On a humid July in 1869, a contest was held to see who could successfully transport frozen beef from Texas to New Orleans. Thaddeus Lowe of Dallas arrived first, in a ship cooled with dry ice, but it was so heavily laden that it could not enter the harbor. Dr. Howard Peyton of San Antonio arrived later but took the prize in a more modest ship outfitted with mechanically refrigerated lockers. The historic St. Charles Hotel held a banquet, where the partygoers dined on the prized Texas beef.
In Episode 8 of The Engines of Texanity, we talk about how advances in cooling technology improved the quality of life in Texas.
Ferdinand Carré first worked on an absorbtion refrigeration system in 1859. Carre’s system worked by heating up an ammonia-water mixture to increase its pressure, then pushing that high-pressure ammonia-water into a lower-pressure chamber. By circulating the now-cooler, lower-pressure mixture through a conduit in a warmer space, the mixture effectively absorbed heat and carried it out. While able to produce blocks of ice, the machine worked far better in theory than in practice.
In 1865, Daniel Livingston Holden purchased one of Carré’s machines that had been shipped to Mexico from France. He brought it to San Antonio to make improvements. Holden switched the heating element from a wood fire to steam filled coils, used distilled water instead of spring water, and swapped out the ammonia-water mixture for petroleum ether, which was safer, cheaper and more consistent. Holden’s work was sufficient to earn him a handful of patents.
A cluster of ice-making innovations took off in Texas. By 1867, three of the five ice-making plants in the U.S. were located in San Antonio. Andrew Muhl, a French immigrant, set up his own ether ice machine that year in the city. Charles Zilker got his start in San Antonio with ammonia absorption units, then moved to Austin.
In 1871, Holden, who owned one of the San Antonio ice plants, opened the first mechanically refrigerated abattoir in Fulton, near Corpus Christi, and was soon packing 100 beef carcasses a day for shipment to England. The next year, his associate Thomas Rankin developed the first refrigerated rail cars, and in 1873 made the first successful shipment from Texas all the way to New York.
Cotton — the truly dominant Texas industry — would soon bring cooling to the people. Textile mills would pump steam onto the factory floors so cotton fibers would stay elastic but tough, referred to as “yarn-conditioning.” Around 1895, a textile engineer named Stuart Cramer designed a system to condition the air, not the yarn, by artificially controlling the room’s temperature, humidity, air quality and distribution — characteristics that define our modern understanding of air conditioning.
Entrepreneurs like Willis Carrier in New York pushed the technology further, adapting it to industries that benefited from a climate-controlled setting. By 1903 the New York Stock Exchange was the first mechanically cooled building in the U.S.
The First Presbyterian Church in the city of Orange claims to have been the first air-conditioned building in Texas. Throughout the 1920s, department stores, movie theaters and hotels were among many buildings adopting the technology and advertising it to customers.
With drought raging through Texas in the 1950s, air conditioning took on a new sense of urgency. Home A/C window units, which had hit the market a decade earlier, were down to the accessible price of $500 each, led by innovators like San Antonio’s Friedrich Air Conditioning. By 1966, Texas became the first state to have half of its homes and apartments air-conditioned. Soon, central A/C units were being installed in new homes because they lowered the cost of construction. At a qualitative level, air conditioning just improved life.
In 1961, the Alamo itself became air conditioned and the Astrodome became the world’s largest air-conditioned space when it opened in 1965. A/C had conquered Texas’ past and present and future, making the state psychologically and physically comfortable for people from other parts of the United States. The second half of the 20th century saw massive immigration into the South. Texas went from the sixth largest state to the second largest by 2000, with a population today four times larger than what it was in 1950. This wave of immigration hasn’t really ever stopped, and yet it’s hard to imagine that 30 million people would be living in Texas today without air conditioning.
Click below to listen to Episode 8 of The Engines of Texanity.
