Inventors of the Automobile Air Conditioner
Here's a little factoid for automotive buffs or just to dazzle your friends:
The four Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram, and Max, invented and developed the first automobile air-conditioner. On July 17, 1946, the temperature in Detroit was 97 degrees.
The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.
Henry was curious and invited them into his office. They refused and instead asked that he come out to the parking lot to their car. They persuaded him to get into the car, which was about 130 degrees, turned on the air conditioner, and cooled the car off immediately.
The old man got very excited and invited them back to the office, where he offered them $3 million for the patent. The brothers refused, saying they would settle for $2 million, but they wanted the recognition by having a label, 'The Goldberg Air Conditioner' on the dashboard of each car in which it was installed.
Now old man Ford was more than just a little anti-Semitic, and there was no way he was going to put the Goldberg's name on two million Fords. They haggled back and forth for about two hours and finally agreed on $4 million and that just their first names would be shown.
And so to this day,
on the dashboard of all Ford automobiles,
the air conditioner controls show:
Lo - Norm - Hi - Max
Just received this from a "C-C rider", One of the crew members I knew when putting the Clark County back in commission at Camden N.J. in 65-66, then riding her to San Diego where I was transferred to ACB-1. The ship went on to RVN where she was sunk, re-floated, repaired and given to the RVN. Been getting quite a few E-mails from some of that crew for several years now.
jud
Very good, indeed.
An amusing little anecdote, but I smelled that it was a joke before I got to the punchline.
Henry Ford died in 1947 at the age of 83. He was out of the day to day of the business by 1945. By that time he had given up his anti-semitism, having been appalled by the goings on in Hitler's Germany. But most of all he would've opposed a comfort item such as air conditioning. Henry was all about building them sturdy but cheap. And anyway, according to wikipedia, Packard had air conditioning in 1939.
