Most Americans did not have air conditioning in their home in 1954. Most Americans do now.

The adoption of home air conditioning was beginning in the 1950s. The first domestic units, the kind that we think of as fitting in a window, were developed in the 1930s. Their cost was prohibitive – only a few really wealthy folks even considered getting one. 

If you wanted to cool off, you could go to the movies – theaters prominently advertised the fact that they had cooling systems inside.

But the industry worked hard to drive those costs down. By the late 1940s, air conditioning was becoming more affordable.

My parents did not have any kind of air conditioner until the 1980s. Their home, built in the 1920s, was not well-equipped for the electricity drain of the big AC units – and that was the case with a lot of older homes.

But newer homes and apartments began to be “fitted” for AC. I remember seeing an apartment building going up across the street from the house apartment we rented in Queens and wondering what those gray rectangles below some windows were for. 

Soon we knew. Names like Carrier, Friedrich and Emerson would show up on those boxes indicating that AC units of those brands were either in there or about to be. For older buildings and those that weren’t being outfitted for AC, window air conditioners became smaller and more portable. 

And homes began including something even better: central air conditioning. It requires a couple of big power-eating units and a lot of ducts, but it is a lifesaver – especially in warmer parts of the country such as in the South.

In 2022, the latest data available from the Department of Energy, 87% of American homes now have some form of air conditioning. And just about every car sold in the nation has AC as standard equipment – a big change from when everyone rolled the windows down and hoped for a breeze.

The concern isn’t so much cooling people off as in not warming the planet any further. 

There have been several regulations regarding chemicals used in air conditioning. Most prominently, every nation in the world banned chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, because of how incredibly proficient at destroying ozone in the atmosphere.

These arguments would have seemed strange to a generation that found keeping cool a struggle. The problem of keeping the planet cool got punted to those of us in the 21st century.