Never sneer at air-con: it built the modern era
Atweet from Transport for London’s Central Line officials that was intended to reassure commuters ended up doing the opposite last week. Addressing concerns about travelling conditions during the heatwave, the Central Line assured its patrons it was aware of “the heating issues” and that new trains with a full air-cooling system were on their way. It’s just that they won’t arrive until early 2030.
I have some sympathy with the hapless Central Line authorities. Airconditioning the entire Underground network for a handful of days a year may be difficult to prioritise, but commuting in crammed trains in temperatures that are illegal for farm animals isn’t acceptable either.
Despite the arrival of thunder and showers in parts of the UK, it’s a good week to pay homage to a particular 20th-century inventor. The New York engineer Willis Carter staged something of a revolution when he invented the air-conditioner in 1902, to stop the paper in Brooklyn printing plants from wrinkling due to heat and humidity.
The White House Historical Association has a dedicated section on its website on how US presidents and their families in the “pre-air-conditioning era” dealt with the challenges of infamous Washington summers. William Taft slept on the roof. Woodrow Wilson worked in a tent at the end of the Rose Garden.
As Carter’s invention developed into scalable and affordable air-conditioning units for homes, it made more of the US comfortably inhabitable, changing the political make-up of the country, according to Steven Johnson, the author of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Belt bloc of conservative voters” who were essential to Ronald Regan’s 1980 electoral success would simply not have existed, not having moved from the cool North to the oppressively hot South.
And if there hadn’t been a Reagan presidency, would the Cold War have ended when it did? What would the world have looked like today? Something resembling the Eighties still?
Back then, the US consumed more airconditioning than the rest of the world put together, while being home to just 5 per cent of the planet’s population. Today, Japan has overtaken the US in the percentage of homes with air-conditioning (and its ACs are typically 25 per cent more energy-efficient than US ones), with Korea not far behind. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2030 ( just when the new Central Line trains will be hitting London) Indian households will account for nearly as many AC units as Japan and Korean households combined, with Brazil and Mexico both more than doubling their household usage. Higher energyefficiency standards to ensure lower emissions are already being explored.
The liberalisation of emerging economies and the resulting rise in incomes have meant amenities such as air-conditioning – which only a few decades ago were the preserve of the richest nations – are more and more accessible and affordable. The story of the air-conditioner is yet another example of innovation and free market policies raising living standards across the planet. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty ;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
Maybe the grown-ups are starting to get a grip in Washington. Over the past week, there have been some significant signs that the ignoramus (sorry, the fearless leader) in the White House had overstepped the bounds sufficiently to trigger the flashing red alert. Perhaps what did it was that spectacular foreign junket that began with the President castigating America’s allies and ended with him fawning over a Russian autocrat. It almost certainly was not the latest chapter in the Trump sexual history – a taped conversation in which a pay-off to a past mistress was apparently arranged. The American electorate has almost no interest in smutty misadventures so long as the economy is chugging away.
As they used to say when it was Bill Clinton’s antics that were being exposed, voters don’t care about (Clinton’s playmate) Paula Jones – they care about the Dow Jones.
It remains to be seen how much interest they show in the latest kerfuffle over Trump’s possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. Testimony from his then-lawyer and chief fixer, Michael