American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning (1998) | Hacker News Reader

American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning (1998)

newyorker.com

174 pointsgeorgecmu85 comments

When I read something like this, the question that springs to mind is whether it was actually hotter, or whether the norms of dress forced people to dress less practically and suffer the heat more. It's interesting, because there seems to be a marked contrast between the daytime (linen suits) and the night time (people sleeping in their underwear on fire escapes).

To within a rounding error none of the houses in my part of Boston have central air, and while people complain, nobody is truly miserable when it hits 33/90 and upwards to body temperature. I don't think we've hit 38/100 this year.

I'll concede that we have better refrigeration, and a diet composed entirely of iced-tea, freezer pops, and cold bear is a possibility. Still I don't see anybody wearing a linen suit or a straw hat.

On the other hand, now that some people do have air conditioning, it seems like it would be dramatically less acceptable for people to sleep out on their porches or in the nearby park.

Cold bear? Like a polar bear?

Dude, you never had a cold bear? Just use a lever at his neck and drink the wonderful fluid that bursts from within.

I will never watch a Coca Cola commerical with polar bears the same way ever again.

I grew up in rural Virginia in a home built in the 20's. We had no air conditioning, and my father refused to purchase a single window unit because of the cost of electricity. Our rooms were hot enough that our fish/turtles my brother and I tried to keep as pets died until we figured out they would have to be kept in the basement.

Understand that viewing people as miserable in public at a certain temperature implies that they are outside. Living within a home, especially upstairs, is TRULY miserable in high humidity at 90 degree plus temperatures. The humidity seeps into everything. Your bed feels damp, and so does any couch or chair that isn't made of wood. My friends refused to stay at my house in the summer. They had AC at home, and they weren't used to sleeping in the heat. My cousin came from New York with my aunt one time. They left for a hotel rather than try to stay in our guest rooms.

Fans help immensely, and I doubt fans were widely available for large swaths of the public in NY in the 20's. In this way, they had it much, much harder than I did.

One nice thing we had going for us was that our house was designed in a time where AC didn't exist. Windows were large and placed on opposite sides of rooms to support cross ventilation. Ceilings were high also, and the walls were made of plaster, which prevented them from fluctuating with heat load as rapidly as dry wall.

Virginia is so incredibly humid in these summer months - 95% constant humidity, I can only imagine trying to rough it without AC in a full seer-sucker suit. I can almost feel the flop sweat forming just thinking about it.

Recent comment about older homes built to maximize breeze (with the side effect of repelling mosquitoes):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052984

I will second this. I grew up in an old row-home in a town not far from Philadelphia. I have very vivid memories of laying on my bed at night sweating, box fan in the window set to "High" and just roasting. My father was in sales and would go on trips from time to time. I'd always hope for him to go during one of the heat spells because my mom would then let us sleep in their room which had an old window air conditioner.

In a detached house, you can at least get cross-currents going from whichever way the wind blows. But in a row-home, you are boxed in. Not to mention the fact that all the things in a city seem radiate heat: pavement, cars, trucks, the laundromat across the street, etc...

When my parents finally had enough money to move to the suburbs we got a brand new house with central A/C. I think it was 90+ degrees the day we moved in. I slept like a baby in the middle of the summer for the first time in my life. It was way more magical than any tech toy I've ever gotten since.

Even outside . . . when I was a boy, my brothers and I were sent off to scout camp for a week and a half during the summer. Camp Lanochee in rural mid-Florida, known to its occupants as Camp Mosquito. I will never forget the feeling of sweat rolling off me whenever I turned in bed. It was this hot even though we slept naked or in underclothes only on a cot in an open-sided adirondack -- under a bug net, of course. It has to have been one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life.

I worked on staff at a very similar camp in the southeast for a few summers as a teenager, taking 2-3 cool showers a day was the norm to get some relief. Even though staff tents had a 110v outlet that we all had box fans hooked up to sleep was never very restful, afternoon naps were cherished when possible.

There's more to "the heat" than the temperature. I live in the NY area, and grew up in the DC area. I just spent a few days near Dallas, Texas, where it got to 104 F one day, but spent most of the days in the high 90s. But it was a dry heat. That was far preferable to me than the NY area in the high 80s with high humidity.

This is the truth. I use to live in Louisiana outside of New Orleans for 4 years and it was very humid all of the time. But the past 5 years I have been living in Harlem and the humidity and heat feel a lot worse in NY even though as far as the thermometer says the heat is no where near as bad as it used to get down south.

I grew up in Georgia and my mother was too cheap for air conditioning. It doesn't even compare to the misery of riding the NYC subway in July.

