Story of Air Conditioning. This runs one minute.

Speaker: Doctors tell us that it is the dust, dirt, and pollen in the air that cause many of our illnesses, such as hay fever, pollen asthma, and many other ailments. Instead of traveling away from business and home to seek relief, you can obtain this same comfort right in your own home, or office, through air conditioning. A thimbleful of air contains as high as 750,000 tiny dirt particles. Every day, the average person breathes 32 pounds of air.

Carrier can enhance the healthful quality of the air you breathe in your home, where you work, or in any public place. A day when the thermometer reads 70 degrees can be extremely uncomfortable if the air contains so much moisture that it gives you that muggy feeling. In the manufacturing and handling of countless products and materials, temperatures and excess moisture in the air have a very costly effect, both in summer and winter.

Brian Lehrer: That from a Carrier air conditioner promotional film in 1941. Eric, everything he said in that clip is not wrong, including the medical stuff. I was once personally involved with taking care of a baby with asthma, and one of the things we were supposed to do with him was keep him in air conditioning in the summer because, primarily, of the humidity.

Eric Dean Wilson: Yes, that's right. It's interesting because the air conditioning has always been controversial in terms of whether it's healthy or not. When I was finishing this book, it was happening around the start of COVID, and I was writing a section of the book about the early wars, about whether or not to air-condition public schools. There was this group called the Open Air Crusaders, who believed that children should learn in the open air, including in Chicago, on top of Chicago rooftops, in February, which, let me tell you, is not very healthy for the children.

There was a real debate about whether it was healthy to throw windows open or not. As I was finishing the book, during COVID, we were having that same debate again, about whether it was healthy to have open windows, how to ventilate them. In a way, it's always been a question about what is the healthiest air quality.

Brian Lehrer: We have it again now, in the last few years, with the air quality alerts that we're getting because of wildfires happening, even far away from New York or other places, and people who might keep their windows open, on some summer days, closing them and using air conditioning, if they have air conditioning,-

Eric Dean Wilson: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: -to protect them from that air pollution. Let's take an oral history call. Arnold, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Arnold. Thanks so much for calling in.

Arnold: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I have two anecdotes. We were the first family on our block to get air conditioning in 1956. The reason we got it was my father had suffered a massive heart attack approximately the year before, and the medical advice was so he could sleep in the heat and not strain his heart, we had air conditioner, a window air conditioner in his bedroom, in our parents' bedroom, in 1956. That was very unusual at the time.

Brian Lehrer: Arnold, that's a great story. I see from your timeline, Eric, that the 1940s was when the window air conditioners first came in. Also in the '40s, Packard introduced the air-conditioned car, at least as an option, not yet a standard. Want to talk more about that moment, and how AC in cars went from a luxury to a standard feature?

Eric Dean Wilson: Absolutely. Arnold's story is really interesting to me and resonates with what I found to be surprising in this history, which is that you'd think that we were all just sitting around waiting for air conditioning. Actually, the evidence shows the opposite, which is that it took a really rigorous advertising campaign, from the air conditioning companies themselves, to convince American homeowners and drivers that they wanted air conditioning.

It doesn't surprise me that, in 1956, having air conditioning in the home would have been rare. It was, and still is, depending on what part of the world you are, also doubles as a class marker, or rather, it can. The reason for that is that I think that people had been so used to sweating it out during the summer, before it had become an accustomed way of life. During the '40s and '50s, there was a pretty targeted campaign to try to convince Americans that they not only wanted air conditioning, but they needed it.

Once again, it was linked with health, despite the fact that, of course, we've lived on this earth prior to 1902 without air conditioning. That's something that's very interesting to me. During the '40s and '50s, there were these moves to build houses in a modernist style, where air conditioning was no longer really an option, it was beginning to be required, because the houses were so poorly ventilated, basically. Cars followed after that, quite swiftly, so that by the '90s, pretty much every car had air conditioning in it.

