Custom Design, Engineering Guarantees, and Unpatentable Data: The Air Conditioning Industry, 1902–1935

Abstract

Custom Design, Engineering Guarantees, and Unpatentable Data: The Air Conditioning Industry, 1902-1935 GAIL COOPER Factory air conditioning appeared in 1902 as an industry dominated by custom design, and air conditioning remained that way for nearly thirty years. Each installation was unique, specially designed to fit a particular set of circumstances. Thus Carrier Engineering Corporation assured prospective customers in 1921 that “it is customary for engi­ neers who specialize in the design of such equipments to treat each problem individually and develop the most efficient equipment for the specific requirements of the client.”1 This approach to production established the overriding importance of engineering expertise within the industry, and the resultant centrality of technical knowledge to business success conferred on engineers both a shaping and controlling power over the emerging technology that was unbroken until the appearance of mass production. Custom design has been less well studied than mass production.2 Perhaps that neglect stems from an association of tailor-made products with a bygone era of craft production. Custom production may seem a historic relic, superseded by mass production. That sense of the new pushing aside the old appears as early as 1832 when Charles Babbage made a distinction between “making” and “manufacturing.”3 In his Dr. Cooper, assistant professor in the History Department at Lehigh University, is working on a history of air conditioning in the United States. She is grateful for the assistance of Dr. Anne Millbrooke and United Technologies, as well as the help provided by the staff of the Cornell University Archives. In addition, a Junior Faculty Fellowship from Lehigh University greatly facilitated access to archives and is acknowledged with thanks. 1 Weather Vein 1 (May 1921): 42. 'See David Hounshell, From theAmerican System to Mass Production (Baltimore, 1984); Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Pise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, D.C., 1981); and Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977). 'Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage: The Economy ofMachinery and Manufactures (London, 1989), 8: 85-86.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3503-0002$01.00 506 The Air Conditioning Industry, 1902-1935 507 discussion of Henry Maudsley’s work for the British navy, he describes a system of “making” that included the production of single-item goods with general-purpose tools to the specifications of the client at a relatively high cost. This description of making, or custom production, and the language to describe it prevailed for nearly a century. In 1914 Frederick Halsey, longtime editor of American Machinist, self-consciously used the same terms in his machine shop text to distinguish between the work of the shop and the work of the factory.4 When they sat down to write their own book on shop practice in 1935, Joseph Wickham Roe and Charles W. Lytle borrowed heavily from Halsey and reproduced the “making” and “manufacturing” distinction, but this time with a difference.5 Substituting the term “building” for “making,” their characterization of custom production focused less on the methods of production and more on the distinctive economic and social relationships that flowed from its practice. “The two processes of production,” Roe and Lytle wrote, “from initial sale to final acceptance follow different courses.”6 Custom design pivoted on a direct relation­ ship between buyer and seller, devolving on the engineer an important role from beginning to end. In this system of production, according to Roe and Lytle, “the sale precedes the building and even much of the designing, and the engineer is intimately concerned in the selling as he must convince the purchaser of the superiority of his design.”7 Their description of custom production in all its commercial trappings vividly depicts the features of a vital system of production rather than the shadowy outline of a dying craft. Roe and Lytle’s assessment is useful not simply for their sensitivity to the economic facets of custom production but, more important, for their reportage of a modern variant of the building tradition. They conceded that “building methods will always have their place...