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Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything [Table Of Contents], Salvatore Basile

History

It’s a contraption that makes the lists of “Greatest Inventions Ever”; at the same time, it’s accused of causing global disaster. It has changed everything from architecture to people’s food habits to their voting patterns, to even the way big business washes its windows. It has saved countless lives . . . while causing countless deaths. Most of us are glad it’s there. But we don’t know how, or when, it got there.

It’s air conditioning.

For thousands of years, humankind attempted to do something about the slow torture of hot weather. Everything was tried: water power, slave power, electric …