Brian Lehrer: We're in our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. It's Thing 6 today, 100 Years of Air Conditioning, with Eric Dean Wilson, Queens College writing instructor and author of the book, After Cooling: on Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Let's take another oral history call. Norma, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Norma. Thanks so much for calling in.

Norma: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I remember going to the movies when I was little and being cautioned that I had to be sure it didn't say the movie was air-cooled, but said air-conditioned specifically, because air-cooled meant that they were blowing air over blocks of ice, [laughs] and it wasn't. You were paying the premium for air-conditioned, so you had to really look carefully and see what it said on the marquee.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, great memory. Thank you very much. Another one coming in, in a text message, listener writes, "I grew up in Maine in the '80s and '90s, without AC, before the effects of climate change. It wasn't hot enough to need it. When I went to grad school in Chicago, in the early 2000s, I was traumatized by what I felt was extremely hot weather. My dad told me I needed to buy an AC. I was completely flummoxed, coming from Maine, as I didn't know you could just buy an AC. I figured it out and got one."

Jane, in Chelsea, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jane.

Jane: Hi. I'm a lady pushing 90. We got an air conditioner for me in the 1940s, because my mother had a latent life child, and I was kicked out of my bedroom, and I was sent up to the attic. Well, you know what an attic is like. It's like hell. I had an air conditioner up there, and it was wonderful. I can also tell you, a month ago, I went to a Broadway show, sitting in the front row mezzanine, and during the intermission, I went down and complained because it was so freezing cold up there. I had goosebumps. You go from the attic to Broadway.

Brian Lehrer: Great story, Jane. Thank you very much. From the attic to Broadway. Continuing with our timeline, the US Census actually began tracking residential air conditioning information in 1960. You write, "At the time, around 18% of all Florida residents reported having domestic air conditioning, but only 2% of Black residents in the state had it." Then, you write that in the 1970s and '80s, the racial gap narrowed considerably, but never, in the Southern States, closed entirely.

By 1980, more than half of all US homes were air-conditioned. That's by 1980, and more than 25% had central air conditioning, but those numbers were far lower for non-white residents. We have those racial disparities, not in same numbers, but in the same direction, to this day, don't we?

Eric Dean Wilson: We do. It's interesting that air conditioning really also transformed the country, the United States, politically, and transformed the voting block, by growing Southern states, the density of Southern states. The racial aspect of air conditioning has actually been with it from the very start, which was something that was extremely surprising to me. Actually, Benjamin Franklin, of all people, had experimented with artificial mechanical cooling, and I found a letter in which he wrote to a yellow fever doctor, describing this.

It was an experiment that he had copied from a Scottish scientist, William Cullen. He said, "This is so great. You can see how you can freeze a man to death in the dead of summer." Then, in the next two pages, he talks about how this will be great for white people, but for the enslaved Africans, they don't need it.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Eric Dean Wilson: In the very first instance in which air conditioning is imagined in the United States, it's also categorically denied to the Black population. Unfortunately, this is something that we see resonate through the whole history of air conditioning because it's the history of the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text message from a listener related to that. This is a big theme of your book, but the listener writes, "My father always said that air conditioners ruined the community neighborhood. Before World War II, he described a lovely front porch culture, where children played in the front yards and streets, and the old people sat on the porch or visited with neighbors. They were waiting for the house to cool in the evening. Once AC came, everyone went inside and lost the interaction." What do you think about that text?

Eric Dean Wilson: I think it makes perfect sense. There's a great essay by the late great Bell Hooks about this, exactly. In that essay, she writes that the front porch in the south, where she grew up, was a place where the women had a sense of power and could watch each other, and watch the neighborhood. With the arrival of air conditioning, everybody was shut inside. People were more isolated. They became more paranoid.

