(Image credit: Leszek Kozlowski)
A brief history of humans trying to chill out by any means necessary.
Life in the past was all about blood, sweat, and tears. But mostly sweat. Before the invention of air conditioning, summers felt like one big Bikram yoga studio: hot, sticky, and uncomfortable.
Consider the summer of 1896. It was too infernal for New Yorkers to sleep in their apartments, so many spent their nights snoozing on rooftops and fire escapes- with restless sleepers rolling off the roofs and falling to their deaths (the heat wave’s death toll in New York: 1,500). In an attempt to keep people cool -and alive- an obscure police commissioner named Teddy Roosevelt organized police stations to give out free blocks of ice.
Until the 1920s, much of America shut down entirely when things got too hot, including government: The capital would close its doors. Broadway theaters also went dark, giving birth to summer stock productions held outdoors. Across the pond, to keep babies cool, London moms bought the “baby cage,” a little box they’d attach outside the window of their apartment, dangling babies stories above the pavement.
In ancient India, homeowners used water as a weapon against heat, hanging wet grass mats in doors and windows to cool the air. In ancient Rome, the rich diverted cold water from the aqueducts into pipes behind their homes’ walls. Meanwhile, the superrich (read: emperors) simply got a thousand slaves to schlepp snow from the mountains to create white hills in their gardens. Wind was another method: Servants really did fan their masters with palm fronds and ostrich feathers in ancient Egypt.
Of course, Ben Franklin had a better idea. Well before wet T-shirt contests, clever Ben was experimenting with damp clothing. In the 1750s, he noticed his sweaty shirt was chillier than a dry one. This led him to delve into evaporative cooling- why objects get colder as water evaporates.
When President Garfield was shot in the summer of 1881 and lay dying in the White House, “inventors rushed forward with devices they hoped would aid the president’s recovery,” according to Cool Comfort: America’s Romance With Air-Conditioning, by Marsha Ackermann. The winner? A contraption that blew air over a box of ice into a series of tin pipes. A half-million pounds of ice were delivered to the White House to keep Garfield comfortable.
But it wasn’t until 1851 that an air conditioner prototype -then called a refrigerator- was patented by a Florida inventor. He drew up plans for a machine that could compress water into ice, using energy from horses on a treadmill. His device never made it to market; an engineer named Willis Carrier eventually came up with a more convenient solution. In 1902, he created a machine that prevented heat and moisture from wrinkling pages at a Brooklyn magazine plant. Movie theaters were some of the earliest adopters. One Newark theater owner was so proud of his frigid air, he took out a 1927 newspaper ad that consisted of complaint letters from patrons who found it too chilly. Talk about cool customers.
The article above by A.J. Jacobs appeared in the May-June 2016 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.
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Comments (1)
Quoting one web site, after the tests started at the Nevada Test Site: "Almost overnight, Las Vegas ushered in the age of atomic tourism. Fueled by a series of press releases from the Chamber of Commerce, visitors from around the country descended on the city in droves to witness the mushroom clouds first hand. On April 22, 1952, 200 members of the media were invited to broadcast from Yucca Lake, just ten miles from the epicenter of a major blast. As the bomb exploded on televisions from coast to coast, the country was caught up in atomic fever."
Quoting another site: In the summer of 1957, an article in the New York Times explained how to plan one's summer vacation around the "non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching." Reporter Gladwin Hill wrote that "for the first time, the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada test program will extend through the summer tourist season, into November. It will be the most extensive test series ever held, with upward of fifteen detonations. And for the first time, the A.E.C. has released a partial schedule, so that tourists interested in seeing a nuclear explosion can adjust itineraries accordingly."
Sure, it was shared on slides and postcards instead of Twitter, and broadcast on network TV instead of sent through Facebook, but it's hard to imagine how there would be "new levels of desensitization." People expected nuclear powered cars and airplanes and rockets, and new ports created by detonating nuclear bombs. Quoting Wikipedia: "Nuclear power was seen to be the epitome of progress and modernity."
The fake pictures, as whitcwa succinctly says, pale in comparison to what actually happened.