In the shop where I went to get a new windshield for my xB, I was a bit surprised to see this very ’70s vintage air conditioner in the wall. I asked the guy at the counter whether it still worked and he said he didn’t know, as they had a more modern central unit now in the office. I wouldn’t be surprised if it kicks in with a nice blast of chilled air from that “Weather Wheel”.
I distinctly remember that round grille on our first air conditioner in Iowa City in 1962, so it must have been a Fedders too.
Fedders dates back to 1896, when it began as a metalworking shop in Buffalo, NY. In 1903 they started making automotive radiators, including the one on the 1908 Thomas Flyer that won the New York to Paris around the world race.
In 1947 Fedders branched out into the nascent portable window air conditioning market, and it looks like the first ones already had that rotatable “Weather Wheel” grille that became a trademark for some decades.
Here’s one from the early fifties.
Air conditioning started in the 1920s, primarily in theaters and other public buildings. But in the ’50s, portable window and wall units really took off, making a huge difference in the comfort, especially in the muggier and hotter parts of the country.
Coming from cool Innsbruck, we were not used to the American style heat and humidity, especially my mother. The first two years in Iowa City we rented this ranch house, seen here with our ’54 Ford and my mother, sister and younger brother. It had cathedral ceilings and not much insulation, and it got hot.
But its owners, who were in Pakistan for two years, had dealt with that by converting the basement into a second living/rec room as well as three bedrooms, all furnished with beds (as was the rest of the house). So we all just moved into the basement in the summers! That’s me with the building blocks the owners left behind, along with other toys and a big trove of MAD magazines that my older brother glommed on to.
In 1962, after two years the owners were coming back, so we bought a house around the corner. It was a two story house, and the upstairs was abysmally hot, so my father broke down and bought a pretty good size air conditioner that was installed at the end of the upstairs hall, to cool the whole upstairs. That worked reasonably well, and helped keep the downstairs somewhat cooler too. It looked a lot like this one. And it’s obviously one or two restyles away from the unit I found at the top.
Fedders became the biggest manufacturer of window a/c units in 1970. I’m not sure this unit is from that year, but it seems to be the earliest year for this style. Dark wood grain became ubiquitous around this time.
I see this unit has a heat mode too. I didn’t realize that was the case back then, but I guess for a commercial building that makes sense.
I guess I have air conditioners and heat pumps on the brain as I installed a minisplit just yesterday (not my picture), in the last one of my rental units that didn’t already have one. I paid a contractor the first time, and watched while he did it. That doesn’t look very hard! So I bought a cheap vacuum pump and a/c manifold on Amazon, and then a Pioneer unit from them too, and I was in business. I’ve installed a dozen of them now, in all the rental units and one in our guest suite and our cabin in Port Orford. They all had resistance electric heat, so these are much more economical, and the a/c is a boon given that summers are getting relentlessly hotter. But I’m still listening to the obnoxious sound of a window unit in our house, although it will get turned off in the evening when it always cools down here. And humidity is not an issue.
These units are cheap, starting at under $800. And they are wonderfully quiet, unlike the window units, although I hear there are some clever and quiet new window units too.
Nice essay to start my day, Paul!
BUI (Bureau of Useless Information): In 1901 the Nabisco Shredded Wheat plant in Niagara Falls was air conditioned using water from the Niagara River. In 1929, Mr. (I forget his name but he became a major manufacturer of air conditioners) mounted one in lieu of the trunk for his own car, and in 1930, Kelvinator air-conditioned a car for a gent in Texas.
I have an in-wall Panasonic 6k AC I bought in 2002. Still works perfectly, so when I had mini-splits installed in the rest of the house in 2012, I kept it. See how long it lasts.
I’ve never owned, or I think even lived in, a house with air conditioning. That’s one of the benefits of the natural A/C of coastal California, along with well preserved Curbside Classics. Our windows are open 24/7 for several months in summer. In fact, our family cars didn’t fully rollover to having A/C until 1995. I still remember letting my in-laws from New England drive our ‘86 Ford Ranger while my wife and kids and I took our ‘85 VW Vanagon, on a late summer camping trip that involved crossing California’s Central Valley. They were amazed – and not very happy – that the Ranger had no A/C.
