THE CURIOUS HISTORY OF THE AIR CONDITIONER AND HOW IT HAS RESHAPED THE WORLD

History has proven that every time a force of nature falls into our control, humanity will propel forward at an incredible speed. Since the creation of fire, humans were no longer afraid of predators and quickly shot up to the top of the food chain. Once we invented dams and thus gained control over rivers, we turned it into the hydroelectricity that runs the world. Now with the power to control the climate (even if only locally) of air conditioners, how much would the world change?

Around a century ago, summer was the utter hell for the movie industry. Cinemas often had no windows, and when you load one of those theatres with a couple of hundred sweaty people in the stuffy, scorching atmosphere of August, it would literally look like Dante’s “Inferno” on earth. But the table had begun to turn in 1925 when Willis Carrier — the American inventor — managed to convince the owner of Paramount to install a central air conditioning system for the Rivoli theatre in Time Square. With the power of the air conditioner, the audience had, for the first time, become able to enjoy the movie without having to fan themselves with hand fans, and the chilly atmosphere of the theatre was so shockingly contrasting with the summer heat outside, that it felt nothing short of magic. It was an overnight success and every cinema in the U.S. was soon to follow suit [1].

At a time when the first air conditioning units were still clunky and expensive beasts and were used only for either large premises like factories or mansions of a few very rich people, the cinemas became heaven itself, where American people could escape from the summer heat for a few of hours or even as long as a day only by purchasing 1 or a few 25-cent movie tickets. Thus, going to the cinema has become a popular summer pastime, the children were off school and thus the families had more free time during the day, but simply because they were there for the air conditioner . As a result, summer, which was previously an utter menace for the movie industry, turned into the golden time of the year for the industry, and it was exactly this boom that had ignited the “Golden Age of Hollywood”. And with that, Summer Blockbusters also became a thing and it had left such an impression on the country’s lifestyle that one bothered to wonder why there are no Autumn or Winter blockbusters.

Nearly 100 years after Willis Carrier installed the first air conditioning system in the Rivoli, the affair between summer and the movie industry had become so solidified we almost can’t seem to expect any highly anticipated blockbusters to come out in any other season. And it wasn’t the movie industry alone, the invention of the air conditioner has changed the world in every way we could ever think of and has allowed us to surpass boundaries that no one would even dream of reaching before the 20th century.

1. The early days of artificial cooling

The earliest air-conditioning devices of humans have existed since ancient times, but in most cases they were so cost-inefficient that only the wealthiest people could afford that little cooling effect that it brought. During the Han Dynasty, Ding Huan — who is said to be the father of the first air conditioner, invented a spinning fan 3m-in diameter that could be powered by humans through a crank and a series of 7 interconnected wheels [2]. The cooling devices such as water-wheel powered fans or fountains were later used in Emperor Xuanzong’s palace in 747. Of course, China was not the only culture to incorporate air conditioning into their architecture. The Romans used tunnels to transport water to irrigate crops, this underground system allowed air to be cooled and then soared up into homes through interconnected ducts. The ancient Persians also employed a similar design that cooled the stone walls with cisterns and wind catchers (that nowadays can still be found scattering throughout the Middle East) [3]. Another ancient and yet still nowadays used cooling technique is evaporative cooling, which relies on the principle that evaporated liquid cools the surrounding. The ancient Egyptians took advantage of this principle by hanging wet rugs in front of doors to help cool the space inside. Yet another common technique of the ancient civilizations was to take advantage of the landscapes to cool adjacent structures, by mixing in the towering ornamental trees and ponds in order to provide shade as well as moisture and thus relieve the heat for the residents. The eccentric Roman emperor Elagabalus is said to have taken cooling to an entirely new level when he sent more than 1,000 slaves into the mountains to cut ice and snow to bring back and pile them up in the royal garden [4]. Overall, records suggested that the progress on local air conditioning was put on a halt during the Dark Ages and all the way to the Victorian era. Luxury people continued to build houses of ice and snow, and hand fans were still an inseparable part of everyone from the upper, middle and lower classes. Perhaps the most notable progress during this long period of relative technical stagnation was the invention of the electric fan by Schuyler Wheeler and Philip Diehl in the 1880s, inspired by the boom of electricity throughout Europe and America thanks to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla [5]. Although before that in 1758, Benjamin Franklin — one of the founding fathers of the United States had once conducted an experiment on evaporative cooling and stated that “From this experiment one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.”.

