Those days before air conditioning
It seems a bit like ancient history, doesn’t it? But when I was growing up and for quite a while afterwards, air conditioning was a rare luxury.
We didn’t have it in houses, except for the occasional bedroom. We certainly didn’t have it in cars. Not in schools, either. And subways? Fugetaboutit.
And in New York in the summer it can get awfully hot. Summer meant sweat. Summer meant seersucker suits for the men and light cotton or linen dresses for the women. When I was a toddler, we were fortunate enough to go for a month or so to a rented cabin at a lake, and my father commuted up there for the weekends.
My bedroom at home had very little ventilation. Even with the two tiny windows open it could be oppressive in there on a hot still night. There was a large fan that could be hauled in, but all it did was circulate the heavy air, and even as a kid it was hard to sleep. My parents finally got an air conditioner in their bedroom, and my brother and I would haul in cot mattresses to put on their bedroom floor on the worst nights.
In New York City, school lasted until June 30th and began again the day after Labor Day. Those last few weeks in June could be awfully hot, coupled with the lame-duck situation of not too much learning going on towards the end anyway. Boring, tedious, draining. Some summers after school was finally over I went to sleep-away camp, and although that was a solution to the heat, it was located in the mountains and often so bitterly cold there that I remember almost never having any desire to plunge into the ice-cold lake, although we were forced to do so every day.
In those days cars had little side vents that did almost nothing at all to circulate air, and if you wore shorts or a skirt you’d stick to the vinyl seats. My family once drove through the Mohave desert in the summer – ’nuff said.
There was one place that was reliably air-conditioned: movie theaters. It could be so cold inside them, though, that one had to remember to take a sweater or risk shivering through the entire film.
Even when I was a teenager and young adult, neither the New York subways nor the ballet classes I attended were ever air-conditioned. The sweaty bodies in close quarters exacerbated the heat, and the humidity in a dance class became formidable. Dancers’ hands would keep sliding off barres which had became slick with sweat, and sweat dripped onto the floor and pooled there. We could have used a few of those guys who appear during basketball games to towel the floor. Every dancer had a little towel draped over the barre with which to try to absorb some of the sweat that stung our eyes and made our leotards sopping wet.
And now I think it’s about time for this:
At least growing up in Denver with 5% humidity, it may have been 98 during the day, but the temperature rapidly went down with the sun. Sleeping was not usually a problem.
As someone who has lived there and on the east coast, visceral proof that the primary greenhouse gas is water vapor.
Growing up on the PNW coast we never had air conditioning and even in the Puget Sound interior it is really only needed a few days a year.
Every now and then some leftist trots out the ‘let’s get rid of air conditioning’ story.
Life in the southwest and southeast would be brutal without it.
Do you think WA DC would be inhabitable for the bureaucrats from June to October without AC? Nope. Sounds like an unplanned bonus. It is awful there w/o AC.
Do you think WA DC would be inhabitable for the bureaucrats from June to October without AC? Nope. Sounds like an unplanned bonus. It is awful there w/o AC.
I grew up in Phoenix, where many of my friends had swamp coolers, not AC. I played outside.
Glenn Reynolds, in response to articles about AC destroying the environment, proposes that we outlaw AC in Washington, DC, first.
I grew up, without air conditioning, in the Midwest. People from other parts of the country don’t understand the misery of the hot, humid summers there. On top of that, I had hay fever in August and September.
I can remember sampling marijuana, for the first time, late in August, not long after turning eighteen. It blew up my sneezing so bad that it was like putting pollen on steroids. Luckily the library was air conditioned and open until 2:00 AM, so I spent a lot of time there, evading the heat, humidity, and ragweed pollen. A few years later, I moved to New York. Believe it or not, the summers there were cooler, and there was no ragweed, so no hay fever. Not many people have so appreciated New York’s salubrious climate.
Nicely written post. We had AC in my childhood home, but on the weekends, we would drive out to the family farm which didn’t. My job was to mow, 7 acres with a powered push mower. When done, you got to cool off in the shade of the house with some watermelon to rehydrate.
On the flip side, when Texas had its Valentine Day power outrage a couple of years ago; I missed the small wall mounted gas furnaces that kept each room warm.
I’ve lived all my life in the very deep south. I was 20-ish before AC became more or less universal. But I really don’t remember being miserable from the heat as a child. And I’ve heard many others say the same. I don’t know if we just repressed the memory or what. But it was just the way things were.
As an adult, though..that’s another story. I don’t understand how adults endured hard manual labor in the summer. But when I think of “summers before…” it isn’t AC that comes first to mind. It’s window screens. Imaging trying to sleep while being miserably, sweaty, stifling hot–AND at the mercy of whatever bugs decided to come in the open window.
In the 1950s in Corpus Christi, Texas, we did not have air conditioning until I was in late elementary school. I loved it when my mother took me with her to the bank. The lobby was air conditioned. I would stand in the middle of the room with my arms extended while my mother completed her transaction at the teller window. When we got a/c, it was two window units, one for the living room where my mother taught piano and one for my parents’ bedroom.
