5 Interesting Facts About Air Conditioning

When most people think about air conditioning they probably don’t regard it as an interesting subject. You might give a quick shrug, tip your hat to its immediate benefits of cooling, and disregard it as just another “nice” invention. But the truth is that if you look beneath the surface you will find plenty of interesting facts about air conditioning which you never knew before. Here are just five of the best ones we think you should know.

1) It helps us to live longer

This might seem like a wild, inaccurate statement for such an ordinary piece of technology but it’s true. While it is no fountain of youth, air conditioning has been instrumental in helping to create the right conditions to produce new medicines and advances in health care.

Having air conditioning in hospitals has helped us to decrease infant mortality rates as well as fight off bacteria and dangerous diseases such as malaria. In certain conditions the temperature in an operating theatre needs to be just right and air conditioning helps with this, keeping a room cool in order to help save lives. All of this has no doubt contributed to the rise of life expectancy in the western world.

2) It created the blockbuster

Yet another statement which seems wild and outlandish, but have you ever considered how hot it would get in a cinema during the summer months if we didn’t have air conditioning? The movie industry was one of the first industries to really utilise air conditioning in an attempt to boost audience numbers in summer when people were more likely to go elsewhere for entertainment. Once people realised that air conditioning made cinema viewing comfortable all year round the production companies began to hang their movies in this desirable slot – thus giving birth to what we now know as the summer blockbuster.

3) It wasn’t initially designed for our benefit

The real reason air conditioning was invented was for the paper manufacturing industry. In 1902 Willis Carrier invented a machine to cool the room in a publishing company building to stop the paper from reacting to the humidity and expanding. The expansion and contraction played havoc with production and only when he produced the first air conditioning machine was the problem solved. Now we see HVAC installed in all kinds of industries, helping to maintain consistent temperatures not only for the workers but for the machinery and equipment involved.

4) It left a legacy of summer holidays

What we think of as the summer holidays was once not just a holiday for the school kids. Many industries would slow production and business during the hottest weeks of the year and it’s only due to the implementation of air conditioning that most of us now work throughout the year. While this has been kept on for the kids and disappointed the adults, it has helped economies around the world grow due to increased production and more business.

5) America is indebted to air conditioning

With our fairly meagre summer here in the UK we don’t need daily doses of air conditioning quite as much as our American cousins. For them the invention of air conditioning has meant a boom for areas of the country where it just wouldn’t have previously been possible. States such as Florida (famous for Disney World) and Nevada (famous for the Vegas strip) have seen populations boom and thrive due to regulated cool temperatures. This boom in such warm climates has boosted the US economy over the last 50 years and helps them make the most of their swathes of land.

Surely there can be no argument about air conditioning being an uninteresting subject now, and these are only a handful of the interesting facts available out there. Here at Airway Air Conditioning we know how important your air conditioning is for you and that’s why we’re dedicated to providing the best installations and a premier maintenance service, keeping you and your industry related machinery running all year round.