Willis Haviland Carrier, 1876-1950, inventor of air conditioning
By JACQUIN SANDERS
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 28, 1999
There was a time, half a century ago in Florida, when people appreciated a nicely prepared possum stew.
Afterward they would amble -- you never hurried in those days, unless somebody was after you -- to the front porch and hope to catch a breeze and rock away the weight of that good dinner.
Of course, it wasn't all sweet-smelling magnolia and red bloom on the bottlebrush tree and great white heron floating across the sky. Sometimes people had to stop watching and rocking and appreciating. Sometimes they had to slap the mosquitoes. It wasn't a perfect way to live, and it wasn't forward-looking, but folks liked it.
Then along came air conditioning, the icy brainstorm of Willis Haviland Carrier, an upstate New Yorker, of all people.
Most Americans first felt the chill of AC in movie theaters and department stores; it didn't get inside their homes till after World War II. Most people saluted the waves of cold air that began to dominate their lives; others sniffed the bogus chill and wondered, "Is this stuff safe to breathe?"
Safe or not, air conditioning was everywhere, and Florida would never be the same.
A new breed of AC-friendly houses cropped up. They were cramped, with lower ceilings and shrunken windows. Builders stopped putting front porches on them.
Television came hand in hand with air conditioning. People ate as they watched, getting goose-pimply with the chill and Playhouse 90. Nobody much cared for possum anymore.
They didn't have to swat mosquitoes, either. Soon the state was bursting with newcomers, sitting and watching and eating and not swatting. Everything speeded up, crowded up, after air conditioning arrived. It was no longer necessary to adjust the pace of living to heavy tropical air. All you had to do was go indoors.
Go to work, go to play, go into some characterless store. Go home to your airtight little house. The Sunshine State boomed because you didn't have to go out in the sun.
The workplace changed too. For many reasons, including the cost of cooling, profit went out of shopkeeping. Former owners went to work in the big stores. Small towns got smaller. Schools combined.
Doctors stopped practicing medicine alone and moved into air-conditioned suites with other doctors. Young lawyers no longer rented a room over a store, painted their names on a shingle hanging outside and waited for clients. They joined others of their ilk in large air-cooled partnerships.
Geniuses no longer wrote, painted or invented alone in a spare room, a barn, a basement. Scientists clustered in colleges. Artists no longer came home (as William Faulkner did after the first world war) to write about their own people thriving in the hospitable Southern dirt, at home with rain and mud and dust.
The porch-sitters and possum-eaters of Old Florida now lived in air conditioning, worked in it, clustered contentedly in the malls it had created.
They were cool. And if they were distinguishable from the newcomers, their children wouldn't be.
