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

On this episode of Our American Stories, Tim Harford, an economist and bestselling author of Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, shares the story of these three underappreciated inventions in history—air conditioning, the barcode, and the elevator brake!

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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 a 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.
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

(00:57):
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.

(01:19):
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

(01:42):
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

(02:04):
floor in the building. So that's why I said to
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

(02:24):
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

(02:44):
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

(03:05):
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.

(03:28):
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

(03:51):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:34):
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,

(04:54):
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

(05:14):
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, 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

(05:36):
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 first thing.

(05:56):
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

(06:19):
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

(06:40):
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 a mention
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
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from all walks of life, doing extraordinary things. But we
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(07:50):
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