Supposedly, as residential A/C became more widespread and available in the fifties, there was concern that it would overwhelm the electric grid. Although I guess it can burden the grid and there ‘are’ occasional brown-outs during long periods of extreme heat, the utilities adapted to the needs and it never really became an issue.
I mention it since it sounds very much like the same FUD of EV-haters that widespread EV adoption will ‘stress the grid’ (as well as the old FUD that producing EV lithium batteries causes way more pollution than ICE vehicles). Not long ago, my libtard-hating, UMC BiL insisted that within the next five years, EV adoption would cause pump gas to be dirt cheap while the price of residential electricity would skyrocket.
Of course, he had gotten all his facts and data from Faux News…
Brownouts do happen and certain parts of the grid would not be able to handle the load if even 20% of drivers switched to electric cars, so I dont really see why grid concerns are somehow disingenuous.
Even the CEO of the biggest electric car company in the world has said it needs to be addressed.
Here’s an article in the Economist saying that the early grid may have been what doomed electric cars
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/30/a-new-study-argues-that-insufficient-infrastructure-doomed-the-first-electric-cars
What’s the context of the first sentence? Is it assuming that those 20% would charge during peak daytime hours all day every day? Do the math, it makes no sense.
The VAST majority of daily EV drivers today don’t charge their cars during the day, they wait until night hours when most utilities drop their rates significantly or, in some places, even give away power since they have too much available, i.e. power is often available for a small fraction of the regular cost. The majority of current EV drivers today live in a residence that has on-site charging and wake up to a full tank every morning if they so desire.
The average driver drives 15,000 miles a year, so under 50 a day, most modern EVs would be able to go 4-5 days without recharging at all. Plugging in does not mean the car is drawing max power the entire time it’s plugged in, not even close, the majority of the time the plug is connected at home there is NO power moving as it’s already done, just waiting to be unplugged in the morning….In our house with two EVs and five people, I believe the AC and clothes dryers are running far more than the charging facilities…
The two instances that cause EV drivers to charge in the daytime:
1. If they are traveling somewhere beyond the range of their vehicle within a day, so for most modern EVs a well over 200 mile trip, i.e. not anywhere near a daily or even weekly occurrence for most non-commercial users/owners
2. If they are parked somewhere that for whatever reason “gives away” power to EV drivers, i.e. some grocery stores, movie theatres, restaurants, and some workplaces.
And lastly, utilities, both public and private, exist to provide power and generate money from doing so. As EV demand (or A/C demand, or hairdryer demand, or electric stove demand) increases, utilities will increase their output to sell more. And that’s not even touching on homeowners that have installed their own power generation devices (i.e. solar, quite common for EV owners which many utilities are actively working against as they fear there will not be enough demand for their own operations…) Clearly EV demand won’t go to 100% overnight so there seems to be time to remain mostly ahead of the curve.
Here in California brownouts or even rotating outages in summer are not quite FUD. Our utility warns about them in summer. Which I always find ironic, as our summer electrical usage is much less than in winter: we’re generating good solar from our rooftop system, days are long so lighting is used less, no furnace fan running, and we have no A/C.
Gas furnaces offset the electrical load in the winter. Most of CA has pretty mild winter, so not as much heat is required. Summers once you get a few miles inland though can still be hot and require AC on all day.
One thing people dont understand when it comes to talking about energy use is CA overall has pretty mild weather compared to most of the country.
Paul, I admire your endless do-it-yourself skills, taking note of how to do those installations!
In addition to the “it’s getting hotter,” there’s the “and I’m getting older”—the feeling that summer heat/humidity wears me down more than it once did….but I wish I could experience a 2024 summer with my 1974 physique, if that makes sense.
DARK WOOD GRAIN: Yeah, that seemed to be popping up on every consumer good by the late 1960s or so (perhaps another aspect of “Broughaming”). It was sometimes a Di-Noc-like veneer, but often molded into the plastic, as it seems to be with the Fedders. (I’d heard the firm’s name a million times—but not recently; kind of like “Robert Hall” a day or so ago at CC.)
eBay has a 1952 Fedders ad with endorser Jane Russell sitting on a block of ice; this image is from a 1966 ad, pre-woodgrain:
This is from a 1966 ad—similar unit without the woodgrain yet.
