Not So Crazy with the Heat

Cattle feeding is a large industry in the Phoenix area. Thousands of cattle are fattened annually.

As a hazard to farmers and to Phoenix, the city and farmers have learned how to combat whose fortunes depend on their success. Winds them. and hailstorms severe enough to cause crop It is no airy boast, therefore, when it loss are so rare as to be negligible. Once in is said that Maricopa County never has five or six winters there may be a few hours a crop failure. What can cause a of weather cold enough to freeze unpicked crop failure? There are not many insect enemies (Continued on Page Fifty-seven) Phoenix is a range cattle center. These are the three top animals at the annual sale of the Arizona Hereford Breeders Association, held last December at the State Fairgrounds. Sheep (right) help to clear weeds from canal banks and ditches.

EXAMINING AT GREAT LENGTH THE EXTENT OF SUMMER IN PHOENIX AND DISCUSSING THE AMAZING DEVELOPMENTS THAT HAVE MADE PHOENIX ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST COMFORTABLE SUMMER CITIES AND THE "AIR-CONDITIONED CAPITAL OF THE WORLD"

ALL WINTER long the sun is worshipped in central and southern Arizona. Chambers of Commerce extol the virtues of abundant sunshine. They spend money to advertise the sheer joy of basking in the warm, friendly rays of sunshine unequalled for constancy and quality. Millions have been spent for "winter resorts." Railroads set up extra-deluxe passenger service for the "tourist trade." Airlines guarantee to whisk you from snow and ice to brilliant Warm sun in a matter of hours. Ah, the wonders of Arizona Sunshine in winter! Comes the summer. Old Sol gets down to the serious business of giving the customers even more of the same and what happens? The Chambers of Commerce shush anybody that mentions the sun. The resort hotels close up, the railroads pull off their fancy trains, and the airlines start whisking you to the seashore. All of which is very inconsistent when one stops to think that the intense heat of central and southern Arizona's summer sun has forced the inhabitants to make their cities the only comfortably cool communities in the country all summer, regardless of the weather reports! As a matter of fact, you make your own summer weather in Arizona in the winter you take what you get! The story of this paradox in weather is the story of how Phoenix, Arizona became the "Air-conditioned Capital of the World" and completely changed its summer living habits by the intelligent mixing of air, water, and electricity!

But it took a long time. Looking back on what the white man should have learned from the Indians, it took too long.

Accidentally or not, the Indians discovered the basic principle of cooling with plenty of air circulation and water evaporation. They made large ollas which were earthenware water vessels of porous pottery. An olla, filled with water and hung in a doorway did double duty. The water seeping through the sides of the olla was evaporated by the passage of air over it. The evaporation of this moisture cooled the water inside the olla and cooled the air outside the olla. Simple enough, to be sure, but it was not until a tinkering handy man in the Salt River Valley put these same principles to work, hundreds of years later, that Phoenix outgrew the "curse" of summer heat.

Of course, Phoenix does not claim to be the birthplace of air conditioning. In 1903 an "easterner" named Willis Carrier advanced the theory that ice-making machinery combined with fans and filters could be used to clean, cool, dehumidify and circulate the air in a building. He called his idea "weather-making" because with a few simple adjustments of his machine he could duplicate almost any type of weather. He had the temerity to suggest that his machines might be used in factories, offices, stores and homes. (At the time he was considered a wild-eyed visionary but today his principles and formulae are the basis of all air-conditioning handbooks.) From Carrier's first efforts many types and makes of equipment were subsequently developed and were being adapted for serious installation in the 1920's.

As early as World War I there were a few "wet wash" cooling systems in Arizona. These, usually in banks, were nothing more than large sheet metal ducts into which water was sprayed as air was drawn through and blown into the space to be cooled. From the standpoint of a customer making a quick entrance and exit, the "wet wash" air was seemingly cool. However, employees remaining in the muggy atmosphere for a period of hours had an entirely different opinion of the "cooling" system. After much fiddling and fussing and paying a plumber for a good deal of miscellaneous experimenting most of these systems were abandoned, or at least had the spray turned off.

From 1910 on there were plenty of electric fans in Phoenix. They were deemed an essential, but questionable, means of keeping cool. By actual test, noisiest fans were found to be the coolest, which test led many to believe that the psychological effect of electric fans was superior to its actual physiological effect. They did keep the air in circulation, thus evaporating the perspiration oozing from the men and caressing the glow on the ladies, all of which helped.