Whether or not the neighborhoods actually got dangerous, some did, there was a real feeling of not knowing your neighbors, and so there was a real feeling that the neighborhoods were dangerous. I think that it's hard to track that cultural shift, but from so many accounts, that seems to be a real loss that the air conditioner invited.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take one more oral history call, and this is going to come from former and retired New York State Assembly member, Richard Gottfried, of Manhattan, who I think is going to recall for us the first time that he was ever on an air-conditioned subway car. Hello, assembly member Gottfried. Is that what you're going to tell us?

Richard Gottfried: Yes, indeed. It was in the 1960s. I think it was under Mayor Lindsay. We'd heard, oh, my goodness, the city was getting-- because in those days, the subways were run by the city, the city was getting air-conditioned subway cars. I remember the first time one of them pulled into the station where I was waiting for the train, and I got on, and it was just amazing.

To this day, any time I get on a car where the air conditioning is not working, I think back to that experience, when I was getting onto this bright new subway car, and it was cool in the middle of the summer.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. To the point where now, and for a long time already, I've noticed in the summer, on hot days, you can tell which cars have seats and which cars don't have seats, if you're traveling in rush hour. I just went through this last week, on the number one train, which is my line, and I noticed, "Oh," on this very hot day, some of the cars were packed with people, with standing room only, and some of the other cars, as the train was entering the station, were very empty. I thought, "I know what that is."

The cars where the air conditioning is working are the packed ones, and so you pick your poison. Do you want to take a car where you have to stand and be in a crowd, or do you want to take a car without air conditioning, but you can have a seat? By the way, I'm a take-a-seat person. Richard Gottfried, thank you very much for calling in. Almost out of time with today's 100 Years of 100 Things, WNYC Centennial Series. Today, Thing 6, on 100 Years of Air Conditioning.

Just to finish up, on the environmental story, they eventually banned the chlorofluorocarbons, and air conditioners use other technology. We know there's this paradox that people want air conditioning more because of global warming, but the electricity and everything that we use to make air conditioning so ubiquitous contributes to global warming. In the beginning of this conversation, Eric, I mentioned that air conditioning has gone from a luxury to, arguably, a human right.

Just last week, New York City Council member Lincoln Restler proposed a bill to require landlords to provide air conditioning in the summer, just as they are required to provide heat in the winter. I wonder what you think about that, in the context of your book.

Eric Dean Wilson: Absolutely. I want to be clear that I think that everyone who needs air conditioning, especially in a dangerous condition, should have access to it. There's been lots of arguments for air conditioning, in terms of energy efficiency. As air conditioners get more energy-efficient, the cooling infrastructure worldwide also expands. Likewise, when we think about how to combat a heatwave, we often turn to the thought of privatized individual air conditioning. That is not quite as good a tool as you might think at first.

For one, air conditioning is only good if you can afford it, and the electricity for it, which this bill seems to address directly. I'm not super up-to-date on the bill, but that's what it seems to do. The other thing is that something very troubling happened a couple of years ago, in the summer, is that during a heatwave, ConEd deliberately cut electricity to certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn, that were majority Black and Brown working-class neighborhoods, in order to, in their words, "Preserve the integrity of the system as a whole."

To me, it really kicks the can down the road of the greater issue, which is that public utility companies should really be owned and in the hands of the people, not in privatized companies who are privileging profit over public health, I think. It also points to something else, which is the need for more public spaces that are safe and cool, as well as more access to shady public green space, like the park.

If you've ever walked through Prospect Park on a really hot day, or biked through it for the swifter change in air, you can feel that it drops by about 10 degrees, and that's because trees act as natural air conditioners. While I think that people should have more access to cooling that saves their life, I also think that we should look at these greater infrastructural issues that are better for the long term.

Brian Lehrer: That's 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing 6, Air Conditioning. Coming up on Monday, thing number 7, 100 Year History of New York City Baseball. Today, we thank Eric Dean Wilson, Queens College writing instructor and author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Thank you so much. This was so informative and interesting.

Eric Dean Wilson: Thank you, Brian. A pleasure to be on.

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