I grew up in the Midwest. My parents had a window unit. We had a finished basement that was very cool in the summers, and a screened in porch. Sometimes, it was less comfortable than other times, but rarely miserable. I now live in the south where the thing that terrifies me most about a hurricane is being without power afterwards, which means being without ac. It’s miserable pretty much from June though September.
Glorious spring and fall require the balance of brutal summer and winter.
Mediterranean climate’s comfort, at the price of a dull sameness.
When I was in elementary school, a new addition was built but only the cafeteria had air conditioning. (There were window units in the principal’s and nurse’s offices, which were in the older part of the building.) What a relief the a/c must have been for the cafeteria workers! Prior to the new addition, the cafeteria was shared with the high school, in a pretty old building. If the kitchen had any a/c, it’d’ve been window units. A new high school a couple of years later that was fully air conditioned. That was on the 70’s.
The one area where not having air conditioning is noticeable in the PNW is upstairs vs downstairs. There are days when it is 85-90 degrees but not humid at all but when you go upstairs for bed it’s not pleasant. Old houses and all. Lots of sleeping on top of the covers.
Just today this video from a Florida public service commission ‘Life before Air Conditioning’ popped into my feed. More than 9 years old, they interviewed retirement home residents about life in Florida before AC. Comments on the old houses with the through the home halls for air flow. Tall narrow windows and high ceilings to bring in the cool air and release the hot out the top. And the planning for no cooking in evenings. I wondered if that’s where the grilling out came from.
https://youtu.be/5bl181cf9V0
I grew up in the Midwest and as a young child we had a window A/C unit, and by the time I was a teen we had a regular central air A/C system. I hadn’t dredged up this memory in many decades, but my father was sort of an inventive guy even though he wasn’t into home improvement work generally.
He put an oversized window A/C unit in a basement window located right next to air intake for the furnace. Then he jury-rigged some ducting from the window A/C to the central furnace air intake. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough.
If I remember correctly, the U.S. Capitol building was the first major building in the U.S. to have air conditioning installed.
P.S. Ah, yes the good old days.
I still remember many sweltering nights when I was a child in a big city a few years after the end of WWII, with only a small fan oscillating back and forth for all the good it did, the windows were open in the hope of a breeze, and how uncomfortable it was as I tried to get to sleep, soaked in sweat.
Of course we do have ‘Mother Nature’s Air Conditioner’ here. Down slope easterly winds through the Cascades bring the hot weather and then one day usually in the evening the switch happens and the westerlies come in from the ocean bringing low clouds and much cooler temps.
I suddenly feel very privileged. Mid-60’s. Most of the time we had AC. In one two-year period I moved from Minot, ND (c-c-c-cold winters, hot summers, AC at home) to Montgomery, AL (h-h-hot summers, AC at home, none in school), to Eugene, OR (no AC home or school) to Omaha, NE (AC at home and school).
I for one miss “cozy-wings”, although they made it easy to break into a car. Lost a stereo that way once.
PhysicsGuy, right now (6:40pm) in N. Colo (Longmont/Loveland) it is 85 degrees and 37% humidity. At 8 this morning it was 45%. We moved to Denver area in 1957. No A/C, dont’ remember when A/C came to our house. I think it was around 1962 when we moved to a new house in Northglenn. Dad had a A/C mounted under the dash in the car. Didn’t put much out and my brother and I in back seat got none.
Oh for the days when I walked uphill in 4 ft of snow, both ways.
My experience growing up was similar to Lee Also’s. The house my family lived in until I went away to college was not large, but my dad and his brother (who was a master carpenter) turned the basement into a finished basement. They went off to Armstrong Cork, which had a factory in my home town at that time and sold flooring out of an outlet store to local DIYs. After my dad and Uncle Don laid down the flooring, Uncle Don put up wood paneling on the walls and built a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that covered the electric meter and could be easily moved when the meter reader came by. (As a born bookworm, I loved that bookcase and kept a stash of favorite books, mostly history, on its shelves).
The next step was putting up a divider with a door between the front part of the basement (which my dad called the rumpus room) and the back, which held the washer, dryer, a stall shower, and a toilet. This layout meant that you could get hot and sweaty doing yard work, go down the outside steps to the back of the basement, shower off, throw your dirty clothes in the washer, and sleep on the convertible sofa in the rumpus room. My parents eventually bought two small one-room a/c units, one for their bedroom and the other for mine, but the basement sofa was comfortably cool even on the hottest Pennsylvania summer nights. You could lie there and listen to Phillies games on the radio along with dad’s running commentary from the upstairs kitchen about the “stinkin’ Phils.”
Apropos of summer weather in DC, I remember reading that the British Embassy used to require all its staff members in Washington to certify that they were acclimated to tropical climates. I also remember Alistair Cooke’s book about his life in the United States (born in England, he became an American citizen in 1941)– in which he said that his first summer on the East Coast was a memorable introduction to a level of heat and humidity he had never experienced in the UK. (Some of Neo’s readers may remember Cooke as the host of Masterpiece Theatre).