On a side note, it’s disgusting what HVAC people want to install minisplits. Like $5k+ in labor for a single days worth of work. I’ve even heard people getting quotes of $15k.
I’m glad the new kits are DIY friends to sidestep this.
We recently moved my elderly mother out of her long-time family home to a senior facility. In going through the house to get it ready for sale, I found in the attic the old, 6,000 btu Emerson Quiet Kool window unit that had been in an upstairs bedroom. It was bought in 1968 and hadn’t been used in over 40 years, when central A/C was installed. For kicks, I plugged it in and turned it on to see if it still worked. The fan was a bit noisy at first, but in a few minutes it quieted down and was blowing cold air.
Recall that Fedders was a popular, budget brand window A/C unit. GE, Emerson and Whirlpool were a bit more expensive and Friederich more expensive still. Sears and Montgomery Ward sold tons of these as well. Sears Coldspot was made by Whirlpool.
Great article, Paul. Fedders had another connection to the auto industry, they bought the non-automotive air conditioning business of Airtemp from Chrysler in 1976.
And speaking of window A/C manufacturers with automotive connections, I own this Frigidaire air conditioner, made by General Motors in the early ’60s I believe. GM sold off its appliance and non-automotive HVAC business to White Consolidated Industries (started by the same guy as the White heavy truck company) in 1979, which in turn was bought out by Electrolux in 1987 which now owns the Frigidaire brand name. The GM/Frigidaire sale didn’t include the Dayton, OH factory where Frigidaires were made, nor apparently the actual equipment designs – WCI-era Frigidaires were mostly based on old Westinghouse designs.
Anyway, those four squares in the louvers are held in place by spirngs, and each one is aimed in a different direction. You can pull each square out and rotate it 90, 180, or 270 degrees to get the air to blow in a different direction.
Of course there were Philco (Ford) and Kelvinator (Nash) ac units as well. The Kelvinator brand still exists in India and has window ac units. Best I can tell, Philco were made by York.
Paul, I’ll bet you thought the heat and humidity in Iowa couldn’t get any worse. That is, until you moved to Maryland.
I grew up in a circa 1928 house to which there was no way to add central A/C, so we had several of these. My only recollection is that they were LOUD.
Nowadays, many window A/C units are built like “micro-splits” which keeps the noisy bits outside. I wish we had them when I was young.
Thanks for the memories Paul. My folks purchased a new home in 1956, a 3 bedroom ranch with a ducted hot air heat system. An easy conversion to central A/C. Took them 35 years and me working at Carrier Building Systems and Services to make it happen! In the meantime my Dad relied on an a large box fan placed in the dining room window to pull in the cool NJ summer air. Sometimes he’d put in the attic access opening in the hall ceiling as an exhaust. Neither worked very well and he didn’t understand the psychometric chart. In 1982 two window units appeared. A GE QuietCool that looked like a suit case, beige with a molded in handle for my Grandmother’s room and a more upscale Westinghouse unit with a dark wood grain grill for their bedroom. Like you, I was happy to sleep in the cool basement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carrier. This URL is in regard to Willia Carrier. it is a good read. In my previous remarks I could not remember his name until a couple of hours late while I was driving around. The article does not mention his 1929 installation and I am at this moment still having difficulty finding the data. Purportedly, Chrysler Corporation created their Air-Temp Division so that they could plane central air conditioning in the Chrysler Building. I read this in a Chrysler Corp. history many years ago. The Chrysler Building became the first centrally air-conditioned skyscraper in the world. It is also a stunning piece of Art Deco design in and out.
I believe that only the first two or three floors of the Chrysler Building were equipped with a/c when it was built. Still, that was something to behold in 1929.
Love the old room A/C units – we have a new build house and I still run one, albeit a modern small GE unit in my bedroom to cool it more, plus I like the noise. The wife hates it.
