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

On this episode of Our American Stories, Tim Harford, an economist and best selling author of Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, tells the story of these three underappreciated inventions in history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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 the story about three of them.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
So air conditioning is a fascinating invention. There's a wonderful writer,
Stephen Johnson, who argued that air conditioning elected Ronald Reagan's hip.
How does that work? Well? Air conditioning changed the demographics
of the United States. Had enabled many more people to

(00:52):
live comfortably in Texas, in Florida, all those people retiring
to Florida and then starting to vote with publican 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.

(01:15):
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

(01:36):
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,

(01:56):
you don't need people driving their automobiles to get to
this space. You 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
to mass transit system, I think it learned absolutely an
accurate description. How did it shape the world, Well, it
made the skyscraper possible. There is really no way you

(02:17):
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

(02:39):
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

(03:00):
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 aggs down and he chops the
elevator rope and everyone in the crowd screams, and the

(03:20):
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 skyscrapers possible. So the people who

(03:41):
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,

(04:05):
and yet still generate a tremendous amount of economic outprot
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

(04:28):
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

(04:49):
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 f
in a slazy 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

(05:12):
he could use those ridges and troughs to convey a
code Morse code. And so the original barcodes were in
fact bulls eyes. The idea of the bulls eye is
where you can scan it in any direction, doesn't make
any 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

(05:35):
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 yu go

(05:56):
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

(06:17):
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,

(06:40):
to introducing these very very cheap goods. And they couldn't
have done it without the barcode.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
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 as invention
that changed the world. Actually, we don't have the modern
city without it. And it was Elijah Otis who did

(07:06):
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.

(07:29):
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
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(07:50):
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