No doubt you’ve experienced the sheer relief of coming home to a perfectly cooled home after time spend out in the hot, sticky sun. And you may also have wondered, as you sip your cool drink in your air-conditioned living room, just how people managed before the air conditioner was debuted in 1902. You may have even experienced the discomfort of life without cool when your own air conditioning malfunctioned and you had to spend a few uncomfortably warm hours waiting for the needed repairs to be completed.
Although it is hard for many of us to imagine life without our air conditioning people did – and do – survive without it. Here’s a look at some of the ways they did it.
Homes Were Built Differently
The introduction of the air conditioner changed a lot of things, including the way homes are designed and built, as prior to 1900 or so, certain features in the average house were specifically included to help keep the place cooler.
Take high ceilings for example. They look rather stunning to us today, but they were actually set at a higher level than in modern homes to allow more of the heat in a room to rise, leaving its inhabitants below to enjoy a little more cool. Deep eaves and covered porches, architectural features we simply consider to be charming these days, also served a practical purpose, as they shaded windows and helped keep the sun’s heat from steaming up the space behind them. Even the windows themselves were placed for maximum cooling potential, usually being set opposite one another to encourage better air circulation when opened as the evening cooled down.
They Got Out More
If you see – or live in – a home today that boasts a covered porch you probably think of it in the same way as many do a fireplace; a nice architectural detail but not particularly practical. Except when porches were all the rage it was because they provided a respite from the heat, not because they looked lovely.
People used their porches as a place to sit to escape their stuffy home and maybe even catch a bit of a breeze. Some porches were even created as sleeping porches, with built in hammocks and screens to keep out the bugs.
This porch sitting created a neighborhood culture that has almost disappeared today. Folks often took an evening stroll as the day cooled, chatting to all their porch sitting neighbors along the way. Often, they might stop to share a cool drink too and enjoy a casual gossip. These days we are all more likely to stay indoors, in the cool, and silently watch TV or check Facebook instead, something that many might say is a real shame.
They Went to the Movies
Even after 1901 and the introduction of ‘Mr. Carrier’s Cooling Box’, air conditioners were extremely expensive to buy and install, so only the wealthiest homes boasted them. Well, the wealthiest homes and movie theaters. One of the big draws of movie theaters across the US was not just the new-fangled moving – and later talking – pictures but also the air-conditioned spaces they were screened in, and people flocked there in droves all summer long not only to be entertained but to be cooled as well. It’s basically how the concept of the big summer blockbuster was born, something we’ll bet you never thought about before.
They Got Creative
Humans are innovative creatures when they put their minds to it, and when it came to keeping cool those forced to live without artificial cooling did get pretty creative. They cuddled up with ice filled water bottles at night, braided ice into their hair, cooled undergarments in refrigerators before dressing (!) and even hung wet laundry in doorways to create a kind of swamp cooling effect.
The fact is that yes, you can live without air-conditioning, but if you don’t have to, why would you, as, basically, it sucks. That’s just one of the reasons it’s so important to get your HVAC and cooling systems checked before the summer really heats up, so that you do not have to end up scurrying off to watch some terrible flick just to get cool or trying to figure out how the heck you do braid ice cubes into your hair..
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