Air-conditioning America

Air-conditioning America PDF Author: Gail Cooper
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801871139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

Air-conditioning America

Air-conditioning America PDF Author: Gail Cooper
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801871139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

Cool

Cool PDF Author: Salvatore Basile
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823261778
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
“[A] history of air conditioning, chronicling the numerous gimmicks, failed attempts, con jobs, and eventual successes . . . a surprisingly interesting journey.” —San Francisco Book Review The air conditioner is often hailed as one of the modern world’s greatest inventions—yet nearly as often blamed for global disaster. It has changed everything from architecture to people’s food habits; saved countless lives, and caused countless deaths. First appearing in 1902, when Willis Carrier, an engineer barely out of college, developed the “Apparatus for Treating Air,” everyone assumed it would instantly change the world. But the story of air conditioning and its rise to ubiquity is far from simple. In Cool, Salvatore Basile tracks two fascinating stories: the struggle to perfect an effective cooling device, and the effort to convince people that they actually needed such a thing. With a cast of characters ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Richard Nixon and Felix the Cat, Cool showcases the myriad reactions to air conditioning as it was developed and introduced to the world. Here is a unique perspective on a common convenience: how we came to rely on it today, and how it might change radically tomorrow.

Cool Comfort

Cool Comfort PDF Author: Marsha Ackermann
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 1588344010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The year 2002 marked the 100th anniversary of the first installation of air-conditioning. During the past century, it has become a staple of American life; 83% of US homes are now air-conditioned. In this engaging social history, Marsha Ackermann explores how the idea of “cooling” became firmly embedded in the social perceptions and expectations of Americans, transforming our definition of comfort and the way we live, work, and play.

After Cooling

After Cooling PDF Author: Eric Dean Wilson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982111313
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
This “ambitious [and] delightful” (The New York Times) work of literary nonfiction interweaves the science and history of the powerful refrigerant (and dangerous greenhouse gas) Freon with a haunting meditation on how to live meaningfully and morally in a rapidly heating world. In After Cooling, Eric Dean Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of the birth, life, and afterlife of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s—when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress—to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland, trailing a man who buys up old tanks of Freon stockpiled in attics and basements to destroy what remains of the chemical before it can do further harm. Wilson is at heart an essayist, looking far and wide to tease out what particular forces in American culture—in capitalism, in systemic racism, in our values—combined to lead us into the Freon crisis and then out. “Meticulously researched and engagingly written” (Amitav Ghosh), this “knockout debut” (New York Journal of Books) offers a rare glimpse of environmental hope, suggesting that maybe the vast and terrifying problem of global warming is not beyond our grasp to face.

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970 PDF Author: Joseph M. Siry
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271089008
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 764

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Book Description
Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970, documents how architects made environmental technologies into resources that helped shape their spatial and formal aesthetic. In doing so, it sheds important new light on the ways in which mechanical engineering has been assimilated into the culture of architecture as one facet of its broader modernist project. Tracing the development and architectural integration of air-conditioning from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the advent of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, Joseph M. Siry shows how the incorporation of mechanical systems into modernism’s discourse of functionality profoundly shaped the work of some of the movement’s leading architects, such as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, and Louis Kahn. For them, the modernist ideal of functionality was incompletely realized if it did not wholly assimilate heating, cooling, ventilating, and artificial lighting. Bridging the history of technology and the history of architecture, Siry discusses air-conditioning’s technical and social history and provides case studies of buildings by the master architects who brought this technology into the conceptual and formal project of modernism. A monumental work by a renowned expert in American modernist architecture, this book asks us to see canonical modernist buildings through a mechanical engineering–oriented lens. It will be especially valuable to scholars and students of architecture, modernism, the history of technology, and American history.

Losing Our Cool

Losing Our Cool PDF Author: Stan Cox
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595586024
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Losing our Cool shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In America, energy consumed by home air-conditioning, and the resulting greenhouse emissions, have doubled in just over a decade, and energy to cool retail stores has risen by two-thirds. Now the entire affluent world is adopting the technology. As the biggest economic crisis in eighty years rolls across the globe, financial concerns threaten to shove ecological crises into the background. Reporting from some of the world’s hot zones—from Phoenix, Arizona, and Naples, Florida, to southern India—Cox documents the surprising ways in which air-conditioning changes human experience: giving a boost to the global warming that it is designed to help us endure, providing a potent commercial stimulant, making possible an impossible commuter economy, and altering migration patterns (air-conditioning has helped alter the political hue of the United States by enabling a population boom in the red-state Sun Belt). While the book proves that the planet’s atmosphere cannot sustain even our current use of air-conditioning, it also makes a much more positive argument that loosening our attachment to refrigerated air could bring benefits to humans and the planet that go well beyond averting a climate crisis. Though it saves lives in heat waves, air-conditioning may also be altering our bodies’ sensitivity to heat; our rates of infection, allergy, asthma, and obesity; and even our sex drive. Air-conditioning has eroded social bonds and thwarted childhood adventure; it has transformed the ways we eat, sleep, travel, work, buy, relax, vote, and make both love and war. The final chapter surveys the many alternatives to conventional central air-conditioning. By reintroducing some traditional cooling methods, putting newly emerging technologies into practice, and getting beyond industrial definitions of comfort, we can make ourselves comfortable and keep the planet comfortable, too.

Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort PDF Author: Marsha E. Ackermann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Air conditioning
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description


Air-conditioning Young America

Air-conditioning Young America PDF Author: United States. Civil Aeronautics Administration
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description


Transactions - American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers; Volume 28

Transactions - American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers; Volume 28 PDF Author: Refriger American Society of Heating
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781019938980
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume contains a collection of papers and reports presented at the annual conference of the American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. Topics covered include new developments in HVAC systems, advances in refrigeration technology, and energy efficiency. The papers are authored by leading experts in the field and provide valuable insights into the latest trends and practices. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Refrigeration in America

Refrigeration in America PDF Author: Oscar Edward Anderson Jr.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400878772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of refrigeration from its beginnings in America up to 1950, which shows its relation to our national development, records the main trends in technological progress, describes the use of refrigeration, and gives some indication of its social effects. Originally published in 1953. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.