50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.

Imagine we could control the weather at the push of a button.

Making it warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, the implications would be enormous.

No more droughts or floods, no heat waves or icy roads, deserts would become verdant.

Crops would never fail.

As it happens, climate change has sparked some crazy sounding ideas for hacking the climate,

such as spraying sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere or dumping quick climb in the oceans.

Clever as humans are, however, we're nowhere near precision control of the weather.

At least if we're talking about outside.

But since the invention of air conditioning, we can control the weather inside.

That's not quite as big a deal, but it still has some far-reaching and unexpected effects.

Ever since our ancestors mastered fire, humans have been able to get warmer when it's cold.

Cooling down when it's hot has been more of a challenge.

The eccentric, teenage Roman Emperor, Allegabulus, made an early attempt at air conditioning

by sending slaves into the mountains to bring down snow and pilot in his garden,

where breezes would carry the cooler air inside.

Needless to say, this was not a scalable solution, at least not until the 19th century.

When a Boston entrepreneur named Frederick Tudor amassed an unlikely fortune in a similar way.

He carved blocks of ice from New England's frozen lakes in winter,

insulated them in sawdust, and shipped them to warmer climbs for summer.

The rest of the country became addicted.

Until artificial ice making took off, every mild New England winter caused a panic about ice famine.

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