The Story of Air Conditioning, the Elevator Brake, and the Barcode!

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Our next storyteller is an economist and best-selling author of “Fifty Things That Shape the Modern Economy.” Tim Harford is here to tell a story about three of them.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: So air conditioning is a fascinating invention. There’s a wonderful writer, Stephen Johnson, who argued that air conditioning elected Ronald Reagan. He’s hip! How does that work? Well, air conditioning changed the demographics of the United States. Had enabled many more people to live comfortably in Texas, in Florida, all those people retiring to Florida and then starting to vote with Republican. So it’s changing the political landscape of the United States. There is no way you can build a glass-walled skyscraper in Singapore or Dubai without air conditioning. It’s completely impossible. There’s no way that technology will work without air conditioning. So it makes possible skyscrapers in warm climates. It makes a lot of things possible that we take for granted. Think about all those floors. These are roughly eighty-one hundred stories. Now let’s just chop them into single-story or two-story buildings and distribute those buildings all over a big out-of-town office park, and think of all the car parks you need to have around them. I think of the enormous amount of space that that office park would take up now, because they’re all stacked on top of each other. You don’t need the car parking, you don’t need people driving their automobiles to get to this space. Just go in on the ground floor, get in the elevator, and you can be taken to any floor in the building. So that’s why I said, “mass transit system.” I think it learns absolutely an accurate description. How did it shape the world? Well, it made the skyscraper possible. There is really no way you could realistically have a building more than ten stories unless you have a functioning elevator. Or actually, more to the point, the real innovation is the elevator break. Because we’ve had elevators for hundreds and hundreds of years, but nobody is going to get in an elevator that’s going to go any serious height unless it’s safe. And Elijah Otis invented the elevator break, and he demonstrated it at all of these World’s Fairs. It was a hugely theatrical demonstration. He was lifted up above the crowd and standing behind him him on this scaffolding. You imagine the drama of it. There’s a guy with an executioner’s axe, and that he raises the axe as that he’s about to strike off Otis’s head, and he swings the axe down and he chops the elevator rope, and everyone in the crowd screams, and the elevator falls about a quarter of an inch. And then Otis yells out to everybody, “All safe, gentlemen, all safe!” He’s demonstrated them that he has developed a safe way to make the elevator work, and they are, in fact, incredibly safe. They make skyscrape as possible. So the people who are concerned about energy efficiency, and they talk about double glazing, they talk about insulation, they talk about all the ways that you can reduce the fuel consumption of a building. One of the best ways of all is an elevator, because you shift a lot of people using a counterweight, pack them all into a very dense area, and you could have a very low environmental impact city like Manhattan, and yet still generate a tremendous amount of economic outproat of income, and it’s all possible because of the elevator. The idea of this book, “The Fifty Inventions That Shape the Modern Economy,” it’s not to pick the fifty most important inventions. It’s to try to surprise people a little bit and to get them to look at everyday objects in a different way. And the barcode is one of the great examples of that. So the barcode was invented several times, really, but the real inventive moment, and I’m drawing a blank on the inventor’s name for a second, that he was sitting at the beach, who’s visiting his grandparents, and he was thinking of the time he had spent as a boy scout communicating in Morse code, and he had been trying to figure out this problem, “How do I create an automated till?” And he dragged his fing in a lazy circle through the sand, and then he looked down and he’d created a kind of bullseye with his fingers, the ridges and the troughs, and he realized he could use those ridges and troughs to convey a code, Morse code. And so the original barcodes were in fact bullseyes. The idea of the bullseye is where you can scan it in any direction, it doesn’t make any difference, it’s always the same. In the end, of course, the modern barcode is linear, and it took several decades to get the computers cheap enough and the lasers cheap enough to make it a practical technology. And of course the retailers didn’t want to put the barcode scanners in until the food manufacturers had barcodes on their products, and the food manufacturers didn’t want to bother putting barcodes on their products until the scanners existed to read them. So there was this all this kind of you-go-first thing. I mean, and Miller, I think, had been printing their label on their beer bottles using the same technology for about sixty or seventy years. So the idea that you’re going to retool in order to print these crazy barcoat, not very attractive. But in the end it was done, and it empowered Walmart and the real big-box retailers because it solved a problem that they had about keeping track of stock, about keeping the staff honests. They didn’t put money in their own pocket, so really tilted the playing field in favor of the big players in integrating the American economy with the Chinese economy. They made a huge contribution there, whether you like it or not, to introducing these very, very cheap goods. And they couldn’t have done it without the barcode.

00:06:46
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by Iron Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Tim Harford, author of “Fifty Things That Shaped the Modern Economy.” This whole idea of the elevator break, it’s just a mention that changed the world. Actually, we don’t have the modern city without it. And it was Elijah Otis who did it and demonstrated it at that World’s Fair. I would have loved to have seen the video of that. And of course, when he did it, there wasn’t the story of our modern economy. And a few contributors: air conditioning, the elevator break, and the barcode. Here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities and from all walks of life, doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.