Chrysler Airtemp 🇺🇸

Airtemp was born from a skyscraper. When Walter Chrysler raised the Chrysler Building in New York (1930), his company designed and built the building’s air‑conditioning system, and from that experience Airtemp Corporation emerged in 1934, a Chrysler subsidiary installed in Dayton (Ohio) in an old Maxwell factory. Airtemp supplied capacity regulators, sealed radial compressors and the autonomous air‑conditioning system; in 1941 it had more than 500 dealers selling cooling and heating, during the war it manufactured medical refrigeration and in the forties it came to dominate the sector before falling behind.

Its great popular milestone was the automobile. Packard had offered a factory air conditioning system in 1940 without success, but it was the Airtemp system of the Chrysler, DeSoto and Imperial of 1953 that set the formula: unit in the trunk, three‑speed fan, air recirculation and, a rarity of the time, R‑22 refrigerant instead of the R‑12 used by others. The advertising promised to lower the cabin from 120 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit in a couple of minutes. That same 1953 Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile and Lincoln launched theirs, but the name Airtemp stayed attached to Chrysler’s car air conditioning for decades.

At home, Chrysler Airtemp sold window units since the 1950s with a very distinct personality: the 1954 swing‑out window line, which required no window modification and remained almost unchanged until the seventies; the “Slender” models of 1957‑60; the “High Power 1600” of 1959; the “Titan” and “Tempette” of the sixties; the “Freeway” of 1967 for sliding windows; the “Power King” P‑25 of 22,500 BTU/h; and in the seventies the “Imperial” and “Sleeper” series (1972), already manufactured in the new Bowling Green (Kentucky) plant, to which Airtemp moved its non‑automotive production in 1971.

1975 was the last year Chrysler manufactured its Airtemp range. On February 23, 1976, in the midst of the crisis, it sold the division to Fedders for about $58.5 million ( $18 million in cash, a $10.5 million note and $1.5 million of preferred stock). Fedders immediately claimed the assets were inflated, stopped paying interest and dividends, and Chrysler responded in November 1977 with an antitrust lawsuit against Fedders, Airtemp International and the Spanish Interclisa S.A., which reached the Court of Appeals in 1981. Under Fedders, Airtemp became a mass‑market brand—K‑Mart, Walmart, Woolworth’s—with little in‑house engineering; it fell with Fedders in 2008, passed to the Airwell/Elco group and in 2012 was revived as a Nordyne brand sold exclusively by the distributor R. E. Michel.

Pending verification

The advertising figure of 120 to 85 degrees in two minutes (only in secondary sources) and the exact role of Interclisa in the European Airtemp business.

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