Why Do We Call it Air Conditioning?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lila Allen, and I’m calling in from Miami.

Hi, Lila. Welcome.

Hey, what’s up?

Hi. So my husband and I were blaring the AC, as we pretty much do year-round out here in Miami, and we got to talking about the terms that we use for temperature manipulation, specifically heating and air conditioning.

So I was wondering, why is it that we call the device that warms the air a heater, but the thing that cools the air, an air conditioner? It seems that changing the condition of the air would go both ways. You can make it warmer. You can make it cooler. So aren’t both the heater and air conditioner conditioning the air?

They are. Why does the one that cools the air get the distinction of being a conditioner?

Yes, it’s true that when you’re heating the air, you’re also conditioning it. But when air conditioning was first invented, the word conditioning was borrowed from the textile industry. There is something that you do to textiles to condition it. It involves controlling the humidity, controlling contaminants, controlling the temperature of the room, and other things. Because you want your mills to operate efficiently. And you want the conditions for the cloth to be sufficient so that things don’t stretch or shrink. Basically, the product is consistent. So what comes out is what you want.

In 1909, there was a guy by the name of Stuart Kramer. He was from North Carolina. And at a convention, he presented a paper called Recent Development in Air Conditioning. And he was the guy who coined the word air conditioning. But what his paper was about was textile mills. It was about dehumidifying. It was about cooling. It was about filtering the air. And he says in one of his later papers, he says, I coined this word specifically from the notion that we were conditioning the textiles. He didn’t necessarily care very much about making the room or the factory cool for the workers. He was more concerned about the product.

So this speech that he gave titled Recent Development in Air Conditioning then became republished and different versions were put out there. And he kind of became known for it. And these machines, and he wasn’t the one who invented air conditioning, not at all. He only coined the term. But these machines later caught on in other kinds of manufacturing. They showed up in movie theaters and other places where you have a lot of people and it’s hot.

But what’s really interesting to me is we still have a very strong reason to use the word conditioning to refer to the device that cools our house. Because it isn’t only cooling our house. It is actually still conditioning in the original sense that Kramer meant it. It is reducing the humidity and even to a small degree. But it does it. It filters the air of contaminants and particles.

Interesting.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah.

What about hot water heaters?

That’s another whole conversation for a different radio show.

Right. We were thinking that it was because it was a cooler term, and since air conditioning probably came about after heating, that it was more of an advertising method. But this makes sense, actually, you know, the way that it was defined. So thank you.

Yeah, you’re welcome. You did say you were right on one respect. The word heating and heater, all that had already existed for a long time. The idea of cooling the air in that way is really recent. I mean, people used to do things with blocks of ice and fans blowing across them. But the idea of having a machine that was powered by kerosene or gas or electricity, they would cool your business or your factory, your home. This is really, really recent. We’re talking 140 years, maybe, maybe 150. And revolutionary. You can read whole books about the effect of air conditioning on the South.

Yeah, staggeringly interesting stuff.

Yeah, and this was in the American South. I don’t know how people lived out here ever without air conditioning. It is so hot in the summer.

They suffered.

No kidding.

And humid where you are.

Oh, my gosh.

Right.

Yeah.

Aliyah, anyway, so that’s the story. Air conditioning, Stuart Kramer, 1909, started in the textile mills of North Carolina.

Nice. Well, thank you. I’m glad that there was a solid answer and reference for this. I appreciate it.

Take care now.

Sure thing.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye.

So there we go. I know when she brought that question up, there were a huge number of people going like, yeah, I’ve always wondered because I always wondered. And the first time I looked into it, I was like, this is great. There’s a guy. And he even in his first use of the word air conditioning in print, he talks about why he chose the word. So he explains his coinage. And so we know from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, why the word is conditioning.

And my ears perked up, of course, when you were talking about textile mills in North Carolina because that’s where my dad worked before child labor laws.

Right. And they were called lint heads.

Lint heads. They came home with all this lint in their hair everywhere.

Yeah, that’s the thing is when you read the history of Stuart Kramer and the textile mills, he was one of many men that was working in the air conditioning business and many people who started these cooling businesses. But nobody at the time was really paying attention to the fact that there were all these workers who were in that hot room with these textiles that they were trying to condition. And so you have pictures from this exact same era, like early 1900s, of children standing at the loom.

Oh, yes. My dad used to have that photo on his wall because that was his memory. And until he died, he had nightmares about trying to escape the mill.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, regular nightmares. There’s lots to say about word origins. I know there’s a question that you’ve, it’s been bothering you, right? A burr under your saddle. This is the show where we’re going to answer it. 877-929-9673.