I’m listening now as the air conditioner in my office slowly tears itself apart. Bad bearings have once again caused it to wheeze as it runs, providing some grating background noise as I work. Left unaddressed for a few days, it will increase to a point where one cannot think.
The air conditioner is a fussy, mechanical affair, largely unchanged since its invention in 1842. That’s when Dr. John Corrie of Apalachicola, Florida thought to use a compressor to cool his hospital patients. A compressor is still at the heart of today’s air conditioners.
Still, in a hundred and sixty years compressors haven’t evolved much. Like the one squealing over my head right now, they need frequent maintenance, they’re very sensitive to voltage changes, and they consume a tremendous amount of electricity. Why, after 160 years of cooling air, do we still use such a troublesome part?
Why do places like California and New York suffer blackouts in the heat of summer? They do because of electricity demand fueled by air conditioner compressors. People don’t turn on more lights or run more equipment when it gets hot. That surge in electricity demand is all air conditioning.
There are ways of cooling things which do not require a compressor. A recent technology called thermoacoustics uses sound to do the work. While thermoacoustic refrigerators are still under development, they promise to solve many of the issues plaguing modern air conditioning. Should they catch on, air conditioners will become more reliable, perhaps even more quiet, and use a fraction of the electricity the compressor models use. Our need for oil, coal, and neutrons to cool ourselves will drop as well. It will be nothing short of revolutionary.
With every whine and grind of the compressor above me, I long more for this cooling revolution.
Growing up I didn’t have an A/C (well we did but we never used it). Instead we had a thing called a Swamp Cooler. It was a box that sat on the roof and circulated air over a pool of water about an inch deep. That raised the humidity and cooled the house. Granted this only works in very dry desert conditions but it did work.
A/C is an aging technology. You would think that someone would have come up with a better solution by now.