The environmentalist whackos see air conditioning as the enemy as they do most of civilization. It can be argued the 20th century invention saved civilization to um, some degree as it removed the scourge of deadly heat waves. Often forgotten is how many people died during the summer months prior to air conditioning.
Realclear Markets reviewed Salvatore Basile's book, Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything last week. The review points out some long-forgotten facts of how things were before the invention of air-conditioning:
To read Basile is to marvel at how awful things used to be. And this was true for everyone, rich and poor alike. Think The Great Gatsby, and the “immensely rich characters” who endured “the hottest day of the year with no relief even in a luxury suite at the Plaza.”
A famous novel isn’t enough for you? Consider New York City’s 5th Avenue in the 19th century, where the Plaza is. Basile confirms that “the air inside these homes” was “as hot, heavy, and oppressive as the atmosphere inside any slum tenement.” As for the scent of towns and cities before the advent of “dirty” energy propelling air refrigerants and cleaners, Basile writes that the “signature aroma” during the summer was “a blend of garbage and horse dung.” Translated, the air was neither clean nor healthy in the era before cars and air conditioners....
It boggles the mind contemplating how people formerly dealt with summers. The simple truth is that many did not. Basile writes of how newspapers had “daily death reports” owing to the summer heat. In other parts of the book, he writes of how people used to fall to their death at night, after rolling off the roof of their dwelling while mercifully catching at least some sleep in the cooler outdoors....
Crucial about the obsession with “cool” is that it went beyond comfort. Heat was plainly a killer that men would die from. Women were always expected to carry smelling salts....
About our nation’s capital, Basile writes that “from its earliest days, the city’s 100-plus-degree summers appalled everyone from tourists to presidents.” No, 100 degree stretches aren’t a late 20th century, early 21st notion.
Which means people persevered in pursuit of relief from the heat. It was mostly about wafting air over enormous amounts of “white gold,” and into public rooms. At Madison Square Theatre in New York, Basile reports that two to four tons of ice were melted for cooling purposes per performance.
Back down in D.C., President James A. Garfield was shot in July of 1881, but had to recover at the White House at a time when “temperatures flirted with the hundred-degree mark.” A machine meant to cool Garfield’s room was certainly brought to the White House, and it “consumed a staggering 436 pounds of ice each hour.” After Garfield died (seemingly the brutality of the heat, along with the total lack of medical sophistication loomed large), Basile writes that the Independent Ice Company sent an invoice for 535,970 pounds of ice…
Basile indicates that a major heat wave in 1901 took 9,500 U.S. lives. As for babies, the journal American Medicine mused that “all the sick babies slaughtered by a heat wave could be saved by putting them in a cool room, but unfortunately we use the cooling machinery only to keep their poor little bodies from decay after the heat has killed them.”...
movie theaters in particular, saw cooling as a way to keep their seats full year-round. Air conditioning gradually became an expensive, but necessary investment for entertainment venues. In 1925 Paramount’s New York City head Adolp Zukor had cooling machinery installed at the Rivoli Theatre. Upon exposure to the cooler air, he concluded that “the people are going to like it.” Zukor was right. Rivoli quickly earned back its $65,000 investment. Eyewitness account.
In 1924, department store Hudson’s spent $250,000 to cool its location in Detroit. As Basile describes it “For the first time ever in human history [emphasis Basile], there was a hot-weather refuge available to overheated people.”
Just the same, these were public places. Basile largely chalks this up to disbelief, but does so with full acknowledgment of costs. Frigidaire’s “Room Cooler” was released in 1929, it could cool a room ten degrees, but Basile reports that the cost of a “Room Cooler” was $800.
General Electric rolled out its own room cooler in 1930, but it cost $950. ...
Basile cites a well-to-do Houston businessman who hated the horrible summer tradeoffs for drivers in the city: he could either suffer “convulsive sneezing” with his Cadillac’s windows down, or overwhelming heat with the windows up. Instead, this intrepid soul strapped a “a trunk-shaped Kelvinator refrigeration unit, powered by its lawnmower-sized gasoline engine” to the car’s rear luggage rack. He could drive without intense heat or sneezing....
Now that is some American ingenuity.
The French are nearly having a civil war right now over air conditioning. It seems some don't like living in 100+ degree temperatures. Article. Who can blame them? The Chinese shucked their old ways and started snapping up air conditioners as their economy grew. Chinese bought over 61 million air conditioners in 2023 while the Euros suffer. Progress.
39 comments:
Why hasn't the ozone layer been depleted by now?
This can't be true. According to the Communist Democrats heat waves are a recent phenomena expounded by Biden and crew as the most pressing issue of mankind. When I was younger it was just plain ole HOT.
I've often said that the inventor of AC deserves his own holiday.
I remember when people went to the King Edward Hotel in Jackson to bask in the air-conditioned lobby.