When temps are above body temperature, I'd imagine the full suits would be more comfortable for the same reason at notably lower temperatures: insulation.

There is something about linen clothing that seems cooler in high temperatures. I'd wear it much more often, except that it wrinkles like crazy.

I would say that it depends on humidity. If humidity is high then sweating stops working. If it's low, you want as much water evaporating off of you as possible.

Low humidity is so much better when you are living in a house with no AC. A good spray-bottle with water and a fan can keep you reasonably comfortable. Even better if you can rig up a proper swamp-cooler with a continuous spray.

Unfortunately summers in Philadelphia are too humid for swamp-coolers to work great, and in Seattle summers it doesn't work at all (there is no AC in Seattle, even though the city desperately needs it for almost two months out of the year. People will tell you it is only too hot in Seattle for 1 week out of the year... they are lying or crazy. Perhaps natives simply don't understand what it can be like to actually sleep in a cool room during the summer...)

I once spent a summer in a house with no AC in Atlanta. I honestly do not understand how areas like that ever became populated before the advent of AC in the first place.

Keep in mind that in ye olden days, you had bigger families in smaller spaces.

Today, we universally have water, electricity and cool places to go. If your AC breaks or you're really feeling uncomfortable, you can always stop into any store and take your time shopping while cooling off. In those days, you had no relief.

Another factor is sanitation. People in urban environments did not shower -- they used public bathhouses once a week. The streets were smellier and grimier from coal, dirty diesel, etc.

Think of the misery of being in a two tiny rooms with six other hot, sweaty, smelly and grumpy people.

"In those days, you had no relief."

I think a big draw of the some movies theaters back then was that some were air conditioned (in other words when their was ac but it was not typically in a home).

I've also see this in retail on, say, Market street in Philly. The stores blast their ac and leave the doors open in order to lure in hot customers who want to cool off.

I had a friend who wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of movie projection. I wish I could cite it, but A/C came about around the same time TV was starting to cut into movie theater profits. A/C not only was a major draw, but it may have save movie theaters.

That's funny, one of my first bosses had done a thesis on old time fancy theatres that did movies and live shows. He worked at one in our city in college, and talked alot about the HVAC system, which he ended up maintaining as a volunteer for a long time.

It was a pre-freon, compression based system powered by natural gas. The refrigerant was some sort of nasty ammonia mixture that came in 55 gallon drums -- I guess when they dropped one, it basically melted through the concrete floor.

There's also something about having a work environment, or coffee shops and department stores and restaurants that all have air conditioning. Where it gets really hot, is when you spend an entire summer without even a minute of air conditioning. We're used to being able to tolerate spurts of 8, 12 hours without air conditioning, but it is rare to have entire days in sweltering heat in the northeast.

We have better refrigeration these days, sure, but before electric refrigeration was widespread there was an extensive nationwide ice distribution network. People would essentially quarry it out from frozen northern lakes during the winters, store enormous cubes of it in warehouses packed in sawdust, and ship it out in railroad cars across the nation.

The icebox significantly predates widespread electrification.

There was also flirtation with other tech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_chiller

My understanding is that my grandparents used to fill their own ice house (on a farm).

Einstein and Szilard actually patented a refrigerator design [1]; AFAIK it was never commercialized. If you're reading this and know about refrigeration tech, you might be able to contribute to the Wikipedia article; it's been tagged as "needs attention from an expert in Technology" since 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator

You just made me realize I never questioned where the 20th-century iceman would have gotten his ice from in a world without condensers. That's a fascinating infrastructure to imagine – shipping ice long distances in the summer heat with no active cooling. I actually want to read more about this.

This is an interesting wiki article on an ice baron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Tudor#The_ice_business

There's a fascinating post about prepairing ice at the end of 19th century - beginning of 20th. The post is in russian, but photos are good enough on their own: http://engineering-ru.livejournal.com/39019.html

There's a silent YouTube video referenced at the end of that piece showing the stages of ice harvesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x9rc-54s-I очень хорошо.

Keep in mind that the rate at which a block of ice melts scales with its surface area, so it actually becomes easier to transport large blocks of ice, if you have the other infrastructure to support it.

A South African gentleman once told me that New York in August was hotter than any place he knew in Africa, yet people here dressed for a northern city.

From my experience this has almost certainly reversed, at least in reference to places I've lived in East and West Africa, as most men wear 3 piece suits or at least long trousers and shirts. Meanwhile in America, most people who work outside or in a non-arctic office will wear as little as they can get away with.

This was in the 20s/30s, a quite different time I'm sure.

