USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications
The cooling of the South.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1984
ISSN
0363-3276
Abstract
With the discovery of fire, man conquered cold. Beating the heat was a more daunting challenge. In ancient Rome, patricians simply fled to the Alban Hills to wait out the sultry summer months. Caliph Mahdi of Baghdad was more ambitious. In A.D. 775, he began cooling his garden by packing the hollow walls around it with snow from nearby mountains. Some 700 years later, Leonardo da Vinci devised a water-driven fan for a patron's home. Not to be outdone, one 19th-century inventor built a Venetian blind "suit" of clothes that permitted ventilation but blocked out direct sunlight. Only with the development of the mechanical air conditioner in the 20th century did man come up with a practical form of summer relief. As historian Raymond Arsenault points out, the air conditioner has done more than lower indoor temperatures; it has also contributed to social and economic change, notably the "Americanization of Dixie.”
Language
en_US
Publisher
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Recommended Citation
Arsenault, R. (1984). The cooling of the south. Wilson Quarterly, 8(3), 150-159.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Citation only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.