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" I noticed it the first time I entered her apartment: no air conditioner. How could that be? &amp;quot;I just open the windows to let in the breeze,&amp;quot; she said, as if it were obvious. As if we lived in some prehistoric time. That was grounds for dumping her right there. I needed a woman who took control of her environment, who did not gamble with comfort. But it was February, and I was being presumptuous to think we&amp;#039;d last until June anyway. Friends are confused by how poorly I tolerate the summer air. &amp;quot;Aren&amp;#039;t you from Florida?&amp;quot; they ask. Yes. That&amp;#039;s the point: Living in Florida means enduring small bursts of heat as we scamper between cooled boxes. I never had to acclimate to 90 degrees. Nobody should have to. But for most of human history, we did. It wasn&amp;#039;t until the early 1900s that engineers figured out how to blow air over cooled pipes, and the modern miracle was born. It&amp;#039;s thrilling to read old news coverage, to watch people grapple with the cure for a timeless discomfort. &amp;quot;If air-conditioning could be applied to apartments and dwelling houses,&amp;quot; hypothesized a New York Times editorial on June 26, 1932, &amp;quot;pure cool air would be breathed by the occupants.&amp;quot;  Modern life flourished in this man-made chill. Factories that once had to close because of humidity could now stay open. Surgeries became safer\u2014cold operating rooms keep doctors from sweating on their patients, a problem in the old days. In the digital age server farms are kept from overheating. Air conditioning is our savior\u2014but also a giant energy hog. An unfortunate conundrum.  RELATED: 7 Window-Mounted Air Conditioners in a Cool-Down Competition There is no going back, of course, so the machines have had to evolve. Today&amp;#039;s air conditioners work mostly the same as their ancestors, though in the 1970s we began regulating away Freon, a chemical used to cool the pipes that was also depleting the ozone layer. Recently, Advantix Systems innovated around a long-standing inefficiency: To dehumidify air, most a/c systems cool air to the dew point, shed the moisture, then heat it back up to the programmed temperature. Advantix pushes air through water-hungry brine that sucks out humidity without the additional steps. And a new &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; unit from Quirky, the Aros, offers smartphone control with a usage monitor and can turn itself off when not needed. Other technological advances make air conditioning less necessary altogether. Those server farms? Tech companies are discovering that modern servers withstand heat just fine. Some are even moving the farms to locations where they can take advantage of naturally lower temperatures. Hewlett-Packard built a data center in England that is entirely cooled\u2014get this\u2014by wind. And Dell recently heated its server farm up to 115 degrees. Now the only air conditioning it needs is for its employees, us humans. The addicted ones.  In fact, even my breeze-loving girlfriend couldn&amp;#039;t resist the air conditioner&amp;#039;s allure. I was still with her come summer and told her I wouldn&amp;#039;t even enter her apartment until fall\u2014but that she was welcome to join me in my a/c-equipped pad. So she did, and stayed the summer. A year later we found our own place. Now we&amp;#039;re married and own two air conditioners. Soon we&amp;#039;ll be expanding our family: We&amp;#039;re buying a third. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/interior-projects/how-to/a10774/the-technological-miracle-that-is-air-conditioning-16927241/>