(*The next part of this article will intensively reference from the book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson).

But the peculiar history of the modern air conditioner (chiller) actually needed to be told from the ice and snow-loaded ships of the “Ice King” Frederic Tudor. The hard-headed Boston merchant had an ambitious idea, that was to make money out of perhaps the most absurd thing that could be made into commodity at the time: The frozen water from the Northern lakes. This history of global commerce had proven that bringing commodities from places where they were abundant to where they were scarce was the key to successful business. And ice cuts seemed to be the perfect fit for this formula, as they were completely obsolete in the North but would become an utter item of luxury if they could somehow make it to the scorching lands of Western India. Tudor was fully dedicated to this idea, he believed that these chilly ice cuts would become a commodity as valuable as gold for people of Western India, and he would make so much money that his family would never fall out of wealth. Committing his entire fortune to hire workers to saw the ice and to buy ships to transport them, in February 1806, the first ship of Tudor loaded with the ice water of Rockwood lake set its sail for Martinique. And this rather ill-advised gambit had of course brought Tudor nothing but crippling loss, and after a few years of holding on to his gun, the business continued to smolder and he finally went bankrupt and even thrown into prison in 1813.

We can easily see that there were 2 fundamental, major hurdles that helped guarantee for that business of Tudor to hit the iceberg. The first was the demand: most of the potential customer — the people of tropical lands — would not be able to find any use for these ice at all, unless maybe to make shaved ice, which makes a nice and cool snack. The next would be, even more obviously, the storage. A lot of the ice had melt during the shipping due to the heat, and once the ship hit the Western India ports, the deterioration got even worse. Having a lot of time to think during his imprisonment, Tudor yet still decided to double down on his ice business anyway, even though the loan sharks were still knocking his door. And like the light finally dawned after the long dark night, the goddess Nike finally smiled with Frederic Tudor when he found the right formula to combine together the 3 items that were seemingly valueless in the market — ice water, sawdust and empty ships — to turn them into super profit shipments. Ice cut only costed labor to gather, and insulation could be effectively done by layering the ice slabs on top of each other laid in between by layers of sawdust (which was an unwanted by-product of sawmills), Tudor transported them by hiring the ships that hadn’t been occupied after finishing a shipment for another merchant (whose freight was, of course, dirt cheap). This ingenious combination, along with the successful designing of heat insulation chambers with double walls allowing an air layer in between that helped the ice to be stored effectively, had turned the business idea of Tudor from what was previously an utter trainwreck into an utterly spectacular success. Ever since the 1815, Tudor began to make regular shipments for enormous profit. In 1820, a system of ice warehouses was introduced all across South America, where ice had slowly but surely turned into a daily necessity for the locals. In 1830, his merchant ship sailed all the way to India and turned it into the most profitable market for the ice trading business. After his death in 1864, the total fortune of Tudor soared up to 200 million USD by today’s rate. Tudor’s success had, within a century, turned ice water from an useless exhibiting item into a luxury commodity that every family demanded. In fact, it was so much of a craze that ice hunger was once alarmed on the front page title of The New York Times in 1906, and pretty much drove the people crazy [6].

However, considering that it’s been 1,5 million year since we first became able to control fire, it had indeed taken quite a long time for us — the Homo-sapiens — to gain control over coldness itself, despite the spectacular achievements that the industrial revolution had previously brought in every other aspect of life: While modern society had railways, telegraphs, printing presses, factories, etc., the most advanced refrigeration technology was just cutting ice from a lake. But as the first piece to a larger picture, Frederic Tudor’s ideas inspired countless creative minds to work on the quest of local climate control.

