HOME COMFORT
Early attempts to cool homes involved fans
– and tons of ice
Melissa
Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@illinois.edu
8/1/02
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
As the Dust Bowl swirled in the Plains
states in the summer of 1936, folks in Central Illinois were sweating it out
through the worst heat wave in recorded history.
According to an account by Seichi "Bud" Konzo, published in his book
"The Quiet Indoor Revolution," hundreds of residents of Champaign
and Urbana, Ill., sought relief from the heat by sleeping in open fields near
the University of Illinois football stadium that summer. Konzo, who died in
1992, was a professor of mechanical engineering. In his book, he noted that
the temperature in Central Illinois in the summer of '36 surpassed 100 degrees
Fahrenheit for 17 consecutive days.
And while Willis Haviland Carrier – regarded as "the father of air
conditioning" – is being heralded this summer for his design 100 years
ago of the first industrial air-conditioning system, air conditioning was still
a rare commodity in 1936. The only air-cooled facilities accessible to most
people were department stores and movie theaters.
But as the residents of Champaign and Urbana struggled to cope with the heat
and humidity that summer, Konzo managed to keep his cool. That's because the
professor and his family lived in the first air-cooled house in North America.
Konzo, his wife and young daughter were tenants of Research Residence No. 1,
a two-story Colonial-style home near the Illinois campus, while the professor
supervised some of the earliest ongoing experiments involving residential central-air
conditioning. The home was built in 1924 as a laboratory for research on home
heating and ventilation; the work was conducted by Illinois researchers and
sponsored by the National Warm Air Heating and Ventilation Association. By the
early 1930s, researchers shifted their attention to home cooling.
"In retrospect the early start in residential cooling was bold and reckless,"
Konzo wrote. "We were treading new ground, and because we had no preconceived
ideas of what might work, we tried almost every conceivable form of cooling
that showed some sign of being practical." Some of those ideas were downright
"absurd" by today’s standards, he noted. They included placing
a unit the size of a refrigerator – equipped with fans and filled with
ice – in the middle of the living room. Another test involved dumping two
tons of ice daily into a basement storage chamber; cooled air was then distributed
throughout the house by means of a separate unit installed in the return-air
duct of the home’s forced-air furnace system.
The Residential Heating and Cooling Project, begun at Illinois in the 1920s,
continued through the 1970s. Today, researchers at the university’s Building
Research Council have used that earlier work as a foundation for current research
focusing on indoor air quality and humidity and moisture control. "We have
a test facility where we continuously monitor temperature and humidity under
various conditions: with and without ventilation, with and without vapor barriers,
and the performance of different insulation materials," said BRC research
architect William Rose.