After years of reading breathless stories about the amazing coming era of self-driving cars, household robots and artificial intelligence so advanced that it could pass for human, I’m sure I’m one of many who feels let down that these confident predictions haven’t yet come to pass. I want nirvana and I wanted it by now.

But as a devotee of science and technology blogs, I’ve got news for those who aren’t that into futurism: Breakthroughs that could transform life as we know it are either just around the corner or a bus stop or two in the distance. Breakthroughs like wearable personal cooling and heating devices.

That concept, which is sparking excitement in tech blogs this week, is based on an 1834 discovery by French clockmaker-turned-physicist Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier. Encyclopaedia Britannica has one of the simpler explanations that I came upon. Peltier found that ...

... at the junction of two dissimilar metals an electric current will produce heat or cold, depending on the direction of current flow. The effect ... is used in devices for measuring temperature and, with the discovery of new conducting materials, in refrigeration units.


Still hazy on how this works? Me too. Here’s another explanation from the website of the II-VI Marlow thermoelectric company.

An electric current that flows between two semiconductors faces is being heated on one side, and the energy output from that side simultaneously cools the other side. The Peltier effect can be reversed; you can use the energy to either heat something or cool something. From this, thermoelectric coolers and heaters were born.

Sony announced Monday it would start selling wearable personal cooling and heating devices for a mere $117 next year in Japan. The Engadget website reports ...

... the Reon Pocket ... slips into a pouch in a special T-shirt. The stealthy device doesn’t condition the air as such. Rather, it sits at the base of your neck and uses the Peltier effect (where heat is absorbed or emitted when you pass an electrical current across a junction) to either lower your temperature by 23 [degrees Fahrenheit] or raise it by 14 [degrees Fahrenheit], all without bulk or noise. You could wear a stuffy business outfit on a hot day and avoid looking like you’ve just stepped out of a sauna.


Sony hasn’t cornered this market by any stretch. In February, Digital Trends gave a rave review to another wearable device — one worn on the inside of the wrist — that also relies on the Peltier effect.

Developed by a team of MIT grads, the Wave [which costs $299] is essentially a wearable heater and cooler that leverages quirks in human physiology to sort of “hack” how your body perceives temperature.

“It’s a product for people that are too hot or too cold, that offers thermal relief,” explains Embr Labs co-founder Sam Shames. “What it does is it heats and cools one spot on your body and helps you improve your comfort, without changing your core temp.”

Think of how revolutionary this is. The money-saving potential of such technology is enormous. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling is the largest energy expense for most homes, averaging 48% of typical household usage. If a family of four living in an 1,800-square-foot house didn’t have to cool or heat all 1,800 square feet because mom, dad, daughter and son each used a Reon Pocket or Embr Wave, the yearly savings would be huge — and astronomical in places with extreme weather like Palm Springs or Buffalo.


The same holds for any energy consumer. Heating and cooling costs are the biggest bill for one-third of small businesses, according to the National Federation of Independent Business. Hard figures aren’t available for larger companies or government agencies, but there’s no question that costs are considerable, and not just if you’re based in Phoenix or Minneapolis.

Think about the implications for anti-poverty programs as well. If governments can help poor people from spending heavily on air conditioning or heating by providing them with a $117 or $299 device, that’s a no-brainer.

Then there’s this: What makes the availability of effective personal cooling and heating devices even more important is that in a wealthier world, there is nothing that the newly affluent crave more than air conditioning. As The Guardian in London reported in 2015, this demand is a huge obstacle to efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions because ...

... it threatens to smash pledges and targets for global warming. Worldwide power consumption for air conditioning alone is forecast to surge 33-fold by 2100 as developing world incomes rise and urbanization advances.


Already, the U.S. uses as much electricity to keep buildings cool as the whole of Africa uses on everything; China and India are fast catching up. By mid-century, people will use more energy for cooling than heating.

And since cold is still overwhelmingly produced by burning fossil fuels, emission targets ... risk being blown away as governments and scientists struggle with a cruel climate-change irony: Cooling makes the planet hotter.

This suggests that devices like the Reon Pocket or Embr Wave won’t just be popular because they save money. They may be mandated for personal use by governments worried about the apocalyptic potential of climate change.

The immense significance of — and the global affection for — air conditioning may be surprising to those who have grown up with it. But air conditioning — invented, according to Time magazine, in 1902 by Willis Carrier in Brooklyn “as a solution to keep muggy air in a printing plant from wrinkling magazine pages” — is on the short list of the best inventions of all time. In 1947, British economist and politician Sydney F. Markham declared that the “greatest contribution to civilization in this century may well be air conditioning.”


It basically was the iPhone of the 20th century, except even more beloved. And now a new iteration is, literally, at hand.

In a telephone interview Wednesday from Embr’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I asked co-founder and co-inventor Shames about the seeming lack of appreciation of his device’s implications for energy consumption and global warming. He speculated that since the Embr Wave offered a “behavioral solution” rather than a new source of clean energy, it hadn’t captured the imagination of journalists or the public.

But Shames believes, as I do, that it’s just a matter of time before the efficacy and the potential of devices using the Peltier effect to make people feel colder or warmer is appreciated.

“Over the next five, 10, 15 years, we as a society are going to have to have serious changes in how we use energy,” Shames told me. In the meantime, he said, Embr is working on making its heating and cooling devices “more powerful” in how they improve individual comfort.


Good for Shames, good for Embr and good for the world. The AC revolution is coming — the sooner, the better.

Reed, who hates that sweaty feeling and loathed the steamy summers he spent in Northern Virginia because of it, is deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section. Column archive: sdut.us/chrisreed. Twitter: @chrisreed99. Email: chris.reed@sduniontribune.com.