Like Mac, I grew up in the Deep South. We never had any kind of A/C until my parents built a new house in 1965. Dad kept the thermostat cranked down to 68 degrees in the summertime. Before that we had attic fans that pulled in the sometimes cooler night air through the screened open windows. I also remember turning the pillow over and migrating to the bottom of the bed seeking cooler sheets but never felt oppressed by it as a child. Our first house in Atlanta had no A/C, and it wasn’t long before we bought a unit for our bedroom. It seemed easier to live without it when we were younger. These days in Nashville the stretch of 90-100 degree days we’ve had this summer would be impossible without our central air.
Those of us who were kids in the 70s didn’t really need too much air conditioning- that was the close of the cooling period we had. Remember all the magazine articles about the coming Ice Age? As usual, the media noted the cooling period right when it was ending.
I am currently READING COOL:How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, by Salvatore Basile. Very interesting so far, I have just reached the 20th Century.
How splendid to find a Neo essay on something I am currently reading!
Grew up in the Detroit area. As kids, we used to wet down the house’s bricks in the thought that would cool things.
I did some remodeling work in some of the big, old, old-money homes. They had, in the roof, an opening three or four feet square. There was a kind of ship’s hatch cover. In the evening, you open the hatch and the chimney effect pulls hot air up and the cooler evening air flows in. Mostly, the outside air was bearable by ten in the evening no matter how hot the day had been.
Yeah, AC made a difference, but we got by anyway.
Spent some time at Ft. Benning on a particularly hot summer. The barracks halls had two six-by-six exhaust fans at the end. Might have helped but they pulled in dust and made the OCS-standard inspections difficult. So we turned them off. You wrap a blanket around the bar at the end of the bunk and rest your ankles on it. Sweat runs down the back of your legs but at least there’s air.
I was 22 in 1983 and basic training at Lackland was the first time I slept in AC…
Florida in the ’40s, ’50s, and well into the ’60s. The comments by others apply in every sense to life in a Florida city at the time.
The typical American of today has no clue. But, the hard core environmentalists advocate policies that would approximate such a life style. I say to them, “there is nothing stopping you, show us the way”. Actually, the Europeans, due to their failed policies, may be on the verge of leading the march to the past.
In fact, I would like to see the environmental militants really live up to their rhetoric, and sample life as it was on a hard scrabble Florida farm in 1947. (That was the year I turned 12, and my last summer on the farm). Life without electricity, running water, telephones, or mechanized equipment was about as environmentally friendly as you could ask; but, created a life style that most folks cannot fathom. Not the least of the issues was living through summer. At night, after a day of heavy physical work in the Florida sun, sleep when it came, was on soggy sheets. Since every chore was labor intensive, men, women and kids all worked to their capacity. Exhaustion was a feature of life; but, it helped to bring on sleep. The toll on people who had to live like this full time was severe.
As for me, I do not want to go back. I am certain that I could not survive.
We had AC in our home after we moved into the newly built home when I was 8, but my father was stingy with its use- off at night, set around 80 during the day in the Kentucky Summers. However, when I was 16, I was moved to the other end of the house into a finished bedroom in what was orginally going to be the 2 car garage. One consequence of this was that that part of the house wasn’t ducted like the rest of the house, so it was basically no AC at all. Took some getting used to sleeping in a room over 80 degrees most nights between June and September. Learned to sleep with fan, and have never stopped- can’t sleep in dead silence at all any longer.
I didn’t really have AC again until I moved back down here to Tennessee to care for my parents. Not sure I could go back now to not having it.
It’s not commonly well-known how the invention of air conditioning came about. The technology was originally developed for the printing industry and textile mills. The problem was that the paper wasn’t being consistently handled and aligned on the presses, and the textile mills were often too dry, which resulted in problems as the yarns were being spun into thread – they would frequently break in the process.
The solution was to artificially humidify the air and control the temperature to provide controlled, optimal industrial conditions. Willis Carrier was the manufacturer of conditioning systems for the printing industry, and Stuart Cramer was the developer of the humidifying systems for textile mills. It was Cramer that coined the term ‘Air Conditioning’, which Carrier adopted into his company’s name for his own technology. This was in the early 1900s – The cross-over of the technology to render conditions more comfortable for humans wasn’t even a decade behind that.
Like Mac, I grew up in the Deep South. We never had any kind of A/C until my parents built a new house in 1965.
tnxplant:
I was in Daytona Beach, FL. As I recall 1965 was the year it changed. A year or two before TV went color for most people.
I still think of “Hogan’s Heroes” as a B&W show.
I don’t think modern folks get what a big deal A/C was for the South.
We weren’t just lazy and colorful. It was hard when the temps were regularly in the 90s or worse for too many months of the year. Plus the humidity.