2. The birth of one of the greatest invention of the XX century

American theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman in his book “At Home in the Universe” mentioned the term “adjacent-possible” which referred to a limbo future dangling above the current states of everything in the living world, a roadmap showing the next steps of everything that is now, and the now is treated as ontological object that is able to create itself when all conditions are met. Nutshelly, “adjacent possibility” shows how far humanity could progress in the future but cleverly considering the constraints posed by the present; these possibilities will realize once the necessary conditions are met and thus the constraints are lifted [7]. Or, explained in a religious way, it’s God’s will. The advancement of knowledge has a fixed roadmap for itself; it relies on the accumulation of innumerable methods, skills, abilities, and information within a certain geographical area and stages of innovation, and with that innovations shall be consecutively unlocked. Even the brightest brain of the XVII century like that of Leonardo da Vinci would not be able to invent a refrigerator, simply because the input conditions for that invention, like electricity, precise quantifying systems, and necessary physical and chemical procedures had yet to be met. It was simply not within the adjacent possibility at that stage. But in the XIX century, humans had had the first ideas on artificial cooling. Steven Johnson believed that it was the problem of ingenious inventions being only makeable by ingenious minds, or the relative genius of any individual. Fundamentally, an idea is always the combination of many other ideas that precede it, and humans come up with new things based on the theoretical foundation and technology that they already had, by picking up things here and there and patching them up together. The jigsaw pieces that were needed for the invention of the modern air conditioner were brought closer to each other in the mid XIX century, and in fact they were two pieces that were found in two different times:

(a) In the XVII century, the scientific world had become aware of vacuum and its special properties. Fire cannot burn in a vacuum, and a vacuum lock can be so tight that two horses cannot pull it open. The British scientist Robert Boyle once put a bird in a jar and used a vacuum pump to suck out all the air. The vacuum environment not only killed the bird, but also froze it. This suggests that changes in air volume and pressure would lead to changes in heat as well [8].

(b) The Age of Enlightenment in the XVIII century brought the development of many scientific and technical disciplines, including thermodynamics. The birth of this science gave rise to standardized thermal scales such as Celsius (degrees Celsius) and Fahrenheit (degrees Fahrenheit). And as the accuracy of the measurement system improved, many new things became possible.

These two pieces lead us to the birth of one of the earliest chillers that existed behind the heartwarming story of Dr. John Gorrie’s efforts to save the patient’s life. In 1842, the townspeople of Apalachicola in Florida were struggling against fevers from malaria, and Dr. Gorrie knew that the disease’s contagion pathway was the hot and humid climate. Initially, Gorrie’s idea to hang ice blocks from the ceiling of the hospital to cool the air, thereby reducing fever for patients had initially proven effective. However, this crude method required large quantities of ice to be transported continuously from the North to Florida, and hurricanes that sank scores of ships decimated this option. To overcome this costly logistical challenge, Gorrie began to work on artificial chillers in his spare time. He knew that compression increases the temperature of the air and if this compressed air is passed through metal pipes cooled by water, once they expand, they will absorb heat from the surrounding environment. This process of absorbing heat would cool the surrounding air, even cold enough to turn water into ice. The machine had really worked effectively; even without electricity, it could still operate by wind, steam or animal traction. Being successful in reducing his patients’ fevers and also being able to make his own ice, Gorrie applied for a patent in 1848, and he also raised venture capital to break the existing monopoly in the ice industry. However, the Tudor merchants did not allow this to happen as they started a campaign to blemish Gorrie’s invention by saying that the ice it produced was contaminated. This is a classic example of the grim reality of the marketplace as a battlefield, where an entrenched industry would skip no opportunity to smother potential innovations. This indirectly led to a sad ending when Dr. John Gorrie could not sell any of his machines and died in poverty at the age of 50 [9].

The crash and burn of Gorrie’s business did not put an end to the dream of ​​artificial cooling, and the legacy that he left behind still contributed to the birth of modern air conditioning and refrigeration systems. In 1922, two scholars William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas in the essay “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution” had described a situation where geniuses living geographically far apart came up with the same ideas, resulting in the duplication of inventions in many separate territories [10]. According to the line of cultural evolution, the “adjacent feasibility” had allowed geniuses to independently access the basic form of an innovation, and then manifest that form into reality using tangible factors. . No one stole Gorrie’s ideas, after him another generation of researchers around the world had actually also been attracted to the same problem and one after another came up with their own technology for artificial refrigeration; which was empowered by the newfound foundation of thermodynamics and the understanding of chemical properties of air. With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, the Confederate navy blocked the flow of ice, causing a scarcity of artificial cold throughout the Confederacy. At the time, ice had to be shipped by smuggler ships from France to Texas, Georgia and Louisiana — and these cool cargoes actually belonged to Ferdinand Carre, who actually came up with a chiller employing the same principles as that of Gorrie. In the early 1920s, Clarence Birdseye, after wintering in the Labrador tundra, discovered that food could be made fresher by sudden cooling. And it was then that the quick freezer was born, and Birdseye’s invention is considered the beginning of the current frozen food industry, to this day his name still appears on the packaging of frozen fish packages [11]. The popular artificial refrigeration practices had then transitioned away from the massive equipment found in ice factories, the frozen meat storehouses and food processing facilities — to gradually be scaled down to fit the space of a home. family, in the form of refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners.

