As for the smell, sure people smelled bad - but compared to the other bad smells in their environment, they probably didn’t notice it much. For instance, there were a lot more horses around in those days, and all those horses were producing horse manure. Before we caught on to organizing the collection of garbage, people had their own refuse pits and frequently burned trash in their back yards. I imagine there were a lot of open sewers then, as well.
Here’s a page with some fun facts about early AC, like G.E.'s first “portable” air conditioner weighed 1200 pounds. Apparently, they had a slightly different definition of “portable” back then. The article seems to give Willis Carrier the credit for the air conditioner as we know it, but like Mr. Zambezi, I remember hearing that the first AC in the US was a contraption made by a doctor - in New Orleans, perhaps? (I think I heard that on one of James Burke’s Connections shows.)
In my grandfather’s clothing store in the rural Midwest, the old man would get a 100 lb block of ice, put it in a wash tub and blow air across it with an electric fan. As a gimmick a bottle of coke would be frozen into the ice and people would guess how long it would take for the ice to melt enough for the bottle to fall out. The winner got a tie or a pair of sox. My miserable overly cute girl cousin would get to drink the coke, damn her.
Many people slept on cots or pallets on the porch and some houses had special second story sleeping porches.
You wore a wide brimmed straw hat in the country or a straw “boater” in the city.
You’d closed the windows on the south side of the house and opened the windows on the north side.
When Mrs. Gelding and I lived in government quarters our duplex had an exhaust fan in the second floor hall ceiling. At night we would close all the windows except one in the bed room that was left open just a crack. When the exhaust fan was on the draft from the window made the place barely comfortable enough to sleep.
I can’t find Cooke’s priceless analysis of The Summer Bachelor on-line. Here are some excerpts from it, but they’re mixed in with other of his favorite “Letters from America”. This particular letter shows up in two of his audio recordings, and must appear in his collected writings as well. Highly recommended.:
It has not been so very long ago that most homes did not have AC. Here in the south we planned our day around the heat. If you worked outside you started very early so that you could get a lot done before it got really hot. You drank lots of water and found shade where you could. It has been many years since I had to get to the fields at dawn to get the hoeing done.
The rich could often find ways to escape the heat to a certain degree. As for the poor- we sweated and got rednecks from farm work.
The poor still suffer, maybe even worse now, because homes and apartments are not designed to combat the heat with out AC.
You are lucky to have no idea of how to make do with out AC. I am spolied by it now as well.
I’m with plnnr here, at least in part. Back in Saskatchewan when I was a kid, we would open up the house after sunset and let the basement fill with cool air. (Since it’s really dry there, the temperature could drop from 90 to 60F overnight. Or in ten minutes if a thunderstorm comes through, but that’s beside the point.) Then close up early in the morning, wait for it to start getting too warm, and turn on the furnace fan to bring up coolness from downstairs.
When I gre up in the woods of East Texas in the 1960s, we didn’t have A/C, but had an old evaporative cooler. I’m not sure how old this technology is, but all it requires is electricity to run a fan and a small water pump to wet the filters.
In the Middle East the traditional architecture has wind towers, a little open-sided turret thing on the roof of a house which somehow manages to draw down and circulate fresh air.
Apparently they are amazingly effective, but with summers here “enjoying” temperatures of 45-50c day AND night I will stick to my Central A/C thanks.
<<When I gre up in the woods of East Texas in the 1960s, we didn’t have A/C, but had an old evaporative cooler. I’m not sure how old this technology is, but all it requires is electricity to run a fan and a small water pump to wet the filters.
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You actually don’t even need a water pump…we were poor college students and built one with a water tank loaded above the fan and wicks leading out of it. The water would trickle down at a controllable rate and evaporate, bringing 107 degree weather down to a more bearable level.
The point of the whole thing was that the exhaust fan would draw fresh, hopefully cool, outside air into the house. With the window in the bed room cracked there was a refreshing draft across the bed where LT. Gelding and his bride lay sweating like a team of draft horses. If the window was wide open there was not as brisk a draft. Same if an additional window was open someplace else in the house. It wasn’t air conditioning but it made things bearable. You had to have a lot more rank than I had to get AC in quarters