On the subject of opening windows for ventilation in offices, “Violet” writes:

Opening a window only works in specific climates, however. Here in south Texas, opening a window to get cooler would be throwing gasoline on a fire.

Clearly this is because the southern Texan is opening the wrong sort of window. To cool off, an office worker in Texas ought to open a window in Manitoba. The problem, of course, is that Manitoba is situated at some distance from Texas. Dr. Boli understands the difficulty, and has consulted with some of North America’s best engineers, who after several minutes of earnest discussion have proposed a solution to it.

 

Proposed route of the Brownsville & Hudson’s Bay Temperature-Exchange Conduit.

Let a conduit be built from Brownsville to York Factory on the shores of Hudson’s Bay. The conduit would be a sort of tube, about four yards in diameter, in which powerful turbines would be located at intervals of about ten per mile. During the hot months, these turbines would capture the cooling breezes of the Hudson’s Bay and direct them southward into Texas, where various outlets would be located in southern Texan office parks. In the winter, the turbines would reverse direction, and warm air from the sunnier climes of southern Texas would be directed toward Manitoba, making the shore of Hudson’s Bay an attractive place to live year-round, and doubtless fostering the growth of prosperous cities of the latest artistic design. Prodigious amounts of energy otherwise wasted in cooling Texans and heating Manitobans would be saved.

The only trifling detail to be worked out is the power source for the turbines themselves. Dr. Boli’s engineers are leaning toward the idea of opening a series of fitness clubs along the proposed route, where ordinary citizens would pay for the privilege of exercising on pedal-powered machinery that would be connected to the great turbines by a system of belts.