Out in the shed I have a “GE Carry Cool” with faux woodgrain unit – it’s a big, heavy thing (60ish lbs) with a molded handle – must be from the early 80s. I picked it up out of a trash pile over 20 years ago and it still works great. We last used it a few years back when I lost a start cap on my central A/C unit. It’s sitting there awaiting the call to duty.
Great find! I love these everyday items that have somehow survived through the decades.
Another thing that’s rarely done anymore is mounting an a/c unit like this through the wall (instead of in a window). My father did this in our first house – he mounted an a/c unit through master bedroom wall. Later owners removed it, and now there’s an obvious patched area on the exterior brick of that house.
I think your family’s strategy of moving into the basement for the summers wasn’t uncommon back then, at least in the Midwest. My wife has mentioned that many of her neighbors growing up (near St. Louis) did that as well, and also had a 2nd kitchen in the basement for that purpose.
I was one of the few kids of my age who grew up in a house (built 1959) with central a/c. It was quite rare in our Ft. Wayne, Indiana neighborhood until the early 70s when more and more families were having it installed. I am sure it was a huge factor for my parents when they bought it in 1962.
What a great find!
Great article!
When my family moved from Maryland to North Carolina in about 1971, we made the jump at that point to houses that all had central air conditioning. Even after leaving North Carolina and returning to the DC area, we moved into a house that had central air, and so for the most part I grew up with it. It seemed something of a necessity in hot and humid DC as well as further south. Mostly we had mid-century modern ranch houses, so these were all created to depend upon air conditioning and didn’t have any of the passive cooling design features that might have existed in previous generations of homes.
I will note that one house in NC was an earlier design, and it clearly was not originally built with central air, but that was added at a later date. That house still had a few window units when we moved in, and one was a terrific 1950s-style Chrysler Airtemp. It was a deep blue color, and I could have sworn it had a round vent like that Fedders. I may be wrong about that, but it was definitely an Airtemp.
Once I left home for college and went to New England, it was back to no air conditioning (except for one house we owned in Kentucky). My current house, built in 1997 doesn’t have central air…but pretty much everything here built after that does, and I’ve been told that I will need to either install central air (minisplits) or take a hit when I go to sell it someday. We still use the noisy window units, but each year we use them more as we have more and more 90 degree days in the summer. I’ve thought about doing the minisplits DIY (deciding like Paul that it “doesn’t look that hard”). It’s likely to be one of my projects in the coming years.
Back when the earth was young, I spent a summer working in a foundry in Albion, Mi. I noticed that the offices in the pattern shop, had window airconditioners stuck into the wall. They attracted the eye because they were Chrysler Airtemp units, with “Chrysler” spelled out in block letters on the outside side of the units.
The Studebaker Chippewa Ave plant was built with air conditioning. Aircraft engines are built with such close tolerances that parts had to be machined and assembled under controlled conditions.
Just installed a split air-con in my home a few weeks ago. A friend who fits marine units on boats helped me install it. He noticed that the hot/cold copper pipe gas lines from the indoor blower to the outdoor compressor ran side by side without much insulation. We lagged both copper gas lines with marine grade materials and the results have been remarkable. This 1HP 9,000 BTU unit, once down to its set temperature, is using barely 340 watts of power an hour. Not a few years back, a unit of this size would be consuming 1KW an hour and I’m certain our superior insulation materials have added substantially to its efficiency and low power consumption.
Paul, that great picture of you as a boy playing with the building blocks struck me as I sometimes forget how long you have lived in the US and how thoroughly American you are despite your frequent references to your European roots. I admire how you’ve enlarged your perspective on life by not forgetting your past and melding the best of both worlds.
We had no A/C in the house when I was a kid in Indiana in the 50’s and 60’s but later when I was in college my parents bought a ranch house and installed central A/C. At the same time I lived in a series of apartments during some of my college years back there and the first one had one of these Fedders A/C units and I think a later one did as well. What I remember is that although they were noisy they worked so well that one unit could quickly cool a small one bedroom apartment and keep it very comfortable in very hot and humid weather. Excellent units for that time.
When my parents moved into their Pasadena, CA home in 1968 my father had a gas air conditioning system installed. in our home. It was a big green box with a tag that said “Arkla-Servel GAS Air Conditioning” on the front. Zoom on attached pic if you do not believe me. It had a big fan on top.