Speaking of which, Albuquerque is no picnic. I’ve got a “swamp cooler” and it sure ain’t A/C. It’s 11pm and my interior thermostat says 97 degrees. When I awake in the morning, the sheets and pillow are soaked.
But it’s a dry heat.
As I recall 1965 was the year it changed.
That was true for a number of hospitals, too. I hadn’t thought about how miserable hospital staff and patients alike must have been before a/c until I had a conversation in the mid-70s with a nurse who had worked in the hospital downtown (presently named Yale New Haven) before the installation of a/c. She had started in nursing back in the days when RNs still had to wear starched white uniforms (dresses; no pantsuits allowed) and stand up whenever an MD entered the room. When the hospital began to install a/c in the mid-60s, it could not do so for all units at once (because the current hospital complex consisted of several buildings of various ages and architectural styles with very different heating systems) and had to set priorities. So the nurse told me that it was the psychiatry department that bullied the administration into installing a/c for them first. I was surprised and asked her why the shrinks got priority over surgery, ob/gyn, or oncology– and she said, “Because the administration figured that a bunch of psychiatrists balmy with the heat would be much more dangerous than anyone else in the hospital.”
I’m concerned for people in the South if power outages become a thing, thanks to foolish policies and the fools and knaves who enable them.
Growing up in the 50s and 60s, we had one window AC unit in the finished basement, between the two houses I lived in. I didn’t miss AC, since it was a cooler era and being near Lake Michigan helped.
Now, in a warmer era and area, I consider AC essential. From time spent without it, I learned that ice cold showers and baths can cool you down for a few hours.
Thank you. That link sent me on to Steven Wright’s first appearance on Carson, then on to a Rodney Dangerfield bit, then my favorite of his, the “One of These” jokes, and followed up with Baxter Black on Carson and his “Vegetarian Nightmare” poem.
Neo, you bring up some memories of growing up in Chicago in the 1960’s. Eventually we had a couple window air-conditioners placed in the living room and my folk’s bedroom. My widowed Aunt bought a triplex apartment that had AC units built into the walls. Just last week I was telling my granddaughter that when I would stay overnight with my cousin, I invariably would come home not feeling well due to the conditions of being outside in the heat and then being inside in the cold as my Aunt kept it way too cool for me. To this day I do not lower the AC under 75, usually keeping it at 78. The temperature change is hard on me. Coming from Southern California, in 1993 my 3 children and I drove my Mom back to Illinois in late June. We stayed in a large home in Belvidere that didn’t have AC. I can still picture me and the 3 kids sweltering in the attic room, our sleeping quarters. Sweating and the feeling of suffocation, lying there, no energy. It is especially difficult when you are unacclimated to the humidity.
One of my first personal purchases with lawn mowing money was a box fan. I set it at the head of my bed pointing down my body. It developed a life-long habit in me and I still have moving air on me at all times (at home). I’ve never had AC in a home but did while working after I got out of physical labor.
I’ve never really cared for AC but don’t at all mock those that do. I see it as a passive form of my fans.
I grew up in Austin, Texas. We built a new house in 1960 that didn’t have air conditioning until we installed it several years after we moved in. None of my schools were air conditioned until high school. I can remember sitting in my 5th period class in 7th grade near the end of the school year. The room faced west and had windows all along that side of the building. It was like sitting in an oven.
We had a brief reprise of those years a few weeks ago when one of our AC units went out. It was 100 degrees or more during the entire 10 days we had no AC. Since our house is well insulated and surrounded by large trees, it really wasn’t that bad–much better than the temps I remember from childhood. (Fortunately the unit that served the bedrooms still worked so we could sleep comfortably at night.)
Absolutely no wish to return to the old days, especially for the cause of some fake environmentalism.
In the early 1970s I commuted to college by subway in NYC. Most subway cars then had no AC, and on those really hot , humid, oppressive days, you are already sweating before you even get into the subway station.
Anyway, I am standing in a moving subway car, holding on to one of those overhead bars, and sweat is running down my forearm (I was wearing a short sleeved shirt) , and of course, as luck would have it, the sweat drips onto the newspaper of a passenger seated in front of me who was reading his paper.
He gave me one really dirty look and all I could say was “sorry;” though I did wipe my arm on my already sweaty pants.
I will also mention that back then it was almost impossible to see out the subway car windows because they were totally covered in graffiti – as was the rest of the subway car.
While it’s a topic for another day, the mayor then was John Lindsay, a charismatic, very very liberal “republican,” whose claim to fame was his looks and personality; these latter two characteristics that, for many, are the only two qualities needed to be president. His incredible incompetence as mayor of NY was of no consequence.
He was, sort of, the white equivalent of a barry HUSSEIN OBAMA.
“…the ballet classes I attended were [n]ever air-conditioned. The sweaty bodies in close quarters exacerbated the heat, and the humidity in a dance class became formidable. Dancers’ hands would keep sliding off barres which had became slick with sweat…Every dancer had a little towel draped over the barre with which to try to absorb some of the sweat that stung our eyes and made our leotards sopping wet.”
Hey, you stopped the story just when it was getting good. 🙂
Shirehome,
My brother is still in Denver, so I’m out there regularly. I think the humidity level in Denver has risen due to all the urban development and along with it, all the new trees that unload a lot of water. In the neighborhood I grew up in (Lakewood) in 1960 when we moved into the house….zero trees. Now the whole area almost looks like the something from the east coast with the number and size of trees.
BTW, swamp coolers seem to be the best way to go in Denver; worked fine for my mother and my brother’s house is cooled nicely with one.
Not dissing AC, but should we consider that in a paradoxical way, AC has increased our sense of heat being intolerable, which feeds into the whole “climate change” thing, which may, paradoxically lead to no AC?
Raheem Kassam has an interesting Substack about how TV weather maps now depict in deepest darkest red temperatures which were graphically done in yellows or greens just a few decades ago:
https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/red-is-the-new-yellow
I admit I use Alexa a lot, and when I ask it the weather outside, last week it was tacking on a “heat advisory in your area” notice, even though the high was only in the low ’90s, in *Florida* in *July*.
Nancy B @ 9:30AM
Rest assured that if ever the no-AC day arrives for we members of the hoi-polloi , the greenie elites (e.g., John Kerry, barry Hussein ocommie, AOC, Pete Buttgieg, et. al) will have unlimited access and use of AC; they will make sure they never will sweat while indoors, in their cars or in their private planes.
This should tell you what they really believe about that “climate change” thing.
Nancy, all that you say is true.
We all relate our stories of “hardship” before a/c; but, then again we all survived. For the most part, we did not think it terms of hardship at all. It was just life. As my Italian born neighbors says, “what are you going to do?”.
It would be interesting to study, if that is possible, a correlation between the unavoidable adjustment to life before every modern comfort, and a general tolerance for situations and people. Maybe a far fetched notion, but I suspect that the current tendency to take offense at any perceived slight, or generally feel victimized is linked to some degree to a general lack of tolerance for personal discomfort of any kind. Makes as much sense to me as most of what passes for social theory.
When the local TV talking heads gush about a heat advisory, and urge people to stay indoors, presumably in an air conditioned space, I wonder what they expect the people who actually perform physical work outdoors to do. I suspect that is a foreign concept to them. Does the world stop when the temp reaches 90 degrees?
The only time I’d ever seen a swamp cooler was in one of the desert like burbs outside of Albuquerque.
______
I admit I use Alexa a lot, and when I ask it the weather outside, last week it was tacking on a “heat advisory in your area” notice, even though the high was only in the low ’90s, in *Florida* in *July*. — Nancy B.
In my youth is used to go board sailing on a short board off the CA coast. I bought a weather radio for wind forecasts and conditions. It took me a few months to realize that a “small craft advisory” warning boaters off the water was almost a minimum requirement for good wind conditions.
The south shore of LI wasn’t bad when I was young. Plenty of breeze off the Atlantic. I did note that, in the 90s, when we visited my parents, the bedrooms were a bit hotter. The trees in the area had become visibly taller, which cut off some of the wind.
But Virginia in the 70s was a shock. Brutal to one raised in the north. And I didn’t have a/c, just used a fan. That was the 70s and 80s. Not until I got married in the late 80s did I live somewhere with a/c.
And yes, I would abolish a/c in DC, and the surrounding counties.
Comments on the old houses with the through the home halls for air flow.
I grew up in Chicago in the 1940s and 50s. No A/C but we did have a big window on a stairway landing the helped air circulate. We also had a “sleeping porch” where my father and I slept in summer. It had windows all around and was tolerable on summer nights. One pleasant memory was thunderstorms at night. They would drop the temperature 15 degrees in a few minutes. They never bothered me but my mother and the dog would sit on the basement stairs during noisy thunderstorms.
Now, in Tucson, we have A/C set at 78 and it feels cool.
I lived in the DC area in the early 70s. I found the weather intolerable as early as May.
Why I live where I do. Even when it gets very hot, it doesn’t last long and is still generally very cool at night. 90-degree weather is not so bad when the night is 40 degrees cooler. Whole house fans work pretty well. I have a heat-pump though, so I don’t pull all the dust and pollen into the house.
Temps June 24-28 2021 vs 2022
24th H 82.5 L 54.2 / H 79.1 L 43.8
25th H 92.9 L 57.6 / H 86.0 L 50.9
26th H 99.0 L 60.4 / H 89.0 L 53.0
27th H 106.2 L 62.8 / H 92.8 L 52.1
28th H 109.0 L 67.5 / H 69.0 L 55.9
the summer of 1980, is when I came down to miami, and stayed with my grandfather, his home had no airconditioning, just one of those electric fans, that’s the closest i’ve come to this brave new world, they are forcing us towards, this was also the fall, when it took till 5 o’clock to enroll everyone at the elementary school, because of the mariel boatlift, a microcosm of our current border situation,
I have many of the same memories from growing up in New York during that same period. But for us there was extra torture during the summer drives in the non-air conditioned car. My father decided to protect the vinyl seats with vinyl seat covers. And the seat covers had raised nubs sticking out every quarter inch. I assume that was supposed to keep you from sliding off as you sweated. All it did was leave vicious marks on our pasty legs.