50 years ago in Deep South Louisiana where I grew up no one had air conditioning. We did just fine with a shade tree by day and a box fan in the window. Come October we needed sweaters and coats in the winter. That’s all changed, you better have AC today. Now I can get by with a long sleeve shirt in the fall. Winter is 3 weeks in late December and early January . With thermal underwear and a sweater or light jacket I can get by easy. What caused these weather changes?
Take a tour of any natchez mansion and they will tell you all the techniques they used to stay cool. Such as, the giant slave-powered fans, how the slaves cooked in kitchens outside of the house. And of course, how the rooms were designed with high ceilings, tall windows, and often cupolas to always give the heat a high escape point.
The earth is slowly coming out of the last Ice Age. None of these changes are man-made, but they have created a hoax "climate change industry," making 1,000s of charlatans wealthy and something for the otherwise irrelevant politicians to bloviate about.
10:48 am, as kids we found sharks teeth in a creek bed at 300 + ft elevation in Rankin County. Things were changing long before you were ever born.
@10:48 AM
The same thing that caused the pacific ring of fire to light up with activity the last two weeks.
Sunspots and space weather causing havoc on the planet’s geomagnetic field and atmosphere.
It's the same reason your paint chips taste less heavy.
Thanks for the enlightment , I see 1out three climate change deniers is just as dumb as the other two
It’s real easy to see that much of the “Climate Change” theory is a hoax, if someone is willing to do just a minuscule amount of independent research. The same people that for years have been telling ordinary folks to put their thermostat a few degrees higher in the summer to “save electricity”, also want you to drive electric cars.
Fortunately this theater "followed the science."
11:56 AM, nobody “denies” the climate is changing…or that the climate has been changing forever.
But 1 out of every 3 environmentalist whacko Democrats is just as stupid as the other 2
that think:
an automobile engine shutting down for 3 seconds at a stop sign before restarting…is intelligent;
that Tim Cook speaking to Tulane grads about the dangers of so-called man made climate change is prudent, while he/Apple uses planned obsolescence so customers will have to “consume” i.e. buy more s__t they don’t need;
that driving your Prius to your private jet makes total sense;
the list goes on and on.
It takes a special level of retard to fall for this scam. Searching “Why Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots” on Youtube might be the smart move.
We grew up without AC. I don't remember anyone ever dying from it.
@10:14 - got a source for that fantasy? I’ve never heard a democrat say that and neither have you.
We’ve known about the consequences of too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the 1800’s. Some people can’t understand a 4th grade level science lesson. Our schools have failed us is what happened.
I bet my buddy a chump would try to hijack my Line, thanks for the cash, you just paid for my next charge.
@11:09 - things weren’t changing at this pace. How old were those fossilized shark teeth you found? That’s the entire issue that so many on the right don’t want to understand or admit. You’ve slowly accepted that the climate is changing, but now you claim it’s always been changing without considering the acceleratnature of the current climate change. Learn to admit when you were wrong and grow from those opportunities, otherwise you’re a lost soul who missed the entire point of living.
This planet has had most likely an unknown number of climate changes over it's $ billion plus years of existence. This won't be the last either.
Back then many people died from their humors getting unbalanced or they made the mistake of breathing a fatal miasma.
We didn't need to waste our money on no smart folks to tell us the causes of death.
So Biden and crew saying that Climate change is the most serious issue that mankind is facing doesn't fit?
@1:35
greenhouse gases = the Co2 and nitrogen gas that farmers purchase to pump into their greenhouses because the physical greenhouse building becomes too oxygen saturated by the process of photosynthesis.
The “greenhouse” gases dont cause the greenhouses to get warmer. They still have to use heaters for that.
You got brainwashed in the 4th grade by the same people trying to tell 4th graders today they should take HRT and cut off their genitals.
I see it runs in the family.
10:48, fifty years ago, was 1978. I just tried to find Deep South, Louisiana, and see that there is no town with that name. So, I assume you're talking about the region. Your attempt at sounding "down-home" is as bogus as your assertion that no one had air conditioning. Assuming you're actually human, and not AI, your ideas about the South seem to have come from watching movies like "A Time to Kill" (set in the 1990s, in Canton, Mississippi, and featuring NO AIR CONDITIONING, ANYWHERE), or maybe the Beth Henley movie where Cissy Spacek goes out on the porch, to comb her hair dry (considering that a 1986 Lincoln Towncar appears in the next scene, and that the film is set in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where people definitely DID have AC - and blowdriers - that scene is one of the most stupid things to ever come out of Hollywood).
What wording caused you to be sent to post here? I frequently wonder what words cause webcrawlers to send rent-a-trolls to "control discourse".
I thought Greenland used to be green and forested thousands of years ago; so why was that. Also, good thing the sun maintains a flat line steady output for millions of years
We got rid of Aqua-Net.
They don't grasp the concept that climate models can be manipulated to show what they want and you won't get funding or published if you don't make the climate data extreme.
1:33 If you've never heard a democrat say virtually those exact words, you must have no forms of communication, other than the ability to hear yourself and those in your bubble.