Yeah, Central and Eastern Europe has humid continental climate with big temperature differences between Summer/Winter. In the Summer it is hotter there than in the UK. Yet, people in the UK (men) have a tendency to go shirtless when it goes above 20 degrees.

My point? Culture.

I think we only do that here because it's so rare when it does go over 20 degrees, it's always time for a celebration :)

Having said that, England is currently enjoying one of the best and longest heat waves we've had in years. I'm just thankful I work from home, most offices would frown on me showing up for work in just my pants.

For American readers, British "pants" means underwear. For British readers, American "pants" means trousers.

I was once mocked mercilessly by a Brit when I told him I had forgotten my pants. I, of course, had meant my blue jeans . . . I was wearing shorts.

I would not mock you, that is a perfectly reasonable way to dress either way :). As long as something is over your giblets.

Having spent time in South Africa and Botswana, in the summer, I can attest that it is hotter here in the summer after taking humidity into consideration.

Believe me, it's still hot and arid and the sun is relentless during the day (very long days, but beautiful nights -- the stars are incredible). There is very little shade and most of that part of the continent is flat and in near-desert like conditions.

I lived directly off the okavango delta which certainly cooled things a bit and added a touch more humidity to the air, but this summer on the eastern seaboard of NA is one of the worst I've experienced.

A lot of comments about heat sources in cities.

I learned something interesting yesterday, when I came into work soaked and complained about how hot Boston's Park Street Station is.

An older (70s) coworker mentioned that when he was young, Boston subway (T) stations were the place you went to cool down, as they were underground. Once they added AC to the subway cars, they dumped all their heat... into the stations. And now they're a furnace.

Thanks for this, now I understand why Barcelona's subway stations felt so hot to me (while the subway cars themselves were cool). I live in an European capital more to the East where the subway stations are still a very nice refuge when temperatures reach 38-40 degrees in summer.

They also use dynamic breaking resistors to the convert kinetic energy of the trains into heat energy. Fans then blow across the resistors to cool them. In Park Street, this just ads to the inferno. It is at least 120F in there in the summer. I'll bring in a theromometer one of this summer afternoons.

> They also use dynamic breaking resistors to the convert kinetic energy of the trains into heat energy. Fans then blow across the resistors to cool them.

On subways, the electricity generated by dynamic braking is sent back into the third rail (or the overhead wiring). It does not get wasted in resistive grids.

The resistive grids that you're thinking of are used by diesel locomotives, which do not have a convenient electric grid to dump the electricity into. Thus, they have to send it out into the atmosphere as heat.

Here in London the tubes aren't air conditioned, but are still exceedingly hot. I'm told that new tunnels are cool but over thirty or so years they gradually warm up, and so there's a noticeable difference between the older lines and the newer ones (less so at the moment as we haven't built a new line for thirty years, but that's another discussion). It also causes some interesting engineering challenges as the clay slowly dries and bakes around the tunnels.

It's hard to visualize sleeping out on the fire escape in New York City before heavy car traffic. It must have been quiet at night.

You get used to noise is my guess. My dad grew up in New Haven in the 40s across from a fire house. When he moved out to the suburbs, he had trouble sleeping at first because it was too quiet.

It's only marginally quieter with the windows closed ... and our's are always open anyways.

Was down in FL on vacation and the wife kept waking up because of the faintest repeating buzz since it was the only noise.

I stayed in a village in India where everyone lived on the street in summer (they would let their rooms out to weird tourists who were used to being in a room). The main noise was the constant gossiping...

While reading this I couldn't help but think that the primary motivation for inventors, decade upon decade, century upon century, has been to devise machines and tools to keep us from going outside and being among fellow humans.

Air-conditioning: A new invention so you don't have to sleep with your neighbors in the grass at the park across the street when it gets hot.

Something inside me greatly desires a life like that. Where we aren't afraid of the people around us. Where it would be totally acceptable to throw a blanket on the ground at the park with my neighbors and enjoy some cool night air while we all get some rest. Today, I think we'd all get arrested, or ticketed.

While it sounds miserable to be without A/C, it can be argued that we are even more miserable now because we have it.

> While it sounds miserable to be without A/C, it can be argued that we are even more miserable now because we have it.

Speak for yourself. I think that those hundreds of people sleeping outside where it's just a few degrees cooler would probably have given just about anything for air conditioning. They weren't doing it because it was fun, they were sleeping outside because it was the best way they had to try to avoid dropping dead from heat stroke. That's why A/C is used[1], not to distance you from your neighbors.

> Something inside me greatly desires a life like that.

You can sleep outside on the ground in a big group any time you want. Most cities have hundreds of people who do that every day. I think any one of them would gladly trade it for an air conditioned room with a bed.

