I sent this to the list last week but it seems not to have 
made it through.

Crossposted from H-Business.  Apologies if you have seen it 
before....


Gail Cooper. _Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled
Environment 1900-1960_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. x +
229 pp. Photos, notes, essay on sources, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-8018-5716-3.

Reviewed by David Kinkela, Department of History, New York University.

Published by H-Urban (March, 2000)

Gail Cooper's book, _Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled
Environment, 1900-1960_, describes what one might call a hotly contested
history of cool indoor air. The book explores the ways in which producers
and consumers of cool conditioned air defined its use while also trying to
determine who controlled and maintained the indoor environment. Cooper
writes, "Two distinct traditions [emerged] in the deployment of air
conditioning. One is the choice of design professionals, engineers, and
architects, who favor[ed] a controlled and rational system....A second is
the choice of some users, who want[ed] an interior that is more comfortable
but not necessarily ideal and who favor a technology that is above all
flexible and responsive to the consumer's needs" (3). Cooper provides an
astute reading of the tenuous relationship between producers and consumers
suggesting that air conditioning was in many ways a struggle of implementing
a technology and imposing one's scientific knowledge onto a public realm
where the understanding of comfort was highly individualized. In order to
illustrate this contentious relationship, Cooper examines how two particular
air-conditioning technologies -- the central cooling unit and the window
unit -- affected how engineers and the public at large experienced and
defined cool indoor air.

By identifying central cooling and window units as independent technologies,
Cooper asserts that Americans experienced two distinct indoor
environments -- one controlled and regulated, the other, flexible and
individualized. She suggests that not only has the "split in
air-conditioning technologies...resulted in a giant public policy headache,"
but also that "many Americans personally experience the schizophrenic
character of modern air conditioning by working in one kind of
air-conditioned space and living in another" (3). For Cooper, this type of
binary experience brings into question "whether technological design can
wholly be entrusted to either the technical elite or the market forces of
our consumer culture" (4). Although Cooper does not provide answers to this
intriguing question, she forcefully demonstrates how air-conditioning
technologies shaped and were shaped by producers and consumers alike.

Published as part of Johns Hopkins University Press's series on the History
of Technology, _Air-Conditioning America_ focuses almost exclusively on the
air-conditioning industry, pointing out specific technological innovations
and improvements, while also tracing how engineers, and the industry as a
whole, brought air-cooling products to the marketplace. Using such a
strategy, Cooper relies heavily on the history of those individuals who
produced and marketed the emerging technology. The central protagonist in
this story is Willis Carrier, the described father of air conditioning, who
in conjunction with his company, the Carrier Corporation, set out to cool
indoor America, from factories to pleasure palaces, and from the office to
the home. Carrier's importance as a technological innovator as well as an
entrepreneur captures the conflict Cooper describes between scientific
achievement and control over indoor atmospheres, in addition to the notion
that cool air was a product to be bought and sold. In this reader's opinion,
selling air is one of Carrier's true lasting legacies.

Cooper's contribution to the history of technology, and air conditioning in
particular, is quite enriching. She provides a history of an extremely
ubiquitous, yet largely invisible product, cool air. For example, in
numerous studies of the post-World War II American home, technologies like
dishwashers, electric stoves, and washing machines were the symbols of the
modern American home. The air conditioner was almost always excluded. Yet as
Cooper's study makes clear, air conditioning became an instrument of
American modernity -- it was a tool marking an American middle class
identity as well as a symbol representing a particular and highly specified
standard of living. In 1953, for example, Fortune magazine recognized the
social importance of the air conditioner by stating: "The rump of a room
conditioner building out of the window [wa]s becoming as unexclusive a
social symbol as the television aerial overhead." Cooper's text highlights
the dramatic influence air conditioning has had on the American landscape,
illustrating the ways in which technology, class identities, comfort, and
standards of living were concepts completely intertwined in Americans'
understanding of cool air and American post-war modernity.

As noted above, Cooper devotes most of her energies to describing the
air-conditioning industry, yet she provides the reader with the important
social, economic, and cultural contexts for each chapter. I think the
strength of her book rests on four chapters, comprising the main body of the
text: "Defining the Healthy Indoor Environment" -- Chapter Three;
"Motion-Picture Theaters, Human Comfort, and Recirculation, 1911-1930" --
Chapter Four; "Mass Production, the Residential Market, and the Window
AirConditioner, 1928-1940" -- Chapter Five; and "From a Luxury to a
Necessity, 1942-1960" -- Chapter Six. In these chapters, Cooper places the
air conditioner at the center of a number of important American historical
experiences, namely progressive reform movements, public entertainment, and
post-war mass consumption. This is not to suggest, however, that the
remaining chapters in the book are inconsequential. In fact, the other
chapters provide important contextual analysis explaining how and why
air-conditioning technologies emerged, who produced them, and what were the
social, economic, and political ramifications of cool indoor air. Yet the
four chapters mentioned above highlight the transformative power air
conditioning contributed to the public discourses over public health and
mass consumption, as well as defined an American standard of comfort.

