Blow, Cool Air

Air conditioning celebrated the 60th year of its existence last week in its own peculiar, purring style. No fuss, just cool and quiet.

Men have long made desperate attempts to keep cool. In the summer of A.D. 221, Roman Emperor Heliogabalus sent i.ooo slaves into the mountains for snow to cool his gardens. Sweltering men have produced bizarre notions too: one 19th century inventor drew a fanciful suit of Venetian blinds, including a Venetian-blind hat. Various theaters and the Hungarian Parliament tried blowing air over massive amounts of ice.

Gasping Leviathans. But modern air conditioning began with the discovery that cooling was not enough; it was also necessary to control the humidity. In 1902 Willis Carrier, who is said by his corporate heirs to be air conditioning's Edison, designed his first system for a Brooklyn printing plant (muggy air was wrinkling the paper for Judge magazine). In this system, coils both cooled the air and condensed the moisture out of it. But progress was slow at first. It was 1914 before the first home air conditioner--a huge, gasping leviathan--was installed in the Minneapolis home of Charles Gates, the son of Bet-a-Million; it was 1930 before the first air-conditioned railroad car was in regular service.

The first machines were massive, noisy, and filled with toxic chemicals. A major breakthrough came in 1938, with the introduction of a system that blew high-velocity air through thin conduits, eliminating the need for bulky air ducts in air-conditioning large buildings. With postwar prosperity--and advances in metallurgy, refrigerants and technique--the window air conditioner was introduced to an eager market, and the industry was on its way.

Space & Earth. Today, air conditioning is a $3.2 billion business. Sixty million Americans now lead lives that are at least in part air-conditioned. Air-conditioning units are in 6,465,000 U.S. homes, six out of ten hotel rooms, half the office buildings, 15% of U.S. hospital rooms, and every other car in Texas.

The air-conditioning industry points out with pride that the space age would not be possible without it. Many of the instruments and gadgets that go into the space-age rockets cannot be constructed except in sealed laboratories, where the air is sterilized, dust-free and closely controlled in temperature. Nor could any astronaut survive the blasting heat of re-entry or the paralyzing cold of outer space without air conditioning.

In earthly comforts, the industry is concentrating on centrally located, massproduced air conditioning: last month the Hartford Gas Co. inaugurated the U.S.'s first utility-operated air-condition ing plant, which will offer metered air conditioning to any building in the entire downtown area. In Washington a builder has installed a central system for 134 new town houses, piping chilled and hot water into each and dispensing with the need for furnaces, hot-water heaters and chimneys.

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