Air Conditioning

Passage One

While it was possible for California cities to boom from the single family detached formula in the 1920s and 1930s, it did not happen in Phoenix until after World War II. In 1940, Phoenix’s population had still only reached 65,000. A continuing impediment to growth was the oppressive heat which was not really solved until the arrival of air conditioning. When the FHA [Federal Housing Authority] accepted central air conditioning as part of its home mortgages in 1957, installation exploded. In part, central air penetrated the market so quickly in Phoenix because of the arrival of Motorola with its high tech manufacturing plants in the early 1950s. Those plants had been refrigerated from the outset and the engineers who moved to Phoenix to work for Motorola thought their homes should be just as comfortable as their factories.

With the arrival of air conditioning, Phoenix population surged. During the 1950s it was the fastest growing city in America, rising by 311%. In 1959 alone, there were more houses built than in all the years from 1914 to 1946. By 1960, it was the largest city in the southwest with a population of 439,000.

^{Source: Gammage, Grady and Jonathan Fink. “The Phoenix Experiment.” March 1, 2004.http://west.stanford.edu/events/edge_conference/metrowestsouthwest.html}

Passage Two

The 1940s and 1950s were boom years in Arizona. Phoenix--population in 1940, 65,000; population in 1960, 439,000--grew overnight from outsize village to big city. Between 1920 and 1960, the state's population doubled twice, and millions of irrigated acres came into production. One of the revelations of the postwar period was that, given the opportunity, people were happy to leave temperate climates with cold winters for desert climates with fierce summers, provided there was water to sustain them and air conditioning to keep them from perishing (Phoenix, in the summer, is virtually intolerable without air conditioning). Not that the migrants had bothered to ask whether there was enough water before they loaded their belongings and drove west. They simply came; no one could stop them. How they were to fill their pools and water their lawns was Arizona's problem.

^{Source: Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. 259-260.}