1:35 I would suggest stepping away from the bong at least 5 hours prior to posting on this website
1:42 I think most people would acknowledge that we're experiencing global warming......um, I mean climate change (sorry, I forgot y'all told us to call it something different now), but the threshold question is whether it's man- (sorry, "person") made or whether the globe has always warmed / the climate has always changed without our ability to control or otherwise affect it? I submit, and the "science" has shown, that the earth has gone through any number of cooling and warming periods....and not necessarily over substantial periods of time. To wit: I noticed that some heat records were recently broken in the northeastern United States. A couple of them went as far back as the 1880s, which, to the climate alarmist mind, that says, "see it's hotter than it's ever been," but to the rational thinker mind, it says, "hmmmm, since humans produced exponentially fewer emissions at that point in time, wonder what caused it to be that hot then?" Weather would be my first conclusion, but to those whose climate religion won't allow that consideration (just like their abortion religion and their covid shot religion, etc. won't), they generally resort to the same old play book of ad hominem attacks, claims of racial injustice, etc. I think it's better to think than to react.....but that's just me.
August 5, 2025 at 1:42 PM, just what is the point of living?
August 5, 2025 at 1:35 PM, do you have a link for that 1800s remark?
Zero answers to be had here - the only real fact
1:42 PM, Barbra Streisand used to yack about climate change and environmental issues while her horses were all comfy in her climate-controlled barn. That’s what these rich leftist hypocritical s__t eaters really think of you…i.e. they think more of their animals than they do of you and I.
If the climate alarmists believed their own BS, they would rail against planned obsolescence resulting in unnecessary consumption (theft really), yachts, private jets, mansions for a single family that looks like hotels, Barbra’s climate controlled barn, etc., etc., etc.
Until then, they’re not to be taken seriously so you should join me in keeping our gasoline powered vehicles and the home thermostat where it is now…on 69 degrees. And do it with a f__k you smile on your face to the “do as I say not as I doers” and their carbon offset scams designed for the super-rich to avoid all of the sacrifices they’re asking of us.
P.S. It’s cold up in here!!!
May I interrupt the Climate Change argument, to insert news of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Eruption? More interesting than its PROBABLE EFFECT UPON OUR PLANET'S CLIMATE (and even more interesting than that wildly-titillating name), is the near-total suppression of news of the event.
Were I not a reader of Coffee & Covid, on Substack, I, too, would not have heard about this HUGE event. But, like I said, the CENSORSHIP is maybe more interesting than the (possibly-ongoing) volcanic eruption injecting vast amounts of superheated seawater into the atmosphere.
In the fifties In Shreveport and Dallas, we had whole house attic fans sucking cool air in the lower half of double hung windows with screens and expelling heated air out of the attic fan openings. The breeze caused cooling respiration on ones skin and scalp. I enjoyed it.
@9:18 - I grew up in a big old 1880's farmhouse with high ceilings, big windows in every room, wide central hall, and an attic fan. I used to wake up covered with green pollen sucked into the house during the night but it did cool the house very well. When our mother wasn't looking, my brothers and I used to make paper airplanes and launch them from the end of hall to watch them get sucked into the fan.
When my husband and I remodeled our 1960 house, we replaced the attic fan with central air and heat, and husband repurposed the attic fan into a floor fan for his shop. It sounds like a 747 jet taking off and can blow down small children and pets that try to stand in front of it.
To the reverse racist about kitchens being built separately outside the antebellum mansions: the kitchens of both large and small homes were outside the main house due to the fire risk of wood stoves. It was better if the kitchen burned down without taking the entire house with it. Duh.
1968, fifth grade, 35 or so students in the classroom, windows open, classroom door closed, big box fan almost as tall as me in one corner of the room. No one died. No one even complained.
After the sun set and the lights were turned off, somehow parents still made babies in the heat of the night.
There was, I seem to recall, a political science master’s candidate some decades back — this was before 1986, I’m sure — whose thesis tied the growth in the federal government to the advent of air conditioning installation in congressional offices in the 40s after World War II.
Kingfish, this is really a timely and important article to post. At the height of the Scamdemic, Ireland's Ivor Cummins (a seasoned leader of scientific research teams), began posting, on YouTube, arguments/graphs, etc., showing that the infectious diseases from which vaccines had supposedly "saved Humanity", had already been in steep decline, before vaccination for them had become widespread. (most of those videos got "disappeared", shortly after being posted to YouTube...)
Cummins, and those in agreement with him, suggest that improvements in Quality of Life, rather than vaccines, are responsible for the declines in infectious diseases. One of those improvements, was the introduction of electric fans. Another, was the spread of Air Conditioning.
Your article paints a vivid picture of how horrible summers were, before Air Conditioning. Anyone who's read histories of the Antebellum South (or watched movies, like 'Jezebel', premised on a Yellow Fever epidemic) can easily come to conclude that, by the end of Summer, people were exhausted, and easy prey for disease pathogens.
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