, Page 00003 The New York Times Archives

''Sauna'' and ''steam bath'' don't really do it justice, and comparing Houston in the summer to being slapped in the face with a hot towel also falls short of the reality. Simply put, Houston is one of the hottest cities in the country, and for six months a year there is nowhere more humid.

As a result, Houston is the most air-conditioned place on earth, and the cost of turning its hot air into cold exceeds the gross national product of 30 countries. Each summer, homeowners here spend well over $600 million, businesses another $66 million, for electricity to run their air-conditioners.

Air-conditioning is to much of the South and Southwest what oil furnaces are to the North - an impertinent exercise of man's will, technology and desire to live in a particular area despite the environment.

The Houston Lighting and Power Company says the average cost of keeping an average-size house at an average of 78 degrees for the ''cooling season,'' which runs from May until October, is $654. According to a fuel-oil distributor in northern New Jersey, it cost from $800 to $1,000 to heat the average home there last winter.

Nowhere in the country has the growth of a city or region been as closely linked to a particular technology as in the Southwest. The Snow Belt was settled long before the first gallon of heating oil had been refined, with wood and then coal fires sufficing to stave off the chill winters. Miami and New Orleans were considered habitable and even desirable in the years before air-conditioning. So were Phoenix and Tucson, where people flocked just to soak up the dry heat.

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Before air-conditioning, however, there was little reason to live in Houston and few did. Fifty long, hot, humid miles from the Gulf of Mexico, far beyond the reach of the cooling ocean breezes that make New Orleans and Miami just bearable in August, Houston is an accidental city founded on a swamp by developers who could not foresee that it would one day become the nation's fifth largest city and the global headquarters of the petroleum industry. And without air-conditioning, it almost certainly would not have done so.

In 1950, at the beginning of the postwar air-conditioning mania, the city's population was a mere 596,163. Thirty years and hundreds of thousands of air-conditioners later it had nearly tripled, to 1.6 million.

The few old-timers here can remember when the only places in town that were air-conditioned were a few movie theaters and the storage vaults at the Alaskan Fur Company. At that time British diplomats stationed here were given bonuses reserved for hardship posts in the tropics. In the years before and immediately after World War II, Houstonians who could afford it left town in the summer.

Such a relaxed approach to the affairs of the day is hardly consistent with Houston's stature as a major citadel of commercialism, and as Houston has undergone its transformation to supercity it has also become the air-conditioning industry's best customer.

Last year, more new air-conditioning units - a third of a million and then some - were sold in Texas than anywhere else, nearly twice as many as in California and 25 percent more than in Florida. Twothirds of the air-conditioners sent to Texas found their way to Houston, which already had more of them than anywhere else.

According to Houston Lighting and Power, the cooling capacity of all the air-conditioners in town is 3.5 million tons - substantially more than the 2.95 million tons that, according to Consolidated Edison, cool New York City and Westchester County combined, far more than the 910,000 tons estimated to be in use in Los Angeles, many more tons than in Miami, New Orleans, Atlanta or Phoenix.

As befits a city that runs on frigid air, a major industry has grown up here devoted entirely to keeping Houston cold - hundreds upon hundreds of companies that sell air-conditioners, install them, clean them and repair them when they break down. The telephone book contains 63 pages of listings related to air-conditioning business, including about 700 licensed air-conditioning contractors and an equal number of repairmen.

Despite their numbers, the companies have all they can do to keep up. There is a shortage of air-conditioner mechanics, and even companies that advertise ''24-hour'' emergency repair service - and in July emergency is the appropriate word - are often days behind in their appointments.

Houston has raised the science of air-conditioning to such a high art that thousands of Houstonians never need to go outside. More than 50 of the city's downtown buildings are connected by a three-milelong network of air-conditioned tunnels that link offices with parking garages, restaurants and stores, enabling one to travel an arctic circle from home to car to office and back without ever entering the city.

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