Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

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When 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.

I 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.

I will second this. I grew up in an old row-home in a town not far from Philadelphia. I have very vivid memories of laying on my bed at night sweating, box fan in the window set to "High" and just roasting. My father was in sales and would go on trips from time to time. I'd always hope for him to go during one of the heat spells because my mom would then let us sleep in their room which had an old window air conditioner.

In a detached house, you can at least get cross-currents going from whichever way the wind blows. But in a row-home, you are boxed in. Not to mention the fact that all the things in a city seem radiate heat: pavement, cars, trucks, the laundromat across the street, etc...

When my parents finally had enough money to move to the suburbs we got a brand new house with central A/C. I think it was 90+ degrees the day we moved in. I slept like a baby in the middle of the summer for the first time in my life. It was way more magical than any tech toy I've ever gotten since.

Even outside . . . when I was a boy, my brothers and I were sent off to scout camp for a week and a half during the summer. Camp Lanochee in rural mid-Florida, known to its occupants as Camp Mosquito. I will never forget the feeling of sweat rolling off me whenever I turned in bed. It was this hot even though we slept naked or in underclothes only on a cot in an open-sided adirondack -- under a bug net, of course. It has to have been one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life.

I worked on staff at a very similar camp in the southeast for a few summers as a teenager, taking 2-3 cool showers a day was the norm to get some relief. Even though staff tents had a 110v outlet that we all had box fans hooked up to sleep was never very restful, afternoon naps were cherished when possible.

Recent comment about older homes built to maximize breeze (with the side effect of repelling mosquitoes):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052984

Virginia is so incredibly humid in these summer months - 95% constant humidity, I can only imagine trying to rough it without AC in a full seer-sucker suit. I can almost feel the flop sweat forming just thinking about it.

We have better refrigeration these days, sure, but before electric refrigeration was widespread there was an extensive nationwide ice distribution network. People would essentially quarry it out from frozen northern lakes during the winters, store enormous cubes of it in warehouses packed in sawdust, and ship it out in railroad cars across the nation.

The icebox significantly predates widespread electrification.

You just made me realize I never questioned where the 20th-century iceman would have gotten his ice from in a world without condensers. That's a fascinating infrastructure to imagine – shipping ice long distances in the summer heat with no active cooling. I actually want to read more about this.

There's a fascinating post about prepairing ice at the end of 19th century - beginning of 20th. The post is in russian, but photos are good enough on their own: http://engineering-ru.livejournal.com/39019.html

There's a silent YouTube video referenced at the end of that piece showing the stages of ice harvesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x9rc-54s-I очень хорошо.

This is an interesting wiki article on an ice baron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Tudor#The_ice_business

Keep in mind that the rate at which a block of ice melts scales with its surface area, so it actually becomes easier to transport large blocks of ice, if you have the other infrastructure to support it.

There was also flirtation with other tech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_chiller

My understanding is that my grandparents used to fill their own ice house (on a farm).

Einstein and Szilard actually patented a refrigerator design [1]; AFAIK it was never commercialized. If you're reading this and know about refrigeration tech, you might be able to contribute to the Wikipedia article; it's been tagged as "needs attention from an expert in Technology" since 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator

There's more to "the heat" than the temperature. I live in the NY area, and grew up in the DC area. I just spent a few days near Dallas, Texas, where it got to 104 F one day, but spent most of the days in the high 90s. But it was a dry heat. That was far preferable to me than the NY area in the high 80s with high humidity.

This is the truth. I use to live in Louisiana outside of New Orleans for 4 years and it was very humid all of the time. But the past 5 years I have been living in Harlem and the humidity and heat feel a lot worse in NY even though as far as the thermometer says the heat is no where near as bad as it used to get down south.

I grew up in Georgia and my mother was too cheap for air conditioning. It doesn't even compare to the misery of riding the NYC subway in July.

Keep in mind that in ye olden days, you had bigger families in smaller spaces.

Today, we universally have water, electricity and cool places to go. If your AC breaks or you're really feeling uncomfortable, you can always stop into any store and take your time shopping while cooling off. In those days, you had no relief.

Another factor is sanitation. People in urban environments did not shower -- they used public bathhouses once a week. The streets were smellier and grimier from coal, dirty diesel, etc.

Think of the misery of being in a two tiny rooms with six other hot, sweaty, smelly and grumpy people.

"In those days, you had no relief."

I think a big draw of the some movies theaters back then was that some were air conditioned (in other words when their was ac but it was not typically in a home).

I've also see this in retail on, say, Market street in Philly. The stores blast their ac and leave the doors open in order to lure in hot customers who want to cool off.

I had a friend who wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of movie projection. I wish I could cite it, but A/C came about around the same time TV was starting to cut into movie theater profits. A/C not only was a major draw, but it may have save movie theaters.

That's funny, one of my first bosses had done a thesis on old time fancy theatres that did movies and live shows. He worked at one in our city in college, and talked alot about the HVAC system, which he ended up maintaining as a volunteer for a long time.

It was a pre-freon, compression based system powered by natural gas. The refrigerant was some sort of nasty ammonia mixture that came in 55 gallon drums -- I guess when they dropped one, it basically melted through the concrete floor.

There's also something about having a work environment, or coffee shops and department stores and restaurants that all have air conditioning. Where it gets really hot, is when you spend an entire summer without even a minute of air conditioning. We're used to being able to tolerate spurts of 8, 12 hours without air conditioning, but it is rare to have entire days in sweltering heat in the northeast.

When temps are above body temperature, I'd imagine the full suits would be more comfortable for the same reason at notably lower temperatures: insulation.

There is something about linen clothing that seems cooler in high temperatures. I'd wear it much more often, except that it wrinkles like crazy.

I would say that it depends on humidity. If humidity is high then sweating stops working. If it's low, you want as much water evaporating off of you as possible.

Low humidity is so much better when you are living in a house with no AC. A good spray-bottle with water and a fan can keep you reasonably comfortable. Even better if you can rig up a proper swamp-cooler with a continuous spray.

Unfortunately summers in Philadelphia are too humid for swamp-coolers to work great, and in Seattle summers it doesn't work at all (there is no AC in Seattle, even though the city desperately needs it for almost two months out of the year. People will tell you it is only too hot in Seattle for 1 week out of the year... they are lying or crazy. Perhaps natives simply don't understand what it can be like to actually sleep in a cool room during the summer...)

I once spent a summer in a house with no AC in Atlanta. I honestly do not understand how areas like that ever became populated before the advent of AC in the first place.

Cold bear? Like a polar bear?

Dude, you never had a cold bear? Just use a lever at his neck and drink the wonderful fluid that bursts from within.

I will never watch a Coca Cola commerical with polar bears the same way ever again.

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