[1] http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-22/national/36017...

Cannot up-vote enough.

> You can sleep outside on the ground in a big group any time you want. Most cities have hundreds of people who do that every day. I think any one of them would gladly trade it for an air conditioned room with a bed.

Most parks I know have rules against entering past dusk, enforced with ticketing. In NYC there are closed gates which would physically prevent you from entering many parks.

I've only been to NYC a couple times but I remember seeing a lot of homeless people. I'm sure that there are resources you could use to find out where the unsheltered homeless population in NYC sleeps, if it isn't in the parks.

Some sleep in the trees: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/nyregion/13trees.html?page...

Must be cooler there than on the ground.. Having lived through a few NYC summers, they can really be the worst. Not only it gets incredibly humid and hot, there's at least one serious rainstorm each week to drench you. I always found summer in NYC is much worse than winter.

Right, but my point was not intended to be specifically about A/C, but innovations that keep us from physically being with each other in general. You might argue that we know our neighbors MUCH less now because we don't see them nearly as often. Being forced out of our homes - in some cases to prevent ourselves from literally dying from the heat - may have made people closer and friendlier with one another.

Of course I don't want to be in deadly heat - but I also wish I knew my neighbors betters, and for the anti-social, like myself, being forced to be around them may have helped.

Where I currently live has the wonderful habit of loosing power every time a decent thunderstorm or, heaven forbid, a tropical storm goes through. It can be out for days depending on the damage done. I'm in NC.

It IS miserable without AC, it doesn't just sound it.

Well, if A/C was invented to get away from other people, it failed miserably. How many times have I gone to the movies, or an ice cream shop, or an indoor mall, to enjoy their A/C? I am not the only one either.

Excellent point. In some cases it could definitely be squeezing more people together - but under the reverse circumstances.

And thank God* for that. Hell is other people.

* or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Elbereth, etc.

While reading this I was thinking of a late summer trip backpacking through Italy that my wife and I had. It was smoking hot and we were just south of Naples. Everyone was outside until really late and once you got used to the noise, people fires and rubbish, it was amazing. Eating pizza whilst watch local kids play football, old men playing cards and neighbours yelling at each other/ talking (I could never tell if they were fighting our catching up) and less desirably, a kid stealing a car. A guy next door was feeding his iguana named Eddy. It was very very communal and great to visit. It felt just a little bit unsafe most the time, but we had nothing material worth talking. $30 US we spent per day each averaged over 6 weeks included everything except the plane ticket to get there. If only my job could be done remotely, I'd be back there very fast.

Seriously? What part of sleeping in a hot, humid field with thousands of other people is desirable? Since when is sleeping a group effort? Start with the noise and end with the spread of disease, the bugs, the rats, the bed bugs, etc etc...

Air conditioning, especially powerful central air (which we do not have in NYC, for shame) is glorious in heat and humidity like this. The only problem is the huge amount of energy we use doing it. I hope we can come up with better renewable electricity sources so we can all bask in as much AC as we want.

This is kind-of my point. Nothing is desirable about the heat or sleeping outside. What IS desirable is having situations where I'm forced to converse with neighbors and live among them instead of separated from them. It just might be nice to be in those situations.

The closest situation I can relate to is our heavy winters (where I live). I don't see half my neighbors all summer because we are cooped up inside, HOWEVER we have daily conversations in the winter as we're all standing at the curb taking a breather from the heavy shoveling.

I believe the AC on casters the author refers to is really a swamp cooler aka evaporative cooler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler

Interesting; I wouldn't have guessed it made that huge a difference. I spent a good portion of my childhood in Greece without A/C, and now that it has A/C it's a pretty incremental quality-of-life change, not some huge revelation (at least outside Athens, maybe it's worse there). Some people use it (rarely more than a few hours a day), others prefer open windows, and generally livable either way. Mainly due to the humidity difference, perhaps?

It's definitely the humidity. I was able to bike my 8 mile commute to/from work while in Portland, OR in the middle of a 100+ F heat wave a couple of years ago. On the other hand, I'm currently dying in this Toronto heat wave that's 90F's during the day and 80F's at night. For me the real difference is the humidity. Portland, is super dry during the summer, and wet during the fall, winter, and spring.

Yes, humidity makes a big difference. Google for air conditioning capital of the world. Houston was a widespread early adopter for a good reason!

Mediterranean climate is the best in the world (it is also found in southern California). Unfortunately most of the rest of the world is drenched in humidity, which is the bane of my existence.

I grew up in the swampy humidity of the DC Metro and didn't live with air-conditioning until I was 20 or so.

