Air Conditioning and Changes in Society - 9 July 1999

A telephone call from an old friend in London.

"Hot here," he says, "how about you?"

"Well, much the same," I say.

"Do you get out much?"

"No," I said, "I'm under house arrest."

"What?" in the ferocious hissing tones of a Victorian villain - and it takes quite some ferocity to hiss the word "what".

One of the problems, I find, of transatlantic telephone calls is that of picking up the emotional tone of the speaker. Don't try humour, don't try irony.

"Under house arrest? I don't understand."

"Well," I said, "I'm confined here to my air-conditioned cell."

"Good lord," he said, "on whose orders?"

"The doctor." I said.

"Oh, I see."

In other words this has been a hideous week in which, from the rock-bound coast of Maine to the tip of the Florida Keys, over a 100° in, if you can find it, the shade.

One of the choicer bits of televised news the other evening was a shot of the Long Island beaches abandoned by bathers as being too hot to stand on. And the sun - 137° - too murderous to stay out in. On that one beach more people must have picked up a melanoma than on all the Australian beaches combined.

In Manhattan alone, which is one of the five city boroughs, 300 people - mostly old - were rushed to the hospitals. So far, miraculously, the count of old folks who died is, as I talk, no more than a dozen.

A huge crew of city workers, recruited from the hospitals, the sanitation department, firemen and so on, have been cruising the poorer sections to help old people install fans, renovate air conditioners, get new ones - the problem there was that by mid-week the suppliers of even the most modest air conditioners cried: "Hold, enough" - for the first time they could remember their inventories were exhausted.

Now, of course, I'm talking about New York City only. The same stories can be told in a hundred cities across this burning land. I looked at a weather map and the colour kind, invented, I believe, by US Today about 15 years ago and much ridiculed at the time, in which parts of the country below freezing were white, up to 50° green, over 70 yellow, over 80 orange, over 90 scarlet.

Well, any day this week you could look at the whole map of the United States, about three quarters was scarlet, most of the rest orange. There was a green patch up in Alaska. In fact I'll break down and simply say that this continent has, except for September and October, for the most part the most hideous climate - bone-crushing Arctic winters, rancid summers. Goodbye!

But this experience of house arrest - may I just throw in for any tabloid reporter who might have just tuned in - it's a joke, son. The way I live now, which for the past 10 days has been confined, as I say, to my air-conditioned study, reminds me vividly when I sat down to do this talk of a similar scene 36 years ago in a small study - much like mine - cool and serene at 70°, while only 10 paces outside it was a 107°.

This was in New Delhi in 1963. I was on a United Nations mission flying around the world at the instance of Secretary General U Thant and courtesy of the Australian airline. I was sitting in the study of an Indian politician, alone, the only sound - as they say of the car - was the ticking of the clock. The only moving sight, the second hand slowly inching round and up to 7pm. At which precise second entered mine host.

"Where are you coming from?" he asked.

"I am coming from - I just came from .." I replied, jumping out of the imperfect tense just in time, "from Bangkok."

This was meant as a courtesy visit of a roving journalist to a distinguished statesman. I'd been told, by one of his aides who thought it up -

"I believe a visit with the prime minister will be rewarding on both sides. The prime minister will, 20 minutes into the meeting, offer you a lemonade. Please accept. About 15 minutes later he will offer you a cigarette. It will be time to say: 'Thank you prime minister I'm afraid I have to go'."

Well the script was followed almost to the last minute. But just before the offer of the poisonous cigarette the host remarked on the blessings of air conditioning and mentioned it had come very late to India.

"We used to have," he said and he made a whirling motion in mid-air.

"Same in the United States," I said until, I suppose, the late 1950s when air conditioning took over in public buildings, theatres, restaurants and shops and so on. Airplane propeller fans were the thing, on the ceiling.

Well one little recollection led to another and while I was moving to leave, on a passing thought by the prime minister about the American Civil War I happened to say that one powerful subsidiary reason why the North won was its access to a continuous supply of fruits and vegetables from California, 3,000 miles away.

"How so?"

Because the North owned the only transcontinental railway line and they had refrigerator cars - carriages, wagons. The PM was stunned and he motioned me back to the chair, for what turned out to be another two-hour stay. He wanted to know how, when and who.

Well I didn't know the history of air conditioning though his interest made me bone up on it pretty soon afterwards, but we could talk about the Northern refrigeration cars. Happily, I recalled, they started to run just 100 years ago from that evening - 1863.

Now if you want to be exact and tedious you can dispute with the French, the British, the Russians, no doubt the Egyptians, for the first attempts at refrigeration. Naturally I myself incline to the account of an American inventor who lived in England - Jacob Perkins - who invented in 1790 a compression machine. He distilled rubber to create a volatile liquid which evaporated by absorbing the surrounding heat until he cooled water to the point that it froze.

But I think nobody could have guessed the next big leap ahead which came in a small town in Florida in 1842. A Florida physician, a Dr John Gorrie, had a sick wife doing very badly in her room in the drenching Florida heat. Dr Gorrie had done something that was very sensible and normal at the time which was to order some ice from the North, from the state of Maine. It was lost in the wreck of the schooner that was carrying it South.

So Dr Gorrie had a crude but successful idea. He placed a vessel of ammonia on top of a step ladder and he let it drip and that way, to his own amazement, he had invented an artificial ice-making machine which turned out to be the basic principle of air conditioning and refrigeration.

The refrigeration cars that thundered across the continent packed all those fruits and vegetables in metal tanks, sealed over cracked ice. Dr Gorrie's principle was sound enough to keep the stuff frozen across 3,000 miles.

This story so excited the prime minister's imagination that next day he interrupted the parliament, the Lok Sahb - which was in the middle of a fierce debate on the shaming fact that India had more rats at large than human beings. More cleanliness, the PM urged, more simple cheap refrigeration everywhere would keep food fresh and greatly reduce the rather appalling figure, at that time, for toddler mortality.

Well this interlude bewildered, I think, as many members as it impressed but it may have done good.

Well if a refrigerated freight car was an interesting thought about the Civil War I don't believe any of us would guess the immense, the drastic and permanent changes air conditioning would have on American society - not least on American politics.

In those intervening 30-odd years the permanent population of what became known as The Sun Belt has more than doubled. The Sun Belt taking in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and Southern California.

Look again at that weather map and observe that for half the year that sweeping arc, from the Carolinas down through the Gulf states all the way across to the Pacific, the eastern and central parts of that huge stretch - those burning lands - are where lots of people - city dwellers, certainly - did not choose to live. Houston, Texas would never have become the centre of the space age if it had not been air conditioning. Millions of new retirees have moved into Florida which, at the time of that conversation in New Delhi, had four million people. Today, 13 million.

Thirty years ago less than a third of the American people lived in the South. Today, more than 55%. The biggest political effect is the transformation of the South from what the Democrats, for 75 years, proudly called the Solid South - that's to mean every state voting Democrat. Today it's the Solid South for the Republicans. And at the same time, of course, the power centre of the Republican Party has shifted permanently from New York and the rural Midwest to the Sun Belt.

Hence, unsurprising news today is that the leading candidate for next year's Republican nomination is the Governor of Texas. For a while his brother - Governor of Florida - was a contender.

If there was one man more than another, more than a whole legion, who shifted the power centre it was Senator Barry Goldwater - from Arizona. The country wasn't quite ready in 1964 for a president from Arizona but 16 years later it was more than ready for a Republican president from California - twice - and then a Democratic Southern Y'all boy from Arkansas.

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