Air-conditioning America

Sinopse

In this groundbreaking study, Gail Cooper shows that, from the outset, air conditioning has been the focus of conflict and controversy - well predating today's concerns about fluorocarbons and global warming. When at the turn of the century a technical elite of designers, inventors, and corporate pioneers launched this promising new technology, their ideas were challenged by workers, consumers, government regulators, business competitors, and rival professionals. Cooper describes the efforts of engineers to achieve artificial climates indoors. Such "man-made weather" helped transform the new motion-picture theaters of the teens and twenties into sumptuous palaces of luxury and comfort. Cooper demonstrates how the lure of the open air, from rooftop schoolrooms to open-air theaters to the front porch, challenged air conditioning. Americans were slow to give up the social rituals of hot-weather living - the cold drink, the cool clothes, the summer vacation - for the comforts of either the window air conditioner or the central system.