Air conditioning developments Milestones in the development of air conditioning:
1830s: Dr. John Gorrie experiments with air conditioning at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Apalachicola, Fla., by blowing air over buckets of ice suspended from the ceiling.
1851: Gorrie receives the first patent for an ice-making machine.
1880: Robert Portner and Edward Eils invent a cooling device that uses a steam-driven fan to force air over refrigerated pipes. The system is put to use in several breweries.
1881: Doctors for an ailing President James A. Garfield cool his bedroom with ventilating fans and 436 pounds of ice per hour.
1882: The electric fan is invented.
1901: The New York Stock Exchange installs a cooling system.
1902: What is recognized as the first full air-conditioning system is installed at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographic and Publishing Co. in Brooklyn, N.Y. The system, which controls both humidity and temperature, is designed by Willis Carrier, who would come to be known as the "Edison of air conditioning."
1906: Stuart Cramer coins the term "air conditioning."
1911: The Folies Bergere Theater in New York installs the first theater air-conditioning system.
1929: Frigidaire introduces the first room cooler. The condensing unit has to be installed separately in the basement of a home.
1930: The first air-conditioned car, a Cadillac customized for a Houston businessman with allergies, hits the road.
1936: United Airlines begins air-conditioning its planes.
1938: Philco markets the first mass-produced window air conditioner.
1942: The War Production Board issues Wartime Order L-38, banning the installation or manufacture of new air-conditioning systems solely for personal comfort.
1945: Order L-38 is repealed; production begins on console-style room units.
1950s: Air conditioning begins to appear in tract housing developments.
1960: According to the U.S. Census, 12.4 percent of all U.S. households, and 18.3 percent of Florida households, have some kind of air conditioning.
1964: A Florida mortgage company starts penalizing customers whose homes don't have central air.
1965: The Astrodome, the world's first air-conditioned indoor stadium, opens in Houston.
1973: 80 percent of cars in the South are equipped with air conditioning.
1980: The census reports a majority of American homes, and 84 percent of Florida homes, have air conditioning.
1990s: Companies experiment with "personal environments," allowing workers to control the temperature and humidity within their office or cubicle space.
Sources: National Building Museum; "The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture," Raymond Arsenault, The Journal of Southern History, November 1984.