Cool Quotes

“Some people thought to travel with chunks of dry ice, suspended in towel slings from the inside windows of the car—again a potentially lethal idea, as the release of all that carbon dioxide could cause everyone in the car to black out right on the road. Less dangerously, there was a small rubber-bladed fan that plugged into the cigarette lighter and clipped on to the dashboard to give the driver a breeze. Failing any of these remedies, drivers joked about the least expensive cooling system of all: “Four-Forty Air Conditioning—four windows down, forty miles an hour.”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“But planning to live with the Roosevelts was FDR’s indispensable right-hand man, Louis Howe, who suffered from a battery of illnesses, among them asthma, and was no fan of summertime humidity. The Roosevelt entourage”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“using the new nonflammable refrigerant dielene, which had been around for some time but used only as a dry-cleaning fluid. Ice and Refrigeration”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“Before long those booklets morphed into The Weather Vein, a free “monthly magazine” featuring a beaming cartoon character named The Mechanical Weather Man, “Mech” for short, whose control-valve body was emblazoned with the phrase “EVERY DAY A GOOD DAY.” In cartoon-strip format and in rhyme, Mech visited businesses”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“the imagination of John Jacob Astor IV. They shouldn’t have been surprised. Astor wasn’t the usual brand of multimillionaire—a Harvard graduate and published science fiction writer, with several patents to his credit, he had commissioned Alfred Wolff”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“The book, The Wind Mill as a Prime Mover, would later be used as a working reference by the Wright brothers as they built their first aircraft.”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“Magazines such as Scientific American, The Technologist, and The American Architect and Building News appealed to the era’s technophiles by endlessly glorifying the process of manufacturing ice by machine.”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“This problem was in the mind of actor/playwright/producer Steele MacKaye when he took over the lease of the bankrupt Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1879. A true Renaissance man and a Paris-trained actor, MacKaye had been a fixture of the New York theater scene since 1872, achieving a notable measure of success both on and off the stage. And when some private investors gave him the opportunity to build a stock company of his own, in a built-to-order theater, spending whatever he liked and making whatever improvements he wanted, he jumped at the chance. Over the next year, the Fifth Avenue was completely remodeled. It opened at the beginning of 1880, renamed the Madison Square Theatre, a resplendent 650-seat jewel box of a playhouse that featured such MacKaye-devised innovations as a double-height elevator stage that could make scene shifts in less than a minute, fold-up seats, a Tiffany-designed interior … and, for the”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“For four decades, nearly all of the country’s ice interests had been under the control of Frederic Tudor, an attack dog of a tycoon who had singlehandedly built the ice trade from one tiny ship into a worldwide empire, earning him the nickname of the “Ice King.” It was understandable that Tudor”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

“drew in air, compressed it in a chamber with a piston (becoming hot), and forced it into a labyrinth of pipe. As it escaped into the pipe and expanded (becoming cool), it was routed through a tank of brine, which itself became chilled below freezing and helped to lower the temperature of the air even more. This was already a familiar theory; a number of inventors and physicists around the world, Benjamin Franklin among them, had written on the possible ways in which artificial cold could be produced.”
― Salvatore Basile, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything