Air conditioning: It was this box that made globalization possible

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Kaspar Almayer suffers.

The Dutch sales representative on Borneo dreams of returning home for the rest of his life, to European comfort - and, above all, to a moderate climate.

The oppressive, suffocating evening heat of the tropical island troubles him.

Even his escape from the house to the veranda doesn't help him.

Almayer is the title character from Joseph Conrad's first novel, and every now and then the author lets the inescapable sultriness evaporate from the pages.

As a literary vehicle with which he drives his protagonist crazy.

“Almayers Wahn”, as the bestseller first published in 1895 is called, was just fiction.

But anyone who worked in real life as a businessman in the tropics a hundred years ago or earlier had to be willing to make sacrifices, accept extreme conditions, and expect a loss of performance.

Travelers in the far north have always had access to achievements with which they could shake off the hostile cold: the stove, the fur coat.

But where it was about unbearable heat, with the bailiff in the colonies of Black Africa, with the trader in humid Southeast Asia, with the missionary in the Amazon basin - there was no escape from the sweaty temperature until well into modern times.

The air conditioning triggered mass migrations

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But then came July 1902, a summer that created one of the most important prerequisites for globalization: air conditioning.

A device that, within just a few decades, should separate life in the tropical, arid and semi-arid zones into two parallel worlds: a pleasantly cool, isolated inside and a hot, uncomfortable outside.

The air conditioning system was supposed to change the world, to transform world-forgotten tropical nests into booming industrial and commercial zones, whose prosperity, like a magnet, attracted people from the countryside where their work was no longer needed.

It triggered mass migrations.

It was unbearably warm in New York that year.

So brooding that the machines in the Sackett & Wilhelms lithography plant stopped.

The house in Brooklyn was known for high quality color prints, each color the masters applied in a separate process.

But now, in the heat, the humidity fluctuated so much that the paper warped, the contours blurred.

Lots of misprints.

The manager turned to the Buffalo Forge Company, which actually made fan heaters, and asked if there was anyone there who could think of something against high humidity.

Willis Haviland Carrier (1876-1950) applied for a patent for an "apparatus for treating air" and thus became the "Father of Cool"

Source: picture alliance / Everett Colle

Buffalo Forge sent a young engineer, Willis Haviland Carrier.

25 years old, fresh from university, he was still a little inexperienced.

But the boss had set up a small room for him in which he had tinkered with and carried out basic research on the production of heat.

And now the use at Sackett-Wilhelms: The resourceful carrier quickly converted a normal heater, blew air into the pipes with a fan, which he then cooled with water.

In this way, as desired, his apparatus drew moisture from the air.

And: by the way, it also cooled them.

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It is an irony in the history of technology that a simple trick used to cool a room was only used when this cooling was supposed to serve a completely different purpose, namely to reduce the humidity.

The idea with the water-cooled pipes would not have been a miracle in the years before, and all the real Almayers in the tropics could have been spared the ordeal.

Cinemas and department stores became pioneers

Since Carrier's invention was not initially aimed at temperature, but rather at air humidity, it did not go down in tradition as a cooling machine, but as an "air conditioning system".

The English “air conditioner” (A / C) could be translated as “air freshener”.

The inventor registered the patent for his flash of inspiration as an "apparatus for treating air", patent no.

808897. Now known as the "Father of Cool", he founded the Carrier Engineering Corporation in 1915 with start-up capital of $ 35,000.

The company is still the world leader in the A / C market to this day.

It took a while for word of the benefits of air conditioning to spread.

Film factories, tobacco manufacturers, meat processors - businesses with sensitive goods were the first to use them.

In the 1920s, the first industries learned to attract customers in the hot months with cool air like the stove the cat in winter.

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The pioneer was the operator of the Rivoli Cinema in New York in the summer of 1924.

Its sales skyrocketed and the system was amortized in three months.

Other movie theaters followed, then the big department stores.

But the streams of people they attracted were only the forerunners of global movements.

Started in the USA.

Union troops repeatedly had to stop the advance in the American Civil War because they could not stand the climate in the southern states.

The photo shows a medical unit 18 ... 63 in front of Vicksburg (Mississippi)

Source: picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS

The first to realize the implications was the Texan writer Frank Dobie, shortly after the first air conditioning system was installed in a private house in 1928: "Texas will perish," he wrote, "now the Yankees can live here too." And the Northerners came en masse.

When A / C became the standard in medium-sized residential buildings in the southern states in the 1960s, the annual outflow of millions of people was turned into an equally strong immigration.

Raymond Arsenault, Southern historian, even compares the manufacturers of air conditioning systems with a commander of the Northern Army in the American Civil War.

Manufacturers have "turned out to be far more devastating invaders than General Sherman," he writes in his essay "The End of the Long Hot Summer".

The "sunbelt" between Southern California and Florida, with Silicon Valley as the most famous symbol, advanced to become the world center of IT development when late hippies and new yuppies learned to appreciate doing business and A / C.

The swampy, sultry, mosquito-pregnant Gulf Coast of the United States, which was 500 miles inland from less than half a million people in the 1950s, is now home to 20 million.

The old industrial region in the north around the great lakes, which once flourished in a cool working atmosphere, has long been overshadowed.

Laptops instead of agriculture are shaping the south today, where the standard of living has risen from 50 percent in the 1930s to 90 percent in the north.

Gail Cooper writes in his book "Air Conditioning America" ​​about a survey of US company bosses in the 1950s: Nine out of ten respondents saw cool air as the most important factor for higher productivity.

It was the air conditioning that made the tropical port of Singapore a modern metropolis

Source: picture alliance / dpa

The artificial "climate change" took hold of the whole world.

The best-known symbol for this is a city that is not that far from the river on which Almayer once had to struggle with heat and mosquitoes: Singapore, the most important trading metropolis in Southeast Asia for decades, bursting with prosperity that was created on monitors behind the glittering facades in a pleasant atmosphere.

Even decades ago, life there was characterized by humid heat when fish, spices, tropical woods and other things changed hands in open halls, just as in all the centuries before.

The recently deceased Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister of the city-state from 1959 to 1990, the entire time that Singapore was going through the most dramatic changes to the place of the cool business of our days.

He knew what he was talking about when he answered the question in the Wall Street Journal to important contemporaries about which invention was the most important of the last millennium.

"The air conditioning," he said.

It allows the inhabitants of the tropics to create the climate of advanced civilizations from the cooler regions.

Cherian George, known as a journalist and book author in the city, titled one of his essay volumes “Singapore.

The Air-Conditioned Nation ".

Against the inequality of the world

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Not only Singapore, but also all other metropolises in the tropical zone around the globe could never generate the added value that they create today if all of their jobs were exposed to the local climate as they were in the past.

Neither by the locals, more and more of whom are well educated and have demanding jobs in air-conditioned offices, nor by the representatives of Europe or North America, who would certainly not have come in as large numbers as they are today.

Not if they only had to dream of their home in the constant heat stress like Kaspar Almayer.

And it's about more than just office work.

Important production lines would collapse in the heat, not least in the high-tech industry.

This is one of the reasons why many advanced emerging countries would not have been able to break free from the group of poor developing countries without the air conditioning system, especially the four “tiger states” in Southeast Asia alongside China, but also Brazil, India and others.

Globalization would be difficult to imagine.

The scout Montesquieu would see himself confirmed.

After all, in 1748 he attributed the uneven development of the world to the fact that heat reduced productivity and suppressed entrepreneurial boldness, while in cool countries courage reigned and led to success.

What he did not know: profitable coolness is feasible, wherever it is needed.

This article was first published in 2015.