Refrigeration and Air Conditioning

Refrigeration and Air Conditioning. The development after 1850 of machines to control the temperature and moisture content of air profoundly affected the way Americans lived and worked. Although refrigeration and air conditioning are historically and technologically entwined, their purposes differ. Refrigeration preserves food and other perishables; air conditioning—a term coined in 1906 by textile engineer Stuart Cramer—controls temperature and humidity in spaces generally occupied by human beings.

Refrigeration arose from the early nineteenth century practice of “harvesting” New England lake ice and shipping huge blocks, packed in sawdust, to cold‐storage warehouses. By midcentury, ice processing and transport had improved enough to supply growing U.S. cities and an overseas market. By the 1880s, ice‐making machinery was widely used in southern cities and spreading nationwide.

In 1902, pioneering air cooling systems were installed at the New York Stock Exchange by Alfred R. Wolff and at Brooklyn's Sackett‐Wilhelms printing plant by Willis H. Carrier, the Father of Air Conditioning.

Both refrigeration and air conditioning benefited from technical improvements in compressor and pump design. The DuPont Corporation's 1930 development of the refrigerant Freon proved a major breakthrough. Safer than commonly used ammonia, Freon made possible smaller, more efficient refrigerators and air conditioners.

Costly home refrigerators caught on slowly, but by 1920 the spread of commercial refrigeration had already affected food production and marketing, reshaping the American diet. As fresh and frozen foods edged out salted, dried, and canned goods, Americans developed new expectations of food safety and palatability.

The effects of air conditioning proved even more diverse. In factories and offices, controlled climate encouraged productivity and facilitated heat‐sensitive processes such as microchip manufacture. Introduced in movie palaces in the 1920s, comfort air conditioning became popular in residences only after 1950. By the end of the century it had become a standard appliance in many households. The environmental costs of both inventions, however, as demonstrated by summer power outages and a ban on atmosphere‐degrading Freon, raised concerns about their basic safety.
See also Environmentalism; Food and Diet; Technology.

Bibliography

Oscar E. Anderson Jr. , Refrigeration in America: A History of a New Technology and Its Impact, 1953, reprint 1972.
Gail Cooper , Air‐Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960, 1998.

Marsha E. Ackermann