The conflict between producers and consumers can best be seen in Chapter
Four, "Motion-Picture Theaters, Human Comfort and Recirculation, 1911-1930,"
where the tension occurred over different notions of human comfort.
Engineers created elaborate guidelines detailing relational specifications
between outdoor and indoor temperatures. Theater owners, on the other hand,
used cool indoor air to sell theater tickets, employing the adage, "the
colder the better," to lure the public into cool theaters. Cooper suggests
that this discord forced engineers to adopt a variety of strategies by which
to impose their scientific understanding of air conditioning and human
comfort. Despite their best efforts, however, once air-conditioning systems
were in place, there was little air-conditioning engineers could do to
control how their products were used. But, as Cooper writes, movie theaters
provided engineers with a type of laboratory where they conducted
experiments to determion, set out to cool
indoor America, from factories to pleasure palaces, and from the office to
the home. Carrier's importance as a technological innovator as well as an
entrepreneur captures the conflict Cooper describes between scientific
achievement  twentieth century, science and the concepts of
professionalism merged in an effort to claim a legitimate and authoritative
space. The history of professionalization is rich, and Cooper adds another
important voice to history. Yet the technology proved to be too flexible,
where consumers, not engineers, controlled the indoor environment and the
meaning of human comfort. Efforts by engineers to claim professional and
scientific authority failed in many ways because they could not control the
end product -- cool air.

While _Air-Conditioning America_ offers a rich history of a specific
technology, it is not a complete history of air conditioning. Cooper states
that "this book centers on the debate, sometimes acrimonious, over open
windows"(1). Throughout her study, Cooper assumes that American windows were
immediately closed once air conditioned spaces were possible. The ensuing
debate in the book, therefore, was not about open or closed windows, but was
concerned with who controlled cool comfort, engineers or consumers. Cooper's
study neglects the counter-narrative -- the non-consumers -- those who
questioned the supposedly positive effects of air conditioning, who

recognized the potentially harmful effects of the technology, and who could
not afford cool comfort. In a time when scholars and citizens alike are
engaged in a public dialogue concerning the loss of community and an
individualization of American society, can we suggest that the closed
window, like the television or internet, as other social critics have
argued, contributes toAmericans' feelings of isolation? Has the closed,
air-conditioned window created a permanent barrier between the indoor and
outdoor, between individual and community? Cooper overlooks these important
questions, reasoning, instead, that all Americans consumed cool air,
collectively sealing their windows to the outside world. And despite the
enormous influence on the technology has had throughout the country, it is
difficult to believe that all Americans willingly participated in the
cooling of indoor America.

Another interesting omission in this study was the failure to discuss the
dramatic demographic shifts that have occurred in the last half-century.
Although Cooper's study concludes in the 1960s, it is this reader's opinion
that the history of air conditioning and its influence could be further
articulated through an analysis of the political and environmental
transformation of the American South and Southwest over the past three
decades. During this time, the South and Southwest have gained enormous
political leverage by a shear force of numbers. Richard Nathan, a political
economist and director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government, recently
stated that "the civil rights revolution and air conditioning are the two
biggest factors that have changed [the United States's] demography and a lot
of our politics in the last 30 years." (The New York Times, August 29,
1998). These demographic and political shifts can not be solely attributed
to air conditioning, yet they underscore how air conditioning enabled large
numbers of Americans to inhabit regions once thought to be inhospitable.
While these particular issues were not part of Cooper's stated intentions,
they do suggest alternative approaches to the history of air conditioning
that may open up future discussions about the technology and its social and
political implications.

Overall, Cooper provides an extremely interesting and insightful study of
the air conditioning industry. Her most important contribution, I think, is
her discussion of the constructed meaning of human comfort -- how it was
measured and by whom. The conflict between engineers, trying to claim
scientific authority over cool indoor air, and consumers, who used the
technology according to personal preferences, explains much of the contested
story of this history. Cooper writes: "Although makers of central air
conditioning proposed a vision of perfect indoor climate, high standards of
performance, ideal operating procedures, and a new way of living, consumers
seemed to embrace the technology but not necessarily the industry's
prescriptions" (176).

In the end, it seems that consumers had a tremendous impact on how Americans
became air-conditioned, even though millions of Americans continue to live
and work in centrally controlled air-conditioned environments, where cool
comfort is regulated by building managers and HVAC experts. The debate
continues.

Library of Congress call number: TH7687.5.C66 1998
Subjects:
Air conditioning -- United States -- History
Citation: David Kinkela . "Review of Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America:
Engineers and the Controlled Environment 1900-1960," H-Urban, H-Net Reviews,
March, 2000. URL:
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=7935954878728.

Copyright © 2000, H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for
non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the
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