When we built our home in Texas, I installed a whole-house fan in the garage. I also have a vented soffit 100% around the perimeter of the house eaves, and turbines on the roof, and vents along the ridgepoles. So the fan can serve two purposes: On very hot days, I can open the garage door in the late afternoon, when temperatures start to drop, and turn the fan on – it ventilates the attic and cools it down by about 15°F, which of course lowers the differential across the insulation between the attic and the climate-controlled areas of the house below.
In the temperate seasons, I can leave the garage door closed and open the entryway to the house instead, and open all the windows. Now, the attic fan is pulling air from outside into the house, then out through the attic. I can completely change the air inside in about 15-20 minutes, very nice on cool spring days, especially after a rain. If you stand in the doorway to the garage, I tell you it’ll really lift your hair up. I’ve become a big fan of big fans.
Aggie:
My previous employer installed one of these large commercial fans in the high bay shop and it worked really well:
https://bigassfans.com/
“In New York City, school lasted until June 30th and began again the day after Labor Day. Those last few weeks in June could be awfully hot, coupled with the lame-duck situation of not too much learning going on towards the end anyway. ”
In Pompano Beach, Florida throughout the entire school year, we had no air conditioning for grades 1 – 4. We also had portables, which were essentially hot boxes. We had a big fan though, which our 3rd grade teacher would point at the ceiling lest we catch some disease from having hot air blow over us. Hence doors and windows were left open all day and dust, bugs, neighborhood dogs, and anything else would blow through. We even had corrugated tin walls like you often see in schools in third world countries. I actually get nostalgic when I see such in news reports. Ah, but we were happy then.
The early car air conditioner was a metallic cylinder, about 2 feet long and one foot in diameter that was closed a one end and opened at the front end and also open on a side slit that was configured in such a way that it could be pinched firmly in a slighly opened window . It was filled with a moist fiber like hay….that one kept moist during the drive. The air cooled by evaporating over the wet hay and came into the car pointing at the passenger side. It was really a swamp cooler.
I might add…my buddy and I were tasked with putting the flag up and taking it down every day. As it was a cotton flag, whenever it rained it had to be brought down. Whenever we would hear thunder, a common, almost daily occurrence in the April thru October “summer” months, not to mention occasional other times, we would race to the flag pole, lightning be damned, to bring Old Glory down lest she be damaged.
In 1952, my family moved to a small farming town in the desert of E. Washington. The area was set to boom with the coming of water, thanks to a water project bringing water to 500,000 acres from the Grand Coulee Dam.
The first several years we lived in the basement of a hardware store that my father started. Behind us was the train depot, complete with the station master’s family. On our block, an assortment of new businesses, three other families lived in their stores.
The kids on the block played in the alley behind our stores, sometimes rode the train that daily brought materials to the air force base a few miles away, or hauled agricultural products– mostly potatoes.
We sometimes shared that alley with hobos that rode the rails– we ruled the days and they passed through in the nights.
After the first few years we moved to a new house built completely with pumice blocks– both exterior and interior walls, and a concrete floor.
In the hot days of summer, and yes it was hot– I remember sleeping on the concrete floor. It was remarkably cool, and that coolness made the hardness barely noticeable.
We added window mount refrigerated air conditioners to the bedrooms by the mid 60’s. What a welcome addition they were, even with all the noise.
Living in the south, in an historic area, I marvel at how the heck people survived summers in all those layers of clothing back in the 1700’s and 1800’s. I know that the piazza of the narrow houses was part of the survival strategy. But it gets so miserable here in the summer.
I write about cars. The first A/C unit offered was by Packard in 1939, but it was considered such a luxury that if you go to a car show and look at Cadillac and Lincoln convertibles from the late ’50s and early ’60s, you’ll see that most of them don’t have A/C. Even rich people figured that it was an expensive luxury.
Our 3 bedroom, 1,200 sq ft colonial in northwest Detroit didn’t have A/C but after a few summers without it, my father whose veterinary clinic had one of those commercial units that sat over the front door of store fronts that could cool his entire building, got another one, hung it in their bedroom and hung a sheet in the stairwell to keep the cold air upstairs.
It’s hard to sleep when it’s 85 deg and high humidity.
I think it’s a crime against humanity that Willis Carrier has never been given the Nobel Prize.
It’s 7:10 p.m. in Mesa, and the sun will be down in half an hour. It’s 107. It will be 100 at 10:00 p.m. People here use both swamp coolers and refrigerated AC.
I read that it’s so hot in London right now that a hospital had all its windows open. They don’t have screens in the UK. There are now a bunch of birds inside.
This time of year in South Texas I use the wheelbarrow in the garden only in the morning, usually not much more than an hour, and I’m careful to chase the shade. I wouldn’t last long in the sun. As we’re close to the coast, the highs tend to be around 95 at most, but of course it’s humid. It doesn’t really cool down even at dawn. This is normal, by the way, expected every year. It was the same when I was growing up. I don’t see a warming trend at all.
The house is air-conditioned, and I turn it down lower at night to sleep. The home I grew up in (I was born in 1956) had AC, too. I think the school didn’t, at least until my later grades. Being young and skinny, I didn’t feel it as much, but it was hot. In the summer it took a while to get our feet tough enough to walk across a large asphalt parking lot to the drug store.
Aggie, your comments about whole house fans triggered the thought that if the schools, etc., has used large fans in 2020 in the rooms and hallways, etc., they could have blown all of those “Covid laden aerosols” away and most opportunities to acquire an infection would have been diminished, if not totally avoided. No, it would not have been that simple in every case, but if TPTB had been honest with us about respiratory disease transmission, more of that type of solution would have been considered.
WTP, what is there to be unhappy about in 3rd grade? That is when I learned the multiplication tables, something I have managed to need and actually use my whole life.
R2L,
The issue of ventilation was known early on, but for some reason it never received the publicity that masks did.
According to this story, one of the federal governments relief bills included $170 billion to retrofit and upgrade HVAC systems in schools across the country. The key was to vent the air to the outside, rather than re-circulating the air.
But as this story mentions, just opening a window slightly in classrooms could have a very beneficial effect.
There were several ways of treating air in HVAC systems– one was putting UV-C light in the return system and another was superheating the air to 400 degrees for a very short period of time, which would kill the virus.
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/for-schools-ventilation-may-be-a-bigger-issue-than-spacing-to-prevent-covid-19s-spread/
I can relate to almost every story told here. Thanks especially for the history notes.
Growing up in the 50s-60s in the Texas Panhandle, we only had a swamp cooler that fit into one window in my brother’s bedroom, and the air never did get back to our bedroom, but cooled the front part of the house pretty well.
It was a HUGE metal box that sat on a little wooden “deck” in the side yard of the house.
We never did get refrigerated air, although my mom’s sister’s husband insisted on it in their house further east. We enjoyed staying over there when we visited Grandma & Grandpa in the same town, although they lived out in the country in a big “ranch house” with the sleeping porch. Nice at night, especially in thunderstorms, but still and hot during the day. Many friends and relatives over there had the high ceilings and the “dog run” architecture that cooled the houses.
@ Dnaxy > “The early car air conditioner was a metallic cylinder,”
We had one of those in our old Buick, and my mother had to pull a cord to rotate the cylinder with the pad into the reservoir of water on the bottom. Sometimes it would spill through the vents, but who cared!
My dad gave it to me after I married, and we used it in our Volkswagen Bug until it finally rusted through. I really hated to get rid of the old thing, but we couldn’t keep hauling it around back then.
@ physicsguy > ” In the neighborhood I grew up in (Lakewood) in 1960 when we moved into the house….zero trees”
We live in Lakewood now, and love the trees! Compared to the Texas Gulf coast, where we came from, any increase in humidity is unnoticeable.
@ Leland > “when Texas had its Valentine Day power outrage a couple of years ago; I missed the small wall mounted gas furnaces that kept each room warm.
I remember those very well, and they do a great job – for one room.
When Denver Metro had a power outage for a couple of days in the winter of 2018 (though not as bad as TX Snowmageddon), I called my HVAC guy and had one installed as soon as he could get it ordered.
It has no electric connection at all, because, although it burns natural gas just like our regular furnace, that one would not work without the fan running.
In re DC, environmentalists, and elitist idiots in general: they never volunteer to be the first ones to sacrifice for Gaia; it’s always us peons who get that honor.
I recall Catholic high school in upstate New York in the early 60’s. In June the temperatures would get into the high 80’s in the afternoon and the school had 2/3 of the classrooms facing the afternoon sun.
The worst part was that we had to wear suits and ties, and none of the teachers would let us take our jackets off. My school wardrobe consisted of a dark grey wool flannel suit and a Harris tweed sport coat with khakis or wool slacks. Great for a cold winter day but excruciating for three months of the school year.
Today I see kids in shorts and tee shirts waiting for the bus to their air conditioned school. I wonder when the schools will be going “green’.
Grew up in the District of Corruption in the ’50s, in an apartment in an older building (built ~1895-1900) overlooking Rock Creek Park. High ceilings – 12 ft – and huge windows. Every apartment had a 20-inch paddle-bladed 3-speed window fan in the kitchen window to pull air through the apartment; during the day on medium, maybe high if you could tolerate the noise, at night on low with strategically opened windows and doors to pull air across the beds. The only time the fans were shut off between April and November was the few minutes it took to put a few drops of oil in the motor every couple months. Early ’60s we got a couple window units, put ’em in in April, remove in early November. The building management finally had to upgrade the antique electric in each apartment because so many resident were buying “window shakers.” Only ran them at night in the bedrooms but they were a Godsend. Those 20-inch fans, heavy, dirt cheap and ubiquitous then, are now “Vintage” or “Antique” and $200+ but they work better and hold up better than anything else now available.
