Content area
Full Text
Henry Ford's Model T, which sold for $500, was the first "people's car" because of its affordability. Henry Galson might be called the Henry Ford of the air-conditioning industry because he produced what would become the first "people's air conditioner." He patented the De La Vergne Self-Contained Air-Conditioning Unit, which became commercially available in 1933 (Figure I).
At that time, the focus of the air-conditioning industry was on process air conditioning, comfort air conditioning of institutional buildings such as the U.S. Capitol or large commercial buildings such as movie houses or theaters. Indeed, support for Henry Galson's De La Vergne patent occurred because its parent company, Baldwin Locomotive, the world's largest manufacturer of locomotives, and the rest of the rail industry, feared losing passengers to cars. Galson's assignment was to air condition trains in an attempt to keep people riding the rails. He completed this assignment and a by-product was a free-standing, self-contained airconditioning unit (Figure 2).
The unit also was marketed as a home air conditioner, and a version was sold as a refrigeration unit for the dairy industry.
Although production of air-conditioning equipment was sharply curtailed during World War II, demand for consumer air conditioners rapidly increased in the years after the war ended. (In 1936,3,000 air conditioners were produced worldwide. Ten...