Happy Birthday, Mr. Cool

One of the most significant books in the historiography of the South, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips's Life and Labor in the Old South, begins with these words: 

Let us begin by discussing the weather for that has been the chief agency in making the South distinctive. ... The summers are not merely long but bakingly hot, with  temperatures ranging rather steadily in the eighties and nineties of the Fahrenheit scale.

The early 20th century single story Southern home, with its high-roof, wrap-around porch, and traditional "dog trot" breezeway, is a vernacular response to that baking heat. Homes of this type can still be found throughout the South, in fact, contemporary construction in the region often incorporates its features in vestigial form. But what has made the South so popular these days? I believes in particular the natural climate remains a significant draw, especially now that the social and political climate of the New South welcomes all Americans. Still, Southerners must deal with the heat. And that brings us to the significance of November 26.

On this day in 1876, a son, Willis H. Carrier, was born into an old New England family. By the turn of the century, Carrier developed a system of conditioning air in a stiflingly hot and humid Brooklyn printing plant. The new environment ensured stability in the paper and the perfect alignment of four-color printing. It was soon a huge success in several industries. By the 1920s, air conditioning became popular in retail trade and entertainment, especially the movie theater. It was a small jump from commercial systems to home systems, and by the 1930s, air conditioning began a slow but steady increase in usage until the post World War II era when it boomed. Carrier's application would have far reaching impacts on the American experience.

From an environmental perspective, air conditioning made the South livable year round. One could work hard outside on a mid-summer Georgia day and find comfort in an air conditioned break at work and a cool, comfortable supper and evening at home. Today, we take this comfort for granted across the nation giving it attention only when it's time to change the filter or the compressor dies.

If you call the South "home," take a moment today to thank Willis for his contribution, an invention you're going to appreciate perhaps as early as March of 2014 when that heat begins its sure increase to "bakingly" unbearable levels in the Southern summer.
For more information on the impact of air conditioning check out these sites:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/keepin-it-cool-how-the-air-conditioner-made-modern-america/241892/

http://www.oldhouseweb.com/how-to-advice/how-air-conditioning-changed-america.shtml


N.B. Life and Labor in the Old South was written by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877-1934) in 1929.Phillips reflects not only the biases one could expect of a Southern historian of the time, but the original scholarship one would expect of the finest historians of our time. If readers seek out fine writing and a curiosity about ideas that have shaped our present-day interpretation of the American South, slavery and its legacy, and race as a primary theme in American history, I suggest they begin with U. B. Phillips.

This is an edited version of an earlier post.