I spent several summers as a tyke on Grandma’s farm in Tidewater, VA with my same-age cousin, he and I sleeping naked on the screened back porch with an oscillating fan. Near a river and the bay, the humidity never quit. When I became old enough getting shipped off to summer camp in far northern New Hampshire for several years was a blessing.
I am a little younger that you Neo, grew up in a city but not NYC. Had a very similar experience with no A/C, as did my wife. It wasn’t until the summer she was pregnant with our daughter that we finally got a window air conditioner. That was the summer of 1986 and I don’t recall it being unusually hot but my poor wife, who was in her third trimester, was miserable. We’ve had A/C in our bedroom, at least, ever since. Our current house and the one before this have central A/C. Though we only turn it on when the heat and humidity are really high. Last summer, our first in Maine, I estimate we ran it for a total of two weeks. Our kids (in their mid to late 30’s now) are much less frugal. 🙂
}}} Those days before air conditioning…
I’m livin’ ’em now. 😛
I live in FL. Days running into the 90s with humidity >80%
My AC, 20y old, decided to give up the ghost. I will be getting a new unit, but trying to find a good deal, rather than just pay through the nose. But it’s been “fun”, for sure. House temps running well above 80, probably above 85 at mid-day (I’m got two thermometers AND the AC thermo, itself new, and each of them tells me a different temperature. :-/ Go figure.) Cools back down at night as the exterior temp goes below 80 and i open the windows.
I remember the 60s and the 70s once again. What Fun.
I remember when working in downtown Phoenix and you parked in the open you left windows open to prevent your windows from being blown out by expanding hot air inside the car. Our house was three bricks thick and after they heated up in summer the swamp coolers could not cope to keep anything cool. Celebrate when the monsoon finally got there and rain cooled cement down.
Hailed yesterday helped a lot.
I attended my grandma’s funeral in 1994 (she was born in 1899) and my uncle noted that the two big game changers for her were washing machines (she had four sons and a daughter) and forced air cooling. She and my grandfather migrated from the East Texas/West Arkansas area to California’s San Joaquin valley around 1927, a 10 day journey in an open car (with four kids and grandma pregnant), right out of the Grapes of Wrath. Ended up in the southern San Joaquin, a veritable frying pan in the summer.
California’s Central Valley heat at its extremes – Red Bluff/Redding in the north and Fresno/Bakersfield in the south – are about 5 degrees hotter in summer days than the middle (Sacramento area). But the nights are much different near Sacramento. The delta that feeds San Francisco Bay is the area’s air conditioner. In the basic shape of a folding hand fan spreading into the center of the Central Valley, a cooling breeze – called the delta breeze – magically appears at around 7-8 pm in summer, cooling things down.
I live in Davis (by Sacramento), my cousins in Bakersfield. A typical hot summer day in Bakersfield is around 105/77, Davis 101/59. So every day (actually we don’t get the breeze in some weather patterns, and we stay warm at night, but those are maybe only 5-10 days a summer) we get a fresh reset. Mornings can almost be cool, but the house cools down over night and A/C isn’t needed until late in the day, if at all. With long eaves and windows shut by 10am, we can get by without A/C if the temp stays below 96-97. Above that we turn on the A/C at around 4-5pm.
And one last note. This kind of weather pattern – where the temp drops quickly – is perfect for a whole house fan. I need to add one.
I recall all too well, being in the boiler room of an aircraft carrier going through the Suez Canal back in “53” when our thermometer hanging in front of the cool air duct was registering a mere 122 degrees. The rear of the boiler was far hotter and one’s lungs actually felt like they were on fire. After I got out of the navy…I took up ice fishing….
When I was a baby nurse in the early 90s, the oldest nurses in the Texas L&D where I worked would tell tales of pregnant patients faking labor just so they could be in the hospital AC for a couple of hours.
I grew up in SoCal and CO and we never had AC but I don’t remember being uncomfortable. I moved to the South after AC so have never been uncomfortable here either. Spoiled a bit, I guess.
I grew up in houses with whole-house fans, and my parents’ house did not have AC until I was 14 years old. Now, my husband and I live at 6900 ft. above sea level in northern NM. There is no furnace and no ductwork, just electric baseboard heat with a thermostat and heater in each room on the main floor. We use a whole-house fan. Sometimes if there is cloud cover the outside temp does not get cooler than the temp in the house until 9:00 PM, but the outside air is so much dryer than the inside air that we often turn the fan on anyway at around 8:00. We run it all night and it cools off the whole house. To install the whole-house fan in this 40-year-old house cost about one tenth of what it would have cost to install AC, and the fan is not expensive to run.