One person who would have been astonished by the fight over air conditioning would have been Lee Kuan Yew, the man who more than any other individual steered Singapore to extraordinary success:
Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key
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