Description
In this groundbreaking study, Gail Cooper shows that, from the outset, air conditioning has been the focus of conflict and controversy—well predating today's concerns about fluorocarbons and global warming. While a technical elite of designers, inventors, and corporate pioneers made a comprehensive plans for the new technology, their ideas were challenged by workers, consumers, government regulators, business competitors, and rival professionals.Reviews
"It sounds like a technical history, and indeed it is, but along the way Cooper shows how ideology, social relations, and economics affect the technology, and how it affects them. In this way, we can learn much from such books—'cultural studies' seeming so much livelier when borne up by material culture than by the unsteady scaffold of abstract theory."—Giles Foden, Times Literary Supplement"Gail Cooper's study is a welcome addition to the history of technology and urban history. Its strength lies in mapping out fundamental engineering and marketing issues about a technology that has had a profound impact on the very nature of inside environments."—Martin V. Melosi, American Historical Review "A groundbreaking study in the early business development of a technology that many Americans now take for granted."—APT Bulletin "Professor Cooper's insistence that we consider engineering and technological change in its broadest context not only allows her to make the stories of the invention of air conditioning and how America came to be air-conditioned lively ones. It also helps her explain, more generally, some of the ways that new technologies become part of our lives."—Steven Lubar, chair and curator of the Division of the History of Technology, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Author Information
Gail Cooper is an associate professor of history at Lehigh University.
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