Residents of the Valley of the Sun who could afford it left for the summer. This included for the most part the wives and children, who were annually packed up and sent to the mountains or to the seashore.

Those who stayed home to sweat out the summer tried nearly everything. They went to open-air theaters, roof gardens and outdoor dancing spots for an evening's pleasure. They slept in the backyard at night. As late as 1932 a fair business was that of manufacturing outdoor screen rooms. Social life was completely curtailed for the summer. Housewives drooped around the house very lightly clad and many were the harrowing tales told by deliverymen, icemen, meter readers, and others who incautiously stepped into back porches or kitchens unheralded by warning noises.

Sometime after the automobile had come to stay . until gas and tire rationing . a Phoenix sheetmetal shop owner built a special hot-country radiator for use in the southwest. He did some experimenting and discovered that air could be cooled by blowing it through a very thin-finned radiator filled with cold water. He knew that a cooling tower would cool water. He combined the two and had a very serviceable air cooling device. Water was dropped from the top to the bottom of a tower composed of trays with wire-screen bottoms. Dripping from tray to tray the water circulated through air, which cooled it by evaporation. The air in the building was circulated through the radiator and gave up its heat to the cool water inside the thin tubes.

This system was rather expensive for popular consumption but was installed in a few stores and some homes.

Then the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company set off the fireworks in 1928 when they installed a refrigerated airconditioning system in their new Phoenix of-

Office building. Cool, dehumidified, filtered air was circulated through the offices for the complete comfort of all, no matter how long they stayed. There were no electric fans to blow toll tickets all over the place. People came in to marvel. Then, because Phoenix was growing, and growing fast in spite of the heat, construction began on two new hotel buildings. Power company salesmen pointed out the advantages of having a nice cool bedroom to rest the weary sweltering traveler. One of the hotel builders said he guessed he would try it on a few floors because, while it was a good idea, there really was no such thing as summer hotel business in Phoenix.

Before the first summer was over the hotel man wished for twenty floors of air-cooled hotel. Travelers who could not avoid Phoenix in the summer despaired of the wrap-a-wetsheet-around-yourself-and-lie-in-front-of-the-fan system of cooling afforded by the other hotels, and flocked to the air-cooled bedrooms. They found cooler sleeping in Phoenix than in seacoast hotels! Imagine it, sleeping under a blanket in Phoenix in August!

So the rest of the hotels were forced to put in cooling.

One theater installed cooling and the others had to. Happy and surprised were the theater managers to find that the additional expense of the cooling was more than offset by the crowds who bought tickets just to get cool.

An office building with a lot of vacancies installed cooling and developed a waiting list. The other office building managers found that in order to rent office space they first had to cool it.

Merchants who had spent most of their summers snoozing in the back of the store under a fan, worrying about the rent, started to cool off the merchandise, and the customers began to flock in after it.

The epidemic was on. You couldn't get the customers' dollar without giving service with a cool zephyr. The five-and-ten-cent stores left their doors wide open and accumulated huge crowds standing on the sidewalk to enjoy the cool breeze emanating from the store.

During the early 1930's the demand for cooling equipment grew so rapidly that many worthless devices and poor installations were foisted upon an unsuspecting public. The complaints came first to the attention of the electric company. They were called upon to service the equipment or to explain why the power wouldn't make it work. The Central Arizona Light and Power Company, serving most of the communities in the Valley of the Sun, established an "air-conditioning department" to help local manufacturers develop adequate equipment, and to make surveys, recommendations, and advise customers who planned to buy cooling units. Under this arrangement progress was made in creating cooling equipment suited to the area, and the fly-by-night, highpressure, cooler super-salesman passed away before he could brand modern cooling as just another unhappy experiment.

And so it went until there was no place like home for sheer stuffiness and discomfort. Mrs. Phoenix began to squawk. All of the comparatively inexpensive home cooling gadgets were quite unsatisfactory. Most of them utilized the family electric fan in combination with some sort of water evaporation system. None of these worked because they used the same air over and over again and the resultant humidity simply made the situation worse.

Then the tinkerer started to "tink." He tried the idea of introducing fresh air, cooled by water evaporation, and he had something!