Was There Life Before Air Conditioning in Texas?

Summer is in full swing here in Houston, Texas, which means our air conditioners are running nonstop working to keep our homes and businesses cool and comfortable.

While it is hard to imagine surviving a Texas summer without the luxury of modern air conditioning, indoor a/c, as we know and love it today, is a relatively new luxury.

In fact, you might not live in the Lone Star State at all if it were not for modern advances in air conditioning technology. Texas, along with Florida, Southern California, Arizona, Georgia and New Mexico all saw above-average growth during the second half of the 20th century, after the rise of modern cooling.

So, in honor of our favorite home appliance, the air conditioner, we’ve put together a list of a few facts you probably didn’t know about air conditioning from Salvatore Basile’s new book, “Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything.”

4 Super Cool Facts about Air Conditioning

1. Summer movie blockbusters became popular as movie theatre owners wanted to fill seats in the late teens and early 1920’s. Before air conditioning was affordable at home, people scrambled to the local theatre to beat the heat.
2. Would you pay the equivalent of $3500 for a single, window-mounted air conditioner? You would if you wanted air conditioning in your home in the 1940s when an air conditioner cost $350, or roughly ten times that today.
3. Heir to the barbed-wire fortune, Charles Gates, built the first fully air-conditioned home in Minneapolis in 1913.
4. Our Nation’s first President of the United States to have an air-conditioned oval office was Herbert Hoover. The expenditure cost approximately $30,000 in 1929.

For more information about your air conditioner, please visit our website or blog. If you’re in our Houston, Texas service area and need air conditioner maintenance or repair (or if you just want to chat about how much you love conditioned air,) please give us a call or schedule online.