How do we know that people “lived just fine” before A/C? Because most people managed to cope okay? As recently as 1995, around 750 people died in a five-day heat wave in Chicago. 1995 Chicago heat wave. Perhaps death tolls were similar in the past but society chalked it up as inevitable/inherent/natural because there was little to actually do about it before A/C. That’s a lot more likely than your “just fine” [del]ass pull[/del] hypothesis.
Plenty of things had a death toll or other serious harmful consequences in the “good old days” but it was unrecognized or undiscussed because it was considered inevitable or natural – until someone invented something that made it not inevitable and no longer natural. “We” did not survive without sewers and clean drinking water in cities (humans were around for a damn long time before the ancient Romans built an aqueduct or cloaca), seatbelts or airbags in cars, helmets on bicycles/motorcycles, etc. because some of us actually DIDN’T survive it, but only the ones who did are around to look back in hazy nostalgia and babble that we’re all coddled weaklings nowadays. :smack: It’s only the age of water and sewer systems that keeps people from putting them in the same class as “we didn’t have seatbelts or helmets when I was a kid, and we came out fine.” :rolleyes:
I say this as someone who (1) never uses the A/C in my car unless a passenger insists on it, (2) runs my home A/C only if gets into the 90s, and (3) has commented more than once on the over-cooling of my office and the blast of cold air upon entering stores & restaurants. But the over-use of a tool doesn’t make that tool a luxury that we all are “just fine” without.
But how many heat wave deaths were actually caused by houses designed only to be cooled by AC, and thus turning in to ovens when the power is cut?
And how many more were caused by people not being familiar enough with the heat to stay properly hydrated and recognize the symptoms of heat-related illness?
I’m not saying nobody died of the heat back in the day, but I think a lot of the damage caused by heat waves today is avoidable.
The elderly “lose homeostasis”, which, among other things, can mean they’ve stoped feeling the symptoms of either too much cold or too much heat. They may remember being familiar with it, though, which can mislead them.
A/C is responsible for AZ becoming a retirement home - with a heater and A/C, anybody can live just about anywhere.
The old “shotgun house” design is unheard of, nobody checks prevailing winds before building, and the old elm tree is a quaint relic you see in old neighborhoods.
The first house I remember was built 1915 and came with both window screens and storm windows. Each window had brackets on the top, and the screens and storm windows (a wooden frame with fixed glass which sat inside the window - the screens were also so hung) were swapped each spring and fall.
Recent heatwave in India has killed over a 1000 last I heard.
And the big migration to the South came after air conditioning. For good reason. There’s a funny, pre-A/C quote about someone who came to Florida, “If I owned both Miami and Hell, I’d rent out Miami and live in Hell.”
I keep my A/C set at over 80, so I’m not as heat-intolerant as some people I know who run their A/C/heater literally every day of the year – the slightest temperature variation and those people can’t handle it. But I still use the A/C (and a lot of fans). The humidity is beyond oppressive and non-stop. This time of year the stickiness varies from bad to worse.
Crime rose dramatically in the summers before air conditioning. It’s not surprising when you consider how miserable people can be in sweltering homes. Constantly dripping with sweat, sticky, rashes, and so forth make people irritable.
Humans survived without AC but it was a pretty miserable existence in the South. I can recall staying at my Uncle’s home back in the early 1970’s. He relied on window units and didn’t have one in the spare bedroom. I had a large box fan on a chair blowing directly on my bed and still couldn’t get any rest. That hot air coming from the fan wasn’t doing me any good. Finally had to take my pillow and a comforter into their room (it had a window unit) and sleep on the floor.
I have a poor tolerance for heat. I grew up in a house without AC in the mid-atlantic region. It was absolutely abysmal and there would always be multiple weeks in the summer where it was still so hot and humid even at night that I could not sleep. All I could do was stare at the ceiling and sweat, sweat, sweat, and pray that maybe, finally, the torture would end and I could sleep. And this was in a stone house which is supposedly “good” at managing heat. If I cried out of frustration the tears were even hotter and made everything worse. Summer showers were cold water only. Anything over 85 and I started turning into a puddle mentally and physically. So basically, all summer long was hell.
So I grew up in the heat and never got used to it. Along with promising myself a dish washer and a clothes dryer when I grew up and left home, I also promised myself air conditioning. You’ll pry it out of my dead hands.
Window units were miracle boxes. I still remember when my grandmother bought two from Sears. One for the den and one for her bedroom. Granddad set them in the window, plugged them in. They used to shut the doors to those two rooms and get them really cold. Like 66 degrees and snuggle up under a blanket at night.
good times. Central units just don’t get a room as cool as a window unit. you can’t close the doors to the rooms because it messes up the return air for the central unit. They are more expensive to run but window units rock.
my house had a big 24,000 btu AC mounted in a wall opening. I used it ten years before finally getting central AC. I had trouble getting the wall unit serviced. The AC service contractors only wanted to service central units and the appliance repair people didn’t like messing with it. It was too big and heavy. Took two men to slide it out of the cabinet and set it on the floor for servicing.
