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American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning (1998)
- jdmitch 13y agoA 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.
- marquis 13y agoThis was in the 20s/30s, a quite different time I'm sure.
- agilebyte 13y agoYeah, 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.
- MattBearman 13y agoI 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.
- goodcanadian 13y agoFor 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.
- agilebyte 13y agoI would not mock you, that is a perfectly reasonable way to dress either way :). As long as something is over your giblets.
- purephase 13y agoHaving 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.
- mauvehaus 13y agoWhen 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dalore 13y agoCold bear? Like a polar bear?
- Ygg2 13y agoDude, you never had a cold bear? Just use a lever at his neck and drink the wonderful fluid that bursts from within.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI will never watch a Coca Cola commerical with polar bears the same way ever again.
- JPKab 13y agoI 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.
- throwaway1979 13y agoI believe the AC on casters the author refers to is really a swamp cooler aka evaporative cooler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
- zalew 13y agoin MENA they had wind towers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_Tower 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_Towers will use wind towers, lol, I hope I'm wrong.
- sp332 13y agoWind towers are much less effective in high humidity, since water doesn't evaporate very well.
- zalew 13y agopossible. 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.
- Retric 13y agoA 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.
- zalew 13y ago> 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.
- sp332 13y agoDeserts 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/ http://www.splendidarabia.com/trekking/ksa_weather/
- codegeek 13y ago"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).
- claudius 13y ago37 °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 :)
- adestefan 13y agoLatitude is only one small part of the equation that makes up the climate of a region.
- nutjob123 13y ago100 isn't the max for NYC, just happens to be the temperature right now.
- revelation 13y agoNotice that air conditioning is really rare in Germany; usually only businesses have them in select locations.
- claudius 13y agoI don’t know a single home with air conditioning, even in cars/trains it only became popular within the past ten years or so.
- jstalin 13y agoIt'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.
- jpdoctor 13y agoYou 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.
- cdrxndr 13y agoIt'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.
- justincormack 13y agoI 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...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dpcan 13y agoWhile 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.
- evan_ 13y ago> 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/36017013_1_home-air-premature-deaths-gas-emissions http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-22/national/36017...
- Zelphyr 13y agoCannot up-vote enough.
- nutjob123 13y ago> 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.
- incision 13y agoI 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.
- pyre 13y ago> 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. ]
- mdpye 13y agoA 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.
- cdrxndr 13y agoMy 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.
- _delirium 13y agoInteresting; 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?
- pyre 13y agoIt'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.
- stephenhuey 13y agoYes, humidity makes a big difference. Google for air conditioning capital of the world. Houston was a widespread early adopter for a good reason!
- joonix 13y agoMediterranean 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.
- bernardom 13y agoA 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.
- paganel 13y agoThanks 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.
- twistedpair 13y agoThey 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.
- tanzam75 13y ago> 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.
- lmm 13y agoHere 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.
- erinbryce 13y agoYou'd think we'd get used to the heat eventually, but it just keeps on being miserable...