Slaughterhouse 25

START TIME: 9:56 PM
END TIME: 10:58 PM
WORD COUNT: 679

This week's question: "What non-essential item would you like to have had credit for inventing?" - Beth Badrov

I’ve always been fascinated by inventions, and more specifically, the future. Whenever I’m feeling a little too beat up by the workplace, I can look at the little blue USB Flash drive I have on my desk that’s solely for running virus updates and definitions back and forth between my desk and a secure server located in a secure cage in a secure facility. I realize that on that little amulet, I can wear around my neck more storage capacity than all of mankind had available 40 years ago. (In addition, these are now available at 64 times the size that drive can contain, and it’s only two years old.) What cheers me up about this is not the sneaker net process; it’s the idea that in a very short amount of time I’m going to see something else that makes me smack my forehead and wonder what we’ll get to see next.

But flash drives are slick, and technology is going to make even those items seem kludgy and bulky before my son’s old enough to drive. I would have liked to take credit for one invention, one that I appreciate more now considering my current location than nearly any other.

I would have liked to have been Willis Carrier, the father of modern air conditioning.

Think of how many inventions there are that legitimately change the world, things that we have absolutely no substitute for. You may think of things like vaccines, and while I’d certainly consider that an amazing achievement, human beings would contract another disease. You can hold up the automobile and I could point at horses and streetcars. You can look at the telephone and I can point to a Morse code machine or the smartphone in my pocket. (It’s probably my grandchildren who will one day look at a Bell rotary handset, the big heavy telephones with the clear red plastic hold buttons and inserts where you could type in the lines, and wonder why you can’t use it to get driving directions.) But I would argue that Willis Carrier’s invention changed the entire world in ways more profound that we even realize.

First off, without air conditioning, America does not become the industrial powerhouse that gives us and, more to the point, the middle class the highest standard of living in the world. The ability to cool factories extended the workday and increased productivity during the summer months. When this was extended to a residential model in the 1920s, it made it possible for Americans to move away from the industrial cities of the North, thus paving the way for Miami, Los Angeles, and my current abode.

There are a lot of stores in the Chicago are which don’t have central air conditioning installed, maybe just a window unit over the front door. It was a revelation for me to come to the land of misters, of meat locker indoor temperatures, of air conditioning repair technicians advertising a one hour response. (It was probably an AC tech who zipped past me in the Rolls Royce the other day on the 215, and having spent a decade here, I can say without a second’s hesitation he deserved it.)

Air conditioning has changed how far we travel, how we live (skyscraper living could only be possible by taking advantage of the efficiency of large-scale chillers) and how we’re entertained (the popularity of movies owes a lot to air-conditioned theaters rising to prominence during the Great Depression, where most homes didn’t have air conditioning but the theaters could use it as a selling point that they did). But I think more than any of the other inventions that I considered, air conditioning confirmed that we could manipulate our environment for something beyond survival, but comfort. I think air conditioning is a greater indicator of modernity in a society than any other item (and I’m sure that there’s some old-school “Civilization” players who might argue with me), but I’d love to have changed the arc of the average citizen in the direction of being more comfortable.