Better, for my money, than automobiles, jet air travel, radio, TV, even the Internet. Yet I don’t often see it listed among “modern marvels”. Seems a lot of people kind of take it for granted.
(It’s fair, isn’t it, to consider refrigeration and AC to be a single invention? I’ve got to think that once you invent one, the other is a natural extension of it.)
I suppose the refrigerator may not have seemed like such a huge deal because previous to it, people did have ice delivered to them to keep their food cold in iceboxes (though the freezer part would have been more of a giant leap forward). But oh, to be able to do something more than relieve discomfort a bit with fans (granted, those were no doubt a huge boon a few years earlier compared with just fanning by hand)…how glorious. No matter how interesting in historical or cultural terms, I would never want to live in a place or time that lacked air conditioning.
I would love to read articles or testimonials about what it was like for those who were “early adopters” of this technology in their homes and businesses. If I lived back then, I would be saving every penny I could to get an AC unit, and/or spending as much time as possible in the summer at a movie theatre, restaurant, or bar that had installed AC (and no doubt advertised their investment in the fancy, newfangled technology with those frosty signs).
It certainly made the big desert cities - Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, etc. possible.
There was a great “Lighter Side of Movies” in Mad a zillion years ago - I showed a hot, sweaty couple talking to someone coming out from a theater. The caption was “The movie stank, but the A/C was great!”
Ha, nice. I suppose theatres were some of the first places to have AC.
I do hear that mentioned about the shift of population to the Southwest becoming possible with the advent of AC. But what about all the places that were already really populated long before it was invented? There’s the South, obviously. But in the heart of the summer, even up north it can get really hot and humid. I lived in Duluth, MN in high school–and that was a genuinely cool place, which had a number of old mansions that were summer homes for the rich in the pre-AC days (another hint of an interesting cultural/geographical shift). But I also lived later in Minneapolis, and the summers there could be dreadfully hot and muggy. I also spent a year in the NYC metro, which seemed to have a plenty uncomfortable heat index in summer; and of course Chicago has heat waves that at times have turned deadly even well after the advent of AC.
I mean, right now where I live it is 88 degrees outside. And I would be miserable if I weren’t sitting here basking in the AC, keeping it a comfy 75 in this room. With the humidity we get in the parts of the country that were already populated before the Sun Belt was, it doesn’t have to hit those triple digits they get to be just sticky, gross, yuck, no thanks. I just so hate being all sweaty and uncomfortable like that, that I think I’d rather live in a 100 square foot box with a comfortable mattress, chair, and AC than in the grandest mansion without.
A/C is nice and all, but it’s small potatoes compared to refrigerated transport, freezing as a form of food preservation, etc.
In other words, I agree with your basic premise that artificial refrigeration is one of the most important technological innovations, but you’re grossly underestimating the importance of mechanical refrigeration for food.
Well, as I say they go hand in hand. It’s absurd to imagine much time going by with one being invented and no one trying to do the other. I suppose if the energy cost were more expensive, you could imagine refrigeration for many, and AC for few (which is true to some extent as the people dying in those heat waves in Chicago do presumably have fridges); but the idea that you could have AC but not have refrigeration makes no sense at all.
Still, for me personally, if it were somehow necessary to choose, I would deal with sticking to canned and fresh food rather than being unable to have AC. I’d probably trade one of my eyes or even one of my arms if I had to, to preserve my AC. That’s how much I can’t stand not having air conditioning–to me it’s definitely not just “nice and all”!
I might sound like I become a complete hermit when temps rise above 80 degrees, but that’s not so. I cycled out to the city tennis courts earlier today. I can handle running around exercising in the heat, as long as I keep drinking water. (I think part of how I handle it is knowing that I will be able to take refuge in the AC later, much in the same way as the sauna feels good because you know you’re not just stuck there.) But what I can’t endure is sitting still (in a car or a house) and feeling hot, stuck to my seat, bedraggled, slimy, unclean five minutes after getting out of the shower, no prospect for relief. That is just not a life worth living IMO.
It’s one of those things I used to pay more attention to. Growing up in the South, each summer you might hear about a few heat related deaths here or there on the news, especially among older people. But you might hear about dozens or hundreds of heat related fatalities in places like Chicago where there’s less A/C. In Houston, several air conditioned city buildings (libraries, rec centers, etc) open up as heat shelters, especially for old folks and kids when the heat index gets too high.
And there’d be the warnings about using fans and being especially careful about using electric fans when the temperature got over 95. The science isn’t firmly settled, but evidence suggests fans may do more harm than good when the ambient temperature rises about body temperature.
