The wonder and civilization-saving nature of air conditioning

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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.

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....

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