Perhaps the most baffling fact is that air conditioners were not originally developed as comfort for humans, but instead for paper. And the person who came up with the idea of ​​​​creating a device to curb heat and humidity, in other words local climate control — was Willis Carrier, who is considered the father of the modern air conditioner.It can be considered an accidental discovery. Specifically, while working for the Buffalo Forge Company in 1902, Carrier was tasked with solving a moisture problem that was threatening the reputation of the high-quality color prints of the Brooklyn printing company Sackett & Wilhelms. Essentially, Carrier’s “air processor” operated by blowing air through a set of coils filled with coolant, thereby precisely controlling air humidity. The reality is, it was humidity, not temperature, that was the first concern for engineers when it came to designing something like an air conditioner. And once they gained control over humidity, they also gained control over the weather itself. The technology invented by Carrier did not only resolve the problem of prints being blurred by the humidity, but also helped to cool the air, and he came to notice this when he saw the worker developing the liking to lunch nearby the printers. Further improving the technology through a series of further tests, Carrier perfected the first modern air conditioning unit with the functions of indoor temperature control and humidity control by humidification and dehumidification. Realizing the “powers” of humidity control and air conditioning could benefit many other industries, it wasn’t long before Carrier left Buffalo Forge and founded Carrier Engineering Corporation with six other engineers. This is Carrier’s decisive move in bringing the air conditioner from being used only in industrial premises to being a convenience for the masses, leading to the complete birth of a civilized achievement that had gone down in history.

After piloting at Rivoli and successfully rolling out air conditioning systems to movie theaters across much of the United States, Carrier gradually realized that the device could become even more popular if he could come up with a design that worked for households. In the years from 1925 to before WWII, most Americans had been completely bewitched by the enchanting cooled indoor of the malls, movie theaters, hotels, and high-rise buildings. The biggest challenge remained was thus the device’s enormous size and humongous initial cost; only industrial conglomerates and extremely wealthy families could afford clunky central air conditioning units whose costs were up to 10,000–50,000 USD, which, by today’s rate, would be 120,000–600,000 USD, and thus these beasts were rarely seen private owned. ‘But if this luxurious comfort could somehow turn into an affordable household convenience, the business potential that it posed would be absolutely immeasurable’, so Carrier envisioned. At the 1939 World’s Fair, the Carrier Corporation have the world a sneak peak on the greatness of household air conditioning by testing it in an igloo in the shape of a five-scoop ice cream cone, the inside of which was, of course, heavenly cool [12]. Delayed by World War II, it was not until the late 1940s that the Carrier vision became a reality: air conditioning had now appeared in every household with a compact wall-mounted design. Back then it was the middle of the XX century, and with the country longing to graduate from the shadow of war and set their sight toward a future of new prosperity, air conditioning became an inseparable object for the people, a symbol for the modern metropolises of the United States of America. Over less than half a decade later, Americans had installed over a million air conditioners a year; the technology that was an untouchable luxury pre-war had now turned into an affordable, mass-producible convenience for the post-war masses. It became so common an American household might be found without a dining room, garage or even a dishwasher, but would never be found without a central or wall-mounted air conditioning unit. When it comes to the downsizing of technologies, there would be other bells ringing as well, like televisions, computers, phones, transistors and microchips. But even among that, the shrinking of the air conditioner from an industrial beast larger than the size of a container to the nowadays’ wall-mounted air conditioners still easily qualifies as an exceptional feat. This advancement was like a bolt of lightning that struck the night forest, and from that sparked the wildfire that was the series of extraordinary events that was the aftermath of the air conditioner — one of the greatest inventions of the XX century.