Some tricks that may help in the absence of A/C: Shade. Elevation (better wind flow). Soaking a sheet and hanging it on a window with the wind blowing in.
It doesn’t happen so much in the South anymore but still happens in the North. And lots in other countries. I wouldn’t doubt a bad heat wave might be responsible for hundreds if not thousands of death in Europe, even to this day.
If my grandmother were still alive she’d agree with the OP. She and my grandpa kept their house icy in the summer. Probably a reaction to the hight summer temps of the 30’s.
Although grandma might say indoor bathrooms would give it a run for the money.
She didn’t believe in the concept of “the good old days” she told me once. She liked airconditioning, indoor plumbing, refrigerators, washers/dryers etc. She said life was harder in the old days, and that people weren’t any nicer back then either.
She died just short of her 108th birthday, in November of 2012, having just voted two weeks earlier in the presidential election. Twenty two straight elections, starting in 1928.
Me I think the OP is right on the mark as well. I hate the summer weather.
Whenever there’s a question about traveling back in time, I always say that I won’t go back to a time before air conditioning. And by the way, it’s true that movie houses had it first. We didn’t have it at home, in schools, in the car or anywhere else, only at the movies.
Interesting. When was this? And then what was it like when a few people started having it at home, and when was that? Was it only rich people at first, or did some people of my more modest-income but heat-hating type just cash in their savings bonds or whatever so they could get relief?
Whenever A/C stuff in history comes up, this pic from Dillinger’s death pops into my head:
The Biograph Theater, where Dillinger got killed, after watching “Manhattan Melodrama”.
As a person who works in heating/air conditioning - thank you for the compliment.
And BTW, its air CONDITIONING which is more than just cooling. A good system also removes air contaminants and controls humidity. Very important in office environments.
That’s a great photo of that theatre. I had seen many of the kitschy “AIR CONDITIONED” signs with the frost/snow on them, but “COOLED by REFRIGERATION” is a new one. I think back then I would be sorely tempted to just sit in movies all day during heat waves (and I’m a film buff as it is, so that wouldn’t be a great sacrifice).
I’m just at the age when air conditioning went from “luxury” to “necessity.” I remember being a little kid, spending time in homes (including our own, until I was about 4 or 5,) without a/c, and that was just normal. However, I also remember twice actually fainting from heat exhaustion - once when I was about 5 (I had asked my mother for a glass of water, she was fixing it, but asked me to please go dump some potato peels onto the compost pile while she did so. I came back inside, made it almost to the kitchen, and lost consciousness,) and once in the first grade, in our un-air-conditioned classroom (during the Pledge of Allegiance. I remember trying to get my legs back under myself as I started to fall, and stumbling halfway across the room, and then Mrs. McCall bathing my face with a damp paper towel while about 30 kids hovered around me!) After those experiences? Yeah, I’d probably give up my internet connection and maybe my indoor plumbing before I’d give up a/c.
I also fancy myself a bit of a cook. I was lucky enough to grow up in the kitchens of two women who could cook their asses off - my mother and one of my grandmothers. My other grandmother, and the only great-grandmother who lived long enough for me to remember, cooked daily, but not well. In later years, I realized that the difference between those ladies was that two had learned to cook after the advent of home refrigeration, and two before. The Frigidaire was the difference between “cook it until it tastes good” and “cook it until it’s unlikely to kill you.” The difference was amazing, and I’m sure that the health benefits were, too. (But, to give my non-cook Grandma credit: after I learned to read, she let me use her kitchen when and how I wanted to, with obvious safety precautions like letting a grownup put things into the oven and get them out, or not letting me deep fry. I vividly remember making huuuuuuge messes in her kitchen, because she’d let me bake a cake or whatever other concoction I wanted to try, starting when I was about four years old. I suppose that she and my Grandpa figured that my cooking would probably be as good as Grandma’s!)
Also, thank you UrbanRedneck for doing your part for civilization!
I saw Dillinger’s syphilitic penis in a jar at the Smithsonian. Funny what sticks in your head…
My parents got air conditioning in the late '70s, but they lived out in the country so it may have been a “thing” for others before that. Our noo-clear family got it a few years later but I remember us sometimes going to the mall because they had it. But I didn’t like it at home (although now I could probably barely breathe without it.) With the windows shut you never felt a breeze or heard the birds as well. Or—a sure sign of Spring—the first car radio wafting down the street.
We used to sit out on the porch a lot before A/C. Talk. Look at the stars. Watch the kids chase frogs. After…that just petered out. We became sealed inside.
