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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 452-454



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Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning. By Marsha E. Ackermann. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Pp. ix+214. $27.95.

For the past twenty-two years I have lived in a house that is not air-conditioned. This often gets revealed in summertime conversations, and people invariably react with incredulity, as though I have admitted to living in a primitive hut that has inexplicably survived from a distant age. Marsha Ackermann's Cool Comfort analyzes Americans' cultural embrace of air-conditioning, the result of half a century's work by the industry's engineers and manufacturers. It should come as no surprise that this was a bumpy road, with both advocates and critics marshaling scientific, racial, gendered, and class-bound arguments.

Ackermann's is a cultural history that "connects air-conditioning to the larger social processes that produced new standards for how the middle-class body (and every body) was to feel and function" (p. 4). She traces this trajectory from air-conditioning's early years in factory production through its eventual widespread residential and commercial adoption to the energy crisis of the 1970s and the 1995 Chicago heat wave. She shows that arguments touting air-conditioning as one means toward a perfect man-made environment have been consistently resisted by champions of fresh air and critics of self-indulgent wastefulness and uniformity. [End Page 452]

Cool Comfort builds on Gail Cooper's excellent 1998 Air-Conditioning America by exploring the cultural discourses that helped cool a nation. Ackermann organizes her book into eight chapters, each of which is fairly self-contained. For example, the first two chapters, "The Coldward Course of Progress" and "No Calcutta," demonstrate the way academics and public health experts connected ideas about imperialism, progress, race, and temperate climates to construct overheating as a problem and thereby associate cooling with progress and civilization. Despite the powerful rhetoric of fresh air advocates who deplored mechanical ventilation, particularly in places such as public schools, engineers and industry advocates, buttressed by racialist theories, projected air-conditioning as "America's great hope for physical, mental, and moral progress" (p. 40). Climate control could rescue even the South from its heat-stressed and enervated history.

Subsequent chapters look at air-conditioned movie palaces where the public first experienced controlled climate, the air-conditioning of Washington D.C.'s government buildings, the promotion of air-conditioning at world's fairs, the targeting of the residential market, and a postwar discourse that used air-conditioning as a touchstone for critiquing a wasteful consumer culture. Because a perfect combination of temperature and humidity rendered air-conditioning invisible, purveyors of modernity in these various venues kept temperatures uncomfortably low so that the shock of overly chilled air would bring home a message of progress and material luxury.

Ackermann supports a theoretical construction of air-conditioning as an agent of modernity by demonstrating that the more important American cities, not the hottest, adopted it first. Air-conditioning was both a powerful symbol of the future and a technology that made other futuristic visions such as sealed skyscrapers and windowless factories possible. Manufacturers, advertisers, dealers, architects, and builders combined their energies and talents to spread the gospel of cooled indoor air from commercial applications to residential ones. This expansion of the controlled environment eventually extended to autos and even outdoor venues such as ballparks, so that by the time of the late-twentieth-century heat waves equal access to air-conditioning came to be regarded as an American right.

Ackermann is not a fan of air-conditioning and, while she gives advocates of fresh air and energy conservation strong voices, she nevertheless is able to convey the enthusiasm of a nascent and imperialistic industry bent on transforming the world. Certain connections are strained, such as a brief foray into the hipness of "cool," and there is some erratic bouncing back and forth between decades, but this is a strong monograph, one that demonstrates the interplay between technological development and cultural processes. The United States...

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