BackStory

The following links and documents relate to the BackStory episode “Climate Control: A History of Heating & Cooling”, originally broadcast in March of 2010. You can listen to the entire episode here.

Mentioned on the Show

• Cold House Journal, the blog of a couple who spent one winter in Maine with “almost no heat”
• Benjamin Franklin recalls his invention of the Franklin Stove in his autobiography
• Excerpts from the letters and diaries of Frederic Tudor, 19th-century ice mogul

Outside Sources

• Benjamin Franklin’s 1744 pamphlet “Account of the New Invented Pennsylvanian Fire-Places“
• A history of radiant heating and cooling, beginning in the first century, B.C. (PDF)
• Coping with cold in colonial Virginia
• “The Favorite Poison of America“: Andrew Jackson Downing on the evils of stoves
• The heritage of HVAC
• The Chairman of the Air Conditioning and Refrigerator Institute discusses early AC, beginning with early 20th-century “atmospheric theaters”
• The story of the experimental 1950s “air-conditioned village” in Austin, TX, plus the results of the experiment
• An interview with air conditioning historian Marsha Ackerman
• Air conditioning as emblem of American malaise: Henry Miller’s Air Conditioned Nightmare
• Who needs heat? Not these 21st-century New Yorkers…much like their predecessors at the turn of the 20th century.
• You’ve just experienced the warmest decade on record.

Bibliography

• Cooper, Gail. Air Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960. Baltimor: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
• Harris, Howell. “Conquering Winter: US Consumers and the Cast Iron Stove.” Building Research and Information 36.4 (2008): 337-350. Print.

• Weightman, Gavin. The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story. New York: Hyperion, 2004.