Much like the author describes, we spent a lot of time outside into the evening/night and at the public pool over the summer. Of course, the existence of air-conditioning certainly helped and saw me spend a lot of time at the local library.

To this day, I much prefer to sleep with the windows open than run the air-conditioning.

  > To this day, I much prefer to sleep with
  > the windows open than run the air-conditioning.

The problem that I have with this statement is that sometimes just opening the windows isn't enough. I've lived without A/C since ~2005, and just bought an A/C unit for the bedroom due to the current Toronto heat wave. It just wasn't getting cool enough at night even with:

* windows open

* 6 fans running in the house to get air moving

* sleeping without any clothes on

Sleeping still meant being drenched in sweat and waking up multiple times in the night.

[ At one point in the past we took to sleeping in the basement if it was too hot, but that's not possible right now. ]

A freezing shower will usually get you 4 hours sleep. Start with the water tepid, then reduce it over a couple of minutes. If you drop your core temp then you can get off to sleep, gotta stay under til you're cold throughout. That's how I dealt with 35 degree (that's 95f) nights after mid 40s days in the south of Spain with no air con. Also, hard shutters over the windows during the day, buildings hold on to a lot of heat.

I think what needs to be more common is very powerful exhaust fans in units/homes. I constantly find myself looking for a way to suck out all the hot air out of my apartment at the end of the day in one fell swoop.

Do you find that hard shutters on the exterior work better than thick drapes on the interior?

> sleeping without any clothes on

I've heard that wearing damp socks with a fan running helps cool you down. Also wearing a damp t-shirt helps. Sounds a bit unpleasant to me, but who knows.

I have a habit of not drying my (substantial) hair when getting out of the shower; it's a great cooler in summers like this.

in MENA they had wind towers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_Tower for thousands of years, a free, ecological and efficient system of ventilation and cooling. Ironically, nowadays they dump megawatts on A/C.

I somehow doubt even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_Towers will use wind towers, lol, I hope I'm wrong.

Wind towers are much less effective in high humidity, since water doesn't evaporate very well.

possible. still better to reduce those problems architecturally upfront and attach expensive technology as additional support, than rely on huge-ass installations running 24/7/365.

A well insulated low solar gain building does not need to spend all that much energy on AC. Especially if people are willing to keep the temperature at 80f in the summer. The real issue is energy is cheap so people are more than happy to use it to keep cool. Also nothing prevents you from using geothermal energy to lower energy costs even further.

> A well insulated low solar gain building

office buildings in say, the developped cities on the Arabian Peninsula, are basically high, very exposed glass and steel cages, where their 4 seasons can be qualified as: summer, hotter summer, unbearably hot summer and tiny itty bitty less hot summer.

Deserts generally only have 2 seasons: winter and summer. Winters are usually moderate, and even very cold at night. http://www.splendidarabia.com/trekking/ksa_weather/

I've been to UAE and Oman, both for xmas/ny, I wouldn't call it moderate. when I had to put up long pants in mid-day to enter the mosque and sadly they happenned to be jeans (you make this mistake only once), I thought I'd die on my way from the parking lot. cold nights are typical for desert in the sense of no civilization open area desert, not cities located on the coastline near a desert. maybe KSA's Riyadh is different because it's located inland, but still cities usually hold temperature pretty well, hence 'summer in the city' tends to be a painful experience during peaks even here in Central Europe.

My wife and I have elected for no A/C in the city for the last 5 years. Pretty much an experiment in stubbornness, but I'm sure it's also saved real money in electricity and we're also probably so skinny because of it.

We try to keep a cross-breeze going whenever possible; ceiling and floor fans are on full blast at all hours; and most recently, I've enjoyed spritzing my feet with water and lying in front of the fan to cool down.

"A South African gentleman once told me that New York in August was hotter than any place he knew in Africa,"

Not sure about Africa since I have not been there yet but definitely it is comparable to some really hot parts of the world in NYC currently (100 degrees outside).

37 °C is, while hot, not the maximum for Germany and the rest of central/southern Europe. It tends to be relatively dry, though, especially if one goes further east (Berlin, e.g.). Given how far north Europe is, I would expect ‘really hot parts’ to be, well, hotter :)

Latitude is only one small part of the equation that makes up the climate of a region.

100 isn't the max for NYC, just happens to be the temperature right now.

Notice that air conditioning is really rare in Germany; usually only businesses have them in select locations.

I don’t know a single home with air conditioning, even in cars/trains it only became popular within the past ten years or so.

You'd think we'd get used to the heat eventually, but it just keeps on being miserable...

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