Once again, current events conspired to take the pen out of my hand as I crafted this bimonthly message. But this time, I refused to yield in the ongoing wrestling match.
After all, job one here is to explain this issue's throwback cover design, an updated tribute to our very first issue from 95 years ago. At that time, of course, this publication went by its full name, Heating, Piping and Air Conditioning, a title we kept for seven decades before switching to HPAC Engineering in 1999. With that in mind, this special issue leads with an iconic article from that inaugural edition, written by the legendary Willis H. Carrier, assessing the bright prospects for our up and coming industry. It's quite a time capsule.
Indeed, history pulses through this issue across multiple stories, from a collection of vintage 1929 advertisements to reflections by ASHRAE's Bill Bahnfleth about his father's influence here as HPAC editor throughout the 1960s. And engineer Danielle Passaglia shares her own history with us about how her popular children's book series, Lucy's Engineering Adventure, came to be in 2021, and how it is now helping to fire the imaginations of young girls all over the world about potential careers in STEM.
Given her story's placement in this issue, that prompted me to review a hard copy of our very first from May 1929 to see if I could find any women even mentioned on its pages. I could not.
With that in mind, today, however belated, I am pleased to announce that HPAC Engineering is finally adding female perspectives to its Editorial Advisory Board. Over the last two months, I had invited ASHRAE leaders Ginger Scoggins, Nancy Kohout, and Elise Kiland, all accomplished engineers, to join our board. I was thrilled that all three accepted without hesitation.
Scoggins, of course, is ASHRAE's immediate past president and its lead emissary to multiple global climate conferences. For her part, Kohout is chairing the Society's first-ever Women in ASHRAE Leadership Symposium in Chicago this fall. And Kiland is in the pipeline to be national president of the Young Engineers of ASHRAE (YEA), starting next June. A wonderful trio to be sure, so HPAC Engineering is fortunate to be able to draw upon their counsel in the months and years to come.
They represent a diversity of industry perspective and wisdom that we have deprived ourselves of for far too long.
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Of course, history like that is happening all around us during this enormously consequential autumn. Just since our last print issue, the U.S. political world has been upended in extraordinary fashion. Indeed, by the time our next print issue goes to press near Thanksgiving, the United States of America may well have elected its first woman chief executive. Miles to go before that ending is written, of course, but history is guaranteed to be made regardless of the ultimate outcome.
That said, more immediate big news for our industry, and every other, broke on Sept. 18, when the Federal Reserve finally announced that it would lower interest rates. It marked the first downward move in 18 months, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell was unusually aggressive in reducing the rate by a half point, not just a quarter. Fed watchers now even expect rates to come down by another half point by the end of this year. This was all music to Wall Street's ears, of course, which saw record market rallies on Sept. 22nd and 23rd.
The bold action was the Fed's clearest signal yet that it believes inflation is heading in the right direction and that an economic recession is no longer on the horizon. And that provides a remarkably stable foundation now for an exhausted nation still stressed daily by a raucous political season unlike any since a young engineer named Carrier even thought air could be mechanically "conditioned."
May our agitated American temperament take that to heart and remain as cool and as positive as possible in the trying months ahead.
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