Last Tuesday, July 6th, the thermometer hit 105˚ down in Baltimore. In a heat-induced spasm of self-pity, I turned to the record books, hoping to find there an even more miserable temperature from the city’s past.
I found one — and only one — hotter day, at least since they started keeping records in the late 19th century. That cursed, skin-blackening, mind-melting day was July 10th, 1936, when the mercury registered an inhuman 107˚.
Seeing that higher number did cheer me up a bit. Not only because it had, in fact, been slightly more miserably hot in the past, but also because Tuesday had come so close to setting an awful new record. Wouldn’t it be something, I thought, to have experienced a city’s largest snowstorm on record in February, and then its hottest day ever?
And both in the same year!
Of course, the key difference between last Tuesday and that hellish scorcher in 1936 can be summed up in two delicious words: air conditioning.
Outside, the streets were running with asphalt, and the local television news talent was busy cracking eggs on the sidewalk. Inside, even with the thermostat turned up to a grid-friendly 79˚, I was cool as a cucumber.
I’ve always been a huge fan of air conditioning. My wife, Shana…not so much. So it was with some reluctance that we decided to install central air in our two-hundred-year old house on St. Peters Church Road. “Some reluctance,” meaning, I was all for it, whereas she needed some extra convincing. “We’ll use a special system made by a company called SpacePak,” I said. “It’s perfect for old houses. Also, we can save money if I do the work myself.”
While most people don’t think of central air conditioning as a do-it-yourself project, I’d had a front-row seat to the installation of a similar system in Baltimore. And I was planning to subcontract out the really hard, technical stuff – basically, anything that involved the words “brazing” or “refrigerant.”
Most of the labor in an installation like this isn’t technical at all. It’s a matter of running ductwork from the air handler, wherever that lives — in our case, the attic — to each room. The big advantage of the SpacePak system is that the ductwork comes in the form of flexible tubing about two inches in diameter.
This flexible ducting can be threaded along joists and inside of stud walls, unlike bulky sheet metal ducts, which require even bulkier chases to hide them. The system also doesn’t need a separate set of ducts to return air to the handler, thanks to the high pressure airstream it delivers, which vigorously stirs, rather than recirculates, a room’s air.
Our SpacePak system works very well, even if it is a bit noisier in operation than a traditional installation with sheet metal ducts. You can learn more about it at www.spacepak.com.
And no, I don’t get a commission for mentioning the company by name!
The whole point being that we’ve now had a couple of years of July heat up at the Creek without air conditioning, and a couple with it.
“With” is better. I can say that unequivocally. Even Shana agrees, albeit somewhat grudgingly.
I feel I owe a great debt to the inventor of air conditioning, who turns out to be an interesting fellow named Willis Carrier. Carrier is still a big name in the world of refrigeration. The condenser humming away outside your house might well bear the Carrier nameplate.
I was fascinated to learn that air conditioning – as we know it, not the old-fashioned kind that involved redirecting Roman aquaducts through masonry walls or blowing air across blocks of ice – was the solution to an industrial problem, not a domestic one. At the turn of the 20th century, it seems that the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, New York, was having trouble with ink registration, a problem that was traced to variations in the ambient temperature and humidity. In 1902, young Willis Carrier, a Cornell-educated engineer, came up with a solution that, for the first time, treated the moisture content of the air as well as its temperature.
A successful and prolific inventor and industrialist, Carrier was also a tireless promoter of air conditioning, which didn’t really catch on in the United States until the building boom after World War Two. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the Carrier company sponsored an exhibit in the shape of a giant, modernist igloo, which touted the wonders of air conditioning. There’s a priceless photograph of Carrier standing at the threshold of the exhibit on a big mound of trucked-in snow, flanked by scantily clad dancing girls. The girls are wearing fur-trimmed shorts and elf hoods.
Carrier himself is wearing a three-piece suit. He seems dwarfed by the dancing girls, but he’s smiling gamely and holding up what looks like an enormous cigar.
The day is warm. Snow is melting around the girls’ high-heeled shoes. But Carrier looks like a very cool customer indeed.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 15 July 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