In the summer I would go to the movie theater not just for the movies but also the air conditioning. That was almost as important as the movie itself. Of course, this wasn’t when air conditioning first came out like you might expect for that sort of attitude, but rather in the 90s…
It is certainly true that in most environments, a house can be constructed that stays comfortable in the summer using passive means (earth-sheltered, for example). It’s also true that very few of these design techniques are actually used. The bigger crime is not using passive solar heating, IMHO.
If you’ve got breathing or other health issues, then A/C could be argued as being medically necessary. My parents got A/C when I was 10 or so, in part because with several asthmatic kids, it was a health issue - open windows / house fan sucked in too many allergens (we won’t mention the cigarette / pipe / cigar smoke they inflicted on us).
I do believe that we’ve developed a lower tolerance for heat, and our houses aren’t designed to reduce such issues. Lots of things could be designed differently to reduce the amount of cooling needed to support comfort.
it is certainly possible for the heat to become dangerous without A/C. Our visit to the Southwest in mid-July a few years back made me wonder how Native Americans coped. I mean, at 115 degrees Fahrenheit, with limited water, even just being active at night only would be tough.
One thing that really surprised me when we visited Hawaii 25 years ago: most public places were NOT air conditioned. They were open air, had adequate shade / awnings, and despite being surrounded by water, it was not humid.
But Hawaii is hardly the hottest of places, despite it’s beachyness. It’s actually very mild and comfortable temperture-wise, at least in Maui. Lowest average low is 65 and highest average high is 86. It’s practically perfect for lack of heating or air conditioning. According to this, the record-high in the county-seat of Maui is 93. Where many of live, there are entire months that are warmer than than.
Looks like other areas have higher temps. Don’t know where you went. Also looks like the trade winds are why they are less humid. Can’t help geography but so much, and we don’t all get those.
We switched from window units to central air when we lived in NJ, and found that a big advantage of central air was allowing you to open windows when the weather outside was decent. some of the bedrooms had no circulation with the window unit blocking the window,
Not having to deal with putting them in and taking them out every year was nice also. I was a fan of window units also before this.
I think the biggest issue is seasonal temperature swings. Like the OP said, you can design a building for great ventilation and comfort, or you can design it to be warm in the winter, but it’s awfully hard to design one to do both without cost or specific locations or the like.
I mean, here in Dallas, we may easily see a difference between winter lows and summer highs as high as 100 degrees, if things are extreme on either end. The usual differential is probably more like 75 degrees, since the usual summer highs are somewhere north of 95, and the usual lows are somewhere between 20 and 30. So you have to build a dwelling capable of being comfortable at 100 degrees F, and one that’s comfortable at 25 F, since both of those are commonly seen every year.
Outside of that, nobody’s expecting comfort- our house gets uncomfortably warm inside when the temps outside get over about 104- air conditioners only cool things off ***SO ***much. Interestingly, with the heater going, I’ve seen temps in the single digits, and it was eminently comfortable inside.
If all you had to deal with is a 30 degree swing annually, then it’s much easier to optimize your building to deal with that.
I would hate to have to make a choice, but they’re very different, and it depends in large part on where you live and your particular circumstances. Here in southern Ontario, car A/C is something one tends to use virtually the whole summer when the sun is shining (and often even when it’s not), because cars get hotter than hell on even a moderately cool sunny day. But then, many of us don’t spend a lot of time in our cars. OTOH, house A/C is something I don’t turn on unless it’s really hot out, which only happens periodically between May and September, but my God, when you need need it, your really, really need it!
I find as I get older I tolerate heat less, just in a comfort sense. OTOH, I hate winter cold, too, and when it snows I curse at it, so maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age!
I empathize with that totally. I love having my windows open and listening to the sounds of nature, or even when the weather is crappy listening to the sounds of wind or rain. But I’m in southern Ontario where summer can get hot and muggy for days on end. It’s pretty moderate right at the moment but it looks like it will be around 90°F through the weekend and almost as hot for some days thereafter, and it will almost surely be humid enough to send the humidex well beyond the equivalent of 100°F. I assure you that the home A/C will be running!
How do we know that people “lived just fine” before A/C? Because most people managed to cope okay? As recently as 1995, around 750 people died in a five-day heat wave in Chicago. 1995 Chicago heat wave. Perhaps death tolls were similar in the past but society chalked it up as inevitable/inherent/natural because there was little to actually do about it before A/C. That’s a lot more likely than your “just fine” [del]ass pull[/del] hypothesis.