I was always taking things apart and not putting them back together right – there were always extra parts when I thought I was done. I remember the first time I opened up the front panel there was a lot of blue flame from its burner but the air at the register was cold and it cooled the house well. I made sure I carefully put everything back as I found it – I knew the hammer would come down on me if dad got home from work and it wasn’t running.
Servel also made gas powered refrigerators from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. They needed no electricity whatsoever and cooled by using an absorption process utilizing a gas burner to heat an ammonia solution to get the process started.
Looks more like a “60’s”, era unit. Still, I expect there were units built in the late “60’s” that were sold in the early, early “70’s”.
Arkla-Servel 5-ton air-cooled unit came first and was introduced in late ’68. The 3-ton unit, which dad purchased, was introduced about a year later. The unit in the picture is still functions well 50+ years later. Dad has been gone 25 years; mom still owns the house. Dad chose the proper manufacturer based in Evansville, IN.
A competitor’s units died within 5 to 7 years of their manufacture. Arkla unit has been thoroughly maintained every year. The furnace that moved the air across the coil died 22 years after installation. The replacement furnace died 25 years afterward. Parts are now getting hard to come by. The unit represents an era when the tag “made in USA” meant something. Sometimes I think USA manufacturers sold their reputations for a “bowl of porridge.”
I well remember SERVEL refrigerators ! they worked very well indeed and were part and parcel of rural American life back then .
Paul, I bet you could do a nifty article on the split AC units and how to install them, the common errors and pit falls to avoid .
I have discovered that simply putting a 21″ box fan in a kitchen or back porch window works wonders in cooling old houses as the refri is a constant heat source .
-Nate
Would love if paid did a mini split tutorial. My moms ranch house is heated by resistance heating in ceiling plaster and we are trying to imagine heat pump driven mini split set up.
There’s many Youtube videos on the subject, and Pioneer’s instructions are quite adequate. I’ve now installed them in all my rentals so I don’t expect to do anymore in the foreseeable future.
I’ve never worked on Servals, though I’ve heard the name. I’ve worked on Dometic. Electrolux, Morphy Richards, Tuomatics, and Consuls.
Absorbation fridges have been a part of my working life for 30 plus years.
Unfortunately, that now includes Thetfords. My former boss refused to work on them. I can see why.
Gosh, does this bring back memories!!
Mom & Dad’s house was built in the early 50’s. We had a Fedders in the dining room to also cool the living room. Another Fedders was in my parents room which cool the back of the house. I so remember that large circular exhaust vent. Also, ours had a sliding panel to cover the dials.
As the years went by, the unit in my parents room was replaced with a Sears Coldspot with exhaust vents along the top.
Eventually, Dad had central air installed in ’72. The window units were give to a relative to put in his fishing camp.
Another fine, logical, well written entry from Paul! Most readable and enjoyable.
Our family had the same unit, with push button controls instead of the knobs, with a sliding metal door to hide the controls, in the early 1960’s.
This Fedders A/C unit changed our lives here in Hot & Humid New Orleans. My Mother stopped pleading with my Father to “Move us ANYWHERE else”.
The first long, extended Summer the entire family slept on the large area rug in the living room, underneath this window mounted air conditioner.
I can still recall my parents laughing over this ad my grade school self tore out of Mom’s “Look” magazine. We all agreed that it was the living embodiment of my Mother after Dad purchased this first A/C unit.
As you noted, Fedders began in Buffalo and its interesting that the inventor of air conditioning was Willis Carrier who was working at Buffalo Forge when he patented his invention. Carrier would start his own company which would become one of the largest employers in Syracuse.
It’s ironic that a technology invented and manufactured in Upstate NY made living in the hot and humid south possible and helped hastened the migration out of the midwest and east Alas Buffalo Forge closed in Buffalo, Carrier moved out of Syracuse and Fedders moved out of Buffalo.
My parents bought a Carrier “window rattler” in New Guinea. We kids made do with ceiling fans. 1967, as Dad wrote the date and vendor in the owner’s manual.
It ended in my humble abode in the late 80s, and finally died in in the mid noughties. It lasted nearly 40 years.