A 700-page book on the history of mobile vehicle air conditioning in Australia and New Zealand, Cool Mavericks, was launched in Brisbane last month.
The Automotive Air Conditioning, Electrical and Cooling Technicians of Australasia (VASA) project was a decade in the making.
More than 100 industry pioneers were interviewed and countless historic documents and patents researched in America, Australia, Asia and Europe.
What makes this book special is that it is the first book ever written that examines the very beginnings of this unplanned industry and it is written from a global perspective.
Just released in Australia, 'Cool Mavericks', reveals for the first time how colourful characters, fired with gold-rush zeal in America and Australia and also in Japan, worked out how to air condition every car ever made, leaving the top car makers out of the game for almost half a century.
The buyers of the vast majority of air conditioned Australian cars from the 1960s to the 1990s had their aircon fitted, not by the new car dealership but by independent, private installers around the corner.
It wasn't until almost the turn of the century that air conditioning became the default accessory in every vehicle on the assembly line.
Large private aftermarket innovators emerged in Australia to design and make the systems used in the Australian-made and assembled cars.
Many of the design standards and purpose-built machinery conceived by these companies are still being used by OEM suppliers today, but, like the car makers, most have left Australian shores.
In the hot states of America and Australia, it led to an exciting, innovative and lucrative period for those workshops that took a punt and started building and installing air conditioning in all kinds of mobile vehicles, including trains, tractors, boats and troop carriers.
Incredibly Cool Mavericks is the first attempt to give long-overdue credit to the real pioneers of mobile air conditioning, an unsung sector of the vehicle aftermarket who defied all the odds and fired up an industry that was never anticipated and so never planned.
The air conditioning systems devised by these entrepreneurs became the blueprint for all future mobile air conditioning.
The authors of Cool Mavericks are VASA's foundation president and industry pioneer Mark Mitchell and VASA's CEO for its first 20 years, journalist Ken Newton.
Current VASA president Brett Meads said the book would appeal to anyone with an interest in the Australian spirit of innovation, as well as automotive history.
While Australia's pioneer role in mobile air conditioning development dominates the book, many of its pages are devoted to the early patents and vital discoveries that needed to be made before a cooling system based on refrigeration would ever work in a moving vehicle.