08/24/23
8/24/2023In weeks like this, it’s not hard to recognize that AAC life is certainly more comfortable than BAC life.
That’s After Air Conditioning and Before Air Conditioning.
The dividing line occurred about 125 years ago, when inventor Willis H. Carrier created the first modern electrical air conditioning unit. He installed it in 1902 in a Brooklyn, NY, printing and publishing plant to control both temperature and humidity.
(Columnist’s note: if you want to know how an AC system works, you can look it up. If I tried to explain it, I’d only confuse you, and would probably get it wrong anyway.)
Talk about an idea for which the world was ready. Before long, with six other employees Carrier founded The Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America. By 2020 it employed 53,000 people and sported a value of $18.6 billion. And that’s only one AC company.
Prior to Carrier, of course, numerous other clever people experimented with various ways to stay cool, including Michael Faraday and (no surprise) Benjamin Franklin. It seemed as if everyone in temperate and warmer climes wanted to reduce hot air (cue Washington political jokes here).
But it was Carrier who summoned the genie. By 2018, according to the International Energy Agency, 1.6 billion air conditioning units (that’s 1,600,000,000) were deployed around the globe, accounting for 20 percent of the world’s electricity usage in buildings. That number is expected to more than triple by the year 2050, to 5.6 billion units.
Window AC units appeared in 1931, and air conditioners for autos followed a year later. Today, except in perpetually cold regions of the world, air-conditioned buildings and vehicles are the norm rather than the exception. For instance, in China between 1995 and 2004 the number of urban homes outfitted with air conditioning rocketed from 8 percent to 70 percent.
But it took a while to get where we are today. For many of us, the olden days were about positioning fans to blow across trays of ice cubes. The summer of 1936 was among the hottest seasons every recorded in the U.S., and thousands of urban residents slept in city parks rather than in their stifling apartments.
Nevertheless, by 2015 almost 87 percent of U.S. homes had air conditioning. Ninety percent of new single-family homes built in America in 2019 were equipped with AC (ranging from 99 percent in the South to 62 percent in the West.)
One study finds productivity to be 24 percent higher in air-conditioned buildings than in those without it.
Starting with the 1970s, the invention has brought massive demographic changes to the United States:
—The summer mortality rate, which had been higher in heat-wave-prone areas, evened out with the rest of the year.
—Before the 1970s the Sun Belt sported 24 percent of the nation’s population. It now stands about 30 percent.
—And one of the more intriguing statistics: the U.S. birth rate had been lower in the spring than in other seasons, but beginning in the 1970s it steadily evened out.
This winter, on one of those unbelievably cold days when you’re working to get your house up to a tolerable 70 degrees or so, think back to this week when you were working to get it down to the same temperature.
Think about how easy it is to reach both goals today, and what it must have been like a couple of centuries ago out on the prairie when humans bowed before the power of nature. Today perfect comfort is only a flipped switch away. Truly an amazing accomplishment.