3. The invention that had single-handedly changed the world

History has proven that every time a force of nature falls into our control, humanity will propel forward at an incredible speed. Since the creation of fire, humans were no longer afraid of predators and quickly shot up to the top of the food chain. Once we invented dams and thus gained control over rivers, we turned it into the hydroelectricity that runs the world. Now with the power to control the climate (even if only locally) of air conditioners, how much would the world change?

- Demographics & Urbanity: Carrier’s invention not only moved air molecules, it also moved people. When air conditioning finally became commonplace, vast tracts of land that previously seemed uninhabitable suddenly turned into promised lands, from the sweltering crocodile swamps of Florida to the scorching lands of northern Australia. The newfound potential to make extreme climates livable helped expand mankind’s biosphere by leaps and bounds, leading to migration to and, thus, population growth in hotter areas of the globe; people thus had more options when it came to choosing where to live, and also created rock-solid improvements on life quality that lingered even till ages later. The post-war migration in America began in 1950 and it overlapped with the spike in public attention toward air conditioners. The states Florida, Southern California, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and New Mexico all witnessed drastic growth during the second half of the XX century, and perhaps this change would never be a thing without humans gaining control over the climate of the spaces within the walls of their homes. In fact, the proportion of the population to live in the Solar Belt regions had exploded from 28% in 1950 to 40% in 2000 [13]. With the ability to withstand humid tropical climates and hot desert climates provided by indoor air conditioners, it became easier for humans to travel to and populate lands that were previously considered to be unlivable. Around the world, megacities sprouted in places that were previously off-limits due to their extreme climates. Hence the rise of Singapore, Chennai, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro, Dubai; where deserts and oases were turned into the hearts of nations with solid economic launchpads. The total population of cities in the Persian Gulf has grown from 500,000 before 1950 to 20 million today.

- Politics: Major shifts in demographics are prone to igniting great changes in politics, and what’s initially the control of tiny molecules had flapped its butterfly wind to change forever the balance of power within U.S. politics. The U.S. Southern States were previously primarily populated by the older and conservative demographics and thus was the fortress of the Democratic. But this state of condition had been overturned by the mass immigration to the lower ⅓ of the U.S. map following the introduction of air conditioners: large volumes of voters had migrated to these states, among which were those of the Republican Party. Within the first half of the XX century, the power hardly ever fell into the hands of a Southern candidate. But since 1952, there have been almost always at least one candidate from the Solar Belt to make it to the final round of the election.

- Architecture: Before air conditioning was invented, the homes in the Southern and Western U.S. used to get extremely hot in the summer, which led to trouble sleeping. As a result, sleeping porches were once the staple architectural component throughout these lands, as shade used to mean everything in these sun-drenched parts of the country. The sleeping porches were roofed, and sometimes they took the form of a spacious veranda where the families could spend their time gathering around, chatting while feeling the breezes on their skins without fear of mosquitoes and other insects. These roofs were so iconic it became a symbol of these lands in stereotypical movies where the protagonist drove into town to the porches where people were gathering around, smoking their cigarettes. Another signature feature of the old Southern homes was the extremely thick stone walls; they helped to keep the inside cool, and to even better serve that purpose, most of these walls were painted in white or face-powder color to reflect the sunlight and thus lessen the heat absorption. Most homes are built with ceilings between 12–16 feet high so the hot air could soar up; they were also installed with large windows that stay open during the summer, all protected with insect screens of course. Since the 1800s, every homes incorporated to their architecture roof fans on the corridors so the hot air could be drained to the attic and then to the outside through attic windows. And it would be negligence to not mention the Dogtrot architecture that was extremely popular in these Solar Belt states in the past, due to its ability to catch and circulate through the house massive volume of wind thanks to a central corridor that runs between the two separate living compartments on its sides, whose window often faces each other[14]. However, the invention of the air conditioner had changed all of that, as eaves and large windows were no longer a necessity and instead became more of an ornamental touch. Children would be taught by their parents to not leave the windows open so the magical cool air produced by the air conditioners wouldn’t seep out. And of course, along came the glass-glazed skyscrapers that had become the symbol for urbanization and civilization itself. As the temperature was controlled, windows were no longer needed for the employees, while sitting densely in a smaller area seemed advantageous when it came to promoting communication and work efficiency. Air conditioners had rapidly changed the face of cities, with the rise of windowless indoors lit primarily with luminescent lights and kept cool by artificial cooling — which was also the origin of the criticisms on air conditioners as the perpetrator to jail humans inside the soulless concrete boxes that were the skyscrapers.

