How Did Americans Survive Summer Heat Before Air Conditioning?

A July night in 1890, New York: whole families asleep in rows on the tenement roofs, because the rooms below were too hot to breathe in. It was the coolest bed in the city, and the most dangerous one. Before air conditioning, summer heat was not beaten by one trick. It was a chain of fixes, and every fix pushed the trouble somewhere else. Shut the house against the sun, and you trapped the stove. Wall off the stove, and the brick walls still gave the heat back all night. Sleep on the roof or the fire escape, and nothing stopped you rolling off in your sleep. Then came ice, free baths, fresh-air trips out of the city, a floating hospital for babies, and finally an invention from Brooklyn in 1902 that was never meant for people at all. Told through Jacob Riis's New York tenements, Hamlin Garland's Iowa wheat harvest, and Catharine Beecher's 1869 household manual: how ordinary Americans actually lived through summer before the AC clicked on. Yes or no: on a ninety-degree night with no fan, would you have climbed up and slept on the roof? CHAPTERS 0:00 A July night on the roof, 1890 0:45 The wrong picture 2:43 Shut the house 4:00 The stove you could not turn off 5:29 Move the fire 7:33 The night that stayed hot 10:12 Sleep outside 11:41 The price of the roof 13:27 Ice and water 16:58 Leave the city 18:27 A fan needs power 19:53 What still works 20:35 Would you sleep on the roof? NOTES ON THE RECORD Jacob Riis was a New York newspaperman and a reformer. How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Children of the Poor (1892) were written to push the city to act. His "half the tenement population" sleeping outdoors is his own estimate, not a count. The 115-degree reading: Riis describes a doctor's thermometer by a tenement stove on a July day when it was "high in the nineties" outside. He gives no year, only that it was before his book came out in 1890. The summer doctors' 16,501 visits (1890) and the tenement population (about 1,250,000, Aug 1, 1890) are from the statistical appendix of How the Other Half Lives. The Fresh Air figures (60 children in 1877, 13,568 in 1891) are from The Children of the Poor. The August 1896 heat wave: newspapers that week counted the dead in the hundreds; historian Edward P. Kohn (Hot Time in the Old Town, 2010) puts New York's toll near 1,300. The free ice from police stations under Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt is also from Kohn. We could not reach the 1896 newspaper pages for this video, so no single figure is given as fact. Hamlin Garland's harvest is from A Son of the Middle Border (1917), about his family's Iowa farm in the 1870s. His reaper is dated 1874; he was promoted to binding at fourteen. The American Woman's Home (1869) is an Eastern household manual. Its shades, sliding doors, charcoal furnace, warm-air flue and hygrodeik are advice and description, not proof of what every family did. Farm electricity: "only 10.9 percent of all farms in the United States had received central-station electric service by 1935" (USDA, Rural Electrification, 1945). Home air conditioning: "In 1955 fewer than 2% of the nation's residences had air conditioning; by 1980 over half were air conditioned" (Jeff Biddle, Explorations in Economic History, 2008). Willis Carrier's 1902 system for the Sackett & Wilhelms printing plant in Brooklyn is from Carrier Corporation's company history. SOURCES Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45502 Jacob A. Riis, The Children of the Poor (1892). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32609 Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home (1869). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6598 Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28791 USDA, Rural Electrification (1945), Table 1. https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/3... Jeff Biddle, "Explaining the Spread of Residential Air Conditioning, 1955-1980," Explorations in Economic History 45 (2008). Edward P. Kohn, Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt (2010). Carrier Corporation, "The Invention of Air Conditioning." https://www.carrier.com/us/en/history...