The Boston Globe

ALEX BEAM
Hot About Air Conditioning

By Alex Beam  |  Tuesday, July 2, 2002

By way of expressing its First Amendment right to free expression, the Syracuse (N.Y.) based-Carrier Corp. has hired a public relations firm to promote the 100th anniversary of air conditioning. That would be July 17, the day Buffalo-born engineer Willis Haviland Carrier installed a system that controlled both temperature and humidity inside a Brooklyn printing plant.

How could they have known that I loathe air conditioning? That I figure among the 1.6 percent of car buyers who specifically ask NOT to have AC? (Temperature in my car Friday: 106. If you can't take the heat, get off the expressway.) That I will never own a home with extravagantly wasteful central air conditioning, and that I am constantly turning our few window units to the "Energy Save" - read: completely ineffectual - setting, sending my already low family popularity rating into the deep freeze.

How could they possibly know that the only column I would write about air conditioning would be: "Air Conditioning: The Silent Killer." Air conditioners, for instance, are the classic breeding ground for Legionnaires' disease, the occasionally fatal illness. Not long ago, an 18-year-old woman was electrocuted by the electronic key card in her Maryland hotel room. "We have concluded the electrical charge was being transmitted from the air conditioner to the door," a spokesman for the Prince George's County police told the Associated Press.

It could happen to you.

But there's more. On a whim, I asked Carrier's flack if she would send me Marsha Ackermann's recently published "Cool Comfort: America's Romance With Air-Conditioning." As it happened, she had several copies at hand. As it happens, Ackermann, a professor at Eastern Michigan University, shares my detestation of air conditioning. As it happened, Ackermann once penned a newspaper column "that blamed my personal discomfort, the rise of the Sun Belt, the decline of Buffalo [her hometown] and a variety of other social and physical ills on the Syracuse, New York-based Carrier Corporation."

Talk about a public relations meltdown!

"Oh, cool!" were the first words out of Ackermann's mouth when I told her I was reading her book. She is happy that Carrier has included "Comfort" in its centennial celebration, although she allows that the company's endorsement is pretty weird. I don't think they read it in its entirety. This book is not exactly pro-air conditioning.

No, not exactly. It is primarily a cultural history of America's romance with the energy-wasting big chill, starting with the 1920s pseudo-scientific notion that cold-zone civilizations were superior to hot-zone civilizations. (Babylon? Egypt? The Fertile Crescent? Never mind . . .) The well-to-do, Ackermann points out, had their own air conditioning - a second home on a lake, or near the ocean. But in the summer, the masses sweltered, and it was mass consumer culture that first embraced the new technology. The warehouse-size downtown movie theaters first installed 50-ton refrigerator-compressors to boost summer grosses. Soon the grandiose, center-city department stores followed suit, to lure customers ("It's Cool Inside!") to their bargain basements and subsequently to their upper-floor salons.

Once air conditioning could be economically situated in the home or car, open-window ventilation never had a chance. "The greatest contribution to civilization in this century may well be air conditioning," effused Englishman Sydney Markham in 1942, "and America leads the way."

But the history of air conditioning in America boasts an impressive line of dissenters, including Franklin Roosevelt, Mary Baker Eddy ("temperature is mental") and Frank Lloyd Wright. The great architect who designed the famous, windowless S.C. Johnson office building in Racine, Wis., later soured on AC, proclaiming in 1954 that "to me, air conditioning is a dangerous circumstance." Likewise Gore Vidal: "I link the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention of air-conditioning," he wrote in 1982. "Before air-conditioning . . . Washington was deserted from mid-June to September. But since air-conditioning? Congress sits and sits while the presidents and their staff never stop making mischief."

Roosevelt, Wright, Vidal, and . . . me. Pretty cool company, wouldn't you agree?

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com