July 19, 2012

• The Portable Fountains of Babylon

  I’ve gone without air-conditioning in my Explorer for a decade now. Bought it new in 1991; still less than a hundred thousand on the odometer. I love the thing, and dread the day when these Minnesota winters send it to a early grave. Great motor. But A/C?…not so much. Weak from the beginning, in fact, and it was no surprise when it finally kicked in 2002. Last week, having found a mechanic I trust and with a road trip to Florida in my Summer sights, I bit the bullet and had it repaired. Took pretty much an entire rebuild; retrofit for ozone-friendlier refrigerant, new compressor, new drier, new expansion valve….

  Yesterday (coincidently the 100th anniversary of air-conditioning itself) I got my Explorer back and I’m happy to report that it allll works again. Really well. Including the A/C.

  But that was just a preamble…or pre-ramble, if you like. Having all this work done, see – and it being the 100th anniversary of air-conditioning on the very day I resumed enjoying the comforts thereof – it got me thinking about Air-conditioning, the Universe, and Everything. 

  Put simply, an air conditioner works by compressing the hell out of a liquid (known as a refrigerant) and then allowing that liquid to expand through a tiny hole (the expansion valve) and ultimately to evaporate into a region of lower pressure. It’s physics: the expanding refrigerant gets cold; quite cold indeed. Ultimately TEH POWAH of the cooled refrigerant chills a train of moving air which is then fanned onto the royal occupants of (in this case) my beloved Explorer.

  Viola’!

  

  It’s cool, it works, and it’s mine. Wow, dude. I live in an age where I can wrap a multi-ton hunk of metal around me and go anywhere I want, at speeds unthinkable on the day air-conditioning was invented. And for a few dollars more I can include a tiny little personal fountain of cool, effervescent liquid to keep me comfortable on even the hottest of globally warmed summer afternoons. Of course there’s more “heat” generated by the process than “cool” (physics again), but the miracle of air conditioning is that it lets us keep the cool part inside whilst shoving the hot part outside, where it belongs – with the rest of the global warming*.

  So there I was today, driving along, windows rolled up, cool as a cucumber while the trees sweltered outside…when I noticed that if I listened very attentively, I could actually hear my own personal Fountain of Babylon, hissing and sputtering, deep within my own personal iron giant. I marveled at this for a moment or two. Surely I’d never take it for granted ever again. Eventually, however, I grew weary of the hissing and sputtering of my personal fountain and decided it to mask it with some music. With that, I pressed a button and turned a knob on a small piece of plastic and metal connected to the world’s smallest violin. And you know what? That violin played. Just for me.

  It’s beautiful.

  Here’s the thing: everything I described here (and for that matter pretty much everything else) runs on OIL, a notably finite resource.

  So happy birthday, Air-Conditioning. May you have many more to come.

  *punchline stolen from my dear friend ben

  • 5:41 pm
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