- Lifestyle: There once existed a stereotype in the US that the Southerners were lazy people who just liked to hang around in the shade with a glass of iced lemonade for the entire day. As stigmatic as it sounds, this was actually quite truthful and, in fact, very reasonable considering the hot climate that they lived in. When the outdoor temperature on a typical day would reach 43 degrees Celsius, paired by the humidity of around 85%, the options were indeed few: either (a) you rest in the cool with something refreshing, (b) you go outside and die. The heat in the South and the Far West of the United States is the same as that in Greece, Italy or Spain, and the lifestyle of the people here revolved around that heat. This partly explains why in hot countries it is common for people to have their dinner late because, otherwise, the heat would be unbearable for ones to enjoy their meals. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that before air conditioning, people would either succumb to the climate where they lived or just die. Therefore, the artificial cold air coming from the air conditioner was nothing short of a heavenly breeze; it made daily life more livable and made the long journeys in the cars no longer feel like hell; people could sit at home before their TV to watch their favorite MMA shows without feeling like the ancient Romans at the Colosseum watching the gladiator flights under the scorching sun.

It is clear that the benefits brought by air conditioners were absolutely tremendous, it would take us an article 3 times longer than this one just to list all of them. Keep in mind that without the invention of air conditioners, most electronic devices would be impossible to produce, and modern submarines would never become a thing because there would be no solution for the humidity that accumulate within them when they descent to the greater depths. And we should also keep ourselves mindful of air conditioners’ other more subtle impacts, like how they enabled the existence of countless other major technologies. Server rooms and control centers need air conditioners to keep electronic components from burning. The Facebook that completely changed the way how humans communicate, the Bitcoin with the power to create countless billionaires overnight — the technologies that made up their foundations would only be able to operate smoothly thanks to the protection from temperature and humidity provided by central air conditioning systems. And the health industry is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the air conditioning technology, with air conditioners were needed to cool their many heavy-duty medical devices like CAT scanners, etc. Hospitals also spend billions of USD on air conditioning systems to keep their premises cool, which was absolutely vital in prolonging the lives of patients. Biochemical labs need refrigerators for samples of viruses, and the same is true for semen banks; it almost feels like nothing could operate without the help of air conditioners. The influence of air conditioners is so intensive it actually affected the very life and death of mankind in general. Up until 1970, the rate of conception had always been drastically low during the summer months because no couples wanted to do that in that sweaty weather. The mortality rate was also influenced, with air conditioners saving people from dying to heat strokes during horrendously hot months of summer.

But despite all that, the ironic reality that this one of the greatest inventions of the XX century might have been among the biggest contributors to the doom of mankind in the XXI century, at least if the predictions of the conservationists were true. The operating principle of the air conditioners is to cool the indoor air, but discharge heated air into the environment in return. It means that while a certain proportion of mankind is enjoying the convenience of air conditioners, the other proportions who couldn’t afford that convenience is having to endure an even worse climate thanks to the heat that was discharged into the atmosphere. Or, even when we somehow overlook that, at the very least it would be a vicious circle for ourselves because the hotter climate would just come right back at us, forcing us to produce more air conditioning, and the air conditioning again makes the climate become hotter.

There is a question that people often ask themselves whenever a power outage happens: “How did people of previous times manage to live without air conditioners?”. But little do they know, the feeling of suffering they are experiencing is specifically associated only to the air-conditioned spaces that they lived and worked in or, more generally, an air-conditioned world; their circumstance and that of people of previous times, they were not at all equivalent. So we have always been living in a world full of inconveniences, one way or another, and are trying to make up for those with the benefits that inventions bring. The people of previous times didn’t need air conditioners to sustain their life because they weren’t living between the concrete walls of the skyscrapers that are directly exposed to the sun and have no windows either.

The modern world is swamped with inventions, and the convenience that they bring is indeed endless. But maybe we should stop for a moment and think if one day those inventions stop functioning or just disappear, what would mankind be left with?

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References:

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