From those in ancient Egypt soaking reeds to hang in their windows, effectively cooling the breeze as it blew in,

to ancient Romans learning to circulate water through the walls of their homes using aqueduct-like pipes reserved for many of the wealthiest citizens, though one emperor would top them all.

The Roman emperor Elagabalus ordered snow and ice to be delivered from nearby mountains to be brought home on the backs of donkeys so that he could stay cool during the summer.

This was extremely inefficient and out of the equation for all but the most powerful, but people needed a way to stay cool,

and a solution wouldn't come until 1902 when the first electrified air conditioning unit was installed, though its purpose was not to cool its building.

Air conditioning would go on to transform humanity, giving us summer blockbusters at movie theaters, computers, and allowing us to expand into climates once thought unlivable.

This is Learn Something New.

While many civilizations prior had implicitly figured out ways of cooling, Benjamin Franklin worked to understand why this was and how it might be more effectively done.

In a letter he wrote in 1758, he described an experiment he conducted with John Hadley, a professor at Cambridge University, where they studied cooling by the evaporation of Fahrenheit to just 7 degrees.

While Ben Franklin wouldn't be able to use this to create any machine to replicate the effect at scale, others were quick to pick up the torch where he left off.

Which leads us to Michael Faraday, the scientist who made many discoveries, including finding out that a magnet rotating inside a coiled wire can induce a current as well as developing the famous Faraday cage.

But the discovery that isn't often attributed to him is his discoveries relating to refrigerant gases.

You see, in 1820, he learned that if he compressed ammonia into a liquid and then allowed it to evaporate, the air in his laboratory cooled.

Ten years later, this concept would be adopted by American Dr. John Gorey, who first designed an engine that could pull in air, compress it, then run it through pipes allowing it to cool the air as it expanded.

He patented the idea in 1851, believing that it could be used in every building across the entire world to keep everyone cool, not just for his hospital patients.

But after an extended tour through many cities throughout the Southeast United States, he found that nobody was willing to help him fund his idea,

and thus it was shelved, at least until he realized that the pipes would eventually freeze and form ice.

Though his ice machine would draw annoyance from some at the time, as the New York Globe painted him as someone who believed he could possess the power of God.

Though many suspect this was partly propaganda from the natural ice industry of the time, which you can learn about in my video about the Ice King, Keeping America Cool Before Air Conditioning.

But despite that, it would be ice that was used to make a makeshift air conditioning unit to make President James Garfield more comfortable on July 2nd, 1881,

after Charles Guiteau fired two shots from his revolver into Garfield's back.

As he lay in his room in 95 degree Fahrenheit heat, naval engineers worked to develop a method to keep him cool.

It ended up being an astronomer named Simon Newcomb that helped develop a new machine that used an engine connected to pipes that powered a fan blowing over a giant bucket of ice.

He explained that the device held 6 tons of ice and was able to lower the President's room temperature from a sweltering 95 to just 75 degrees,

but all the while consumed hundreds of pounds of ice every single hour, and using around half a million pounds of ice over the course of two months before the President ultimately passed away.

After this, public interest in air conditioning largely died off because, similarly to El Gabalus before him, the President's system was simply unattainable for the everyday man, or even for many of the biggest companies of the time.

It was just too inefficient.

But at the turn of the century, it would be brought back out into the spotlight, with new advancements in technology that would lead to the early form of air conditioning units we see today.

Willis Carrier had a breakthrough in July of 1902 when he designed his apparatus for treating air, as he called it, which was first installed in the Sackett Williams Publishing Building in Brooklyn, New York.

This device built upon all that had been created before it, and it blew air over tubes containing a coolant, though in reality, its use was not for cooling.

It was less about the use of bringing down the temperature of the building, and more about bringing down the humidity in the building,

because there was excess water in the building's air that was damaging the publishing company's paper.

Carrier's device was especially significant because it was powered by electricity, rather than the hand-cranking nature of the ones that came before it, officially earning him the title as the inventor of air conditioning.

But in the same year he installed his into the publishing house's building, another inventor was installing his cooling device into the New York Stock Exchange building.

Alfred Wolff's device used three ammonia absorption machines, the same compound Faraday used 80 years prior.

Each of these machines was able to cool with the equivalent capability of 150 tons of ice.

After installing this into the building, Wolff became the leading air conditioning engineer in New York City,

though over the course of his career, he would only wind up installing three residential versions of his device, with most focusing on industrial use.

From there, Carrier began to expand the use of his air conditioning units, creating them for hotels, department stores, and even the White House in Capitol.

But it would gain the most popularity from the public for its use in theaters.

Carrier's air conditioner was first introduced in 1925 on Memorial Day weekend in the Rivoli Theater in Times Square.

Theaters had traditionally been closed during the summer because a lack of windows along with a crowd of humans tightly packed together had led to a surge of heat-related ailments.

After the introduction of air conditioners, however, people would flock to air conditioned movie theaters all across the country on some of the hottest summer days, leading to the summer blockbuster scheduling of films that we see today.

From here, the air conditioning unit would only become more efficient, and as it improved, its impact could be seen across the country, with its effects still able to be seen today.

Air conditioning made urban growth and industrial production in the southern states possible despite their heated climates.

It helped cool the first computers that took up entire rooms, and even changed architecture.

For a long time, skyscrapers could only go up so high before the top floors would get unbearably hot, but with air conditioning, they felt they could go as high as they wanted.

Heat was no longer the limiting factor.

Not to mention that mortality from extremely hot days dropped roughly 80% when comparing the average deaths before mass adoption in 1900-1959 to after many homes began being built with AC units pre-installed from 1960 on.

Now, approximately 10% of all the electricity consumed in the United States is for air conditioning purposes, costing Americans around $30 billion a year.

But that's a cost that nearly everyone seems to agree is worth it.

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