B.A.C. The Age Before Air Conditioning
I half jokingly in an email this morning to a friend, suggesting that I should write a blog about B.A.C. - The Age Before Air Conditioning and growing up in the 1950’s on the east side of Windsor, when we didn’t even know what air conditioning was, when the attached book review landed in my lap this morning, and got me thinking. And yes, I am dating myself! And I don’t care, we need to remember.
From what I experienced and remember from many of our summers in Windsor in the fifties, is what we are experiencing right now, with high temperatures and humidity, it was hot but we got through it!
The war time houses weren’t insulated, many at the time still had coal fired boilers in the basement. Our food was cooled by an ice box, with ice delivered every other day buy the Ice Man, driving a truck with large blocks of ice under a tarp, which we kids always tried to sneak pieces while he was making a delivery. It also meant that our mothers shopped more often for perishable goods, thus less food in the house for snacking! I remember when my Mom got her first refrigerator, she thought she died and went to heaven! And the first, what appeared to us, to be truly miraculous! - Ice cubes!
A lot of mothers on our street (Olive Road), including mine, got up earlier in the morning to cook the evening meal, because, by four in the afternoon, those homes were intolerable in today’s standards. Seemingly tons of potatoes were cooked for a week’s supply of potato salad, cuts of meat for cold cuts later. There was no such thing as “ice cubes” but chilled lemonade or the new thing at the time, Kool Aid!
In ground or above ground pools, what were they? We had hoses and sprinklers, and if you were rich in our eyes, an inflatable rubber pool, with every kid on the block running through it!
Sun screen? Most of our mothers smothered us in tanning oil, so that we could burn better! The first almost full body burn in the summer was a kids right of passage! “O! That’s a big piece for a skin sandwich!” Each trying to pull the biggest piece off each other! No boy wore sissy shorts, like girls! It was jeans, t-shirt and sneakers! The only time our legs got out was when we were wearing our swim trunks! And girls wore bathing caps to protect their hair!
I lived in a two story war time house, with two bedrooms up, the master down and one rather small bathroom (it might make for a second bathroom today) at the back door. The two upper bedrooms during a heat wave were cookers! You went to bed sweating, spent the night with sweat laden sheets and woke up still sweating. There was no such thing a personal fans, they were almost unheard of and if you could find one, they were too expensive. It wasn’t until my grandfather showed up with two army surplus canvas folding cots, and put them in our basement for us to sleep on, did my sister I get some relief from the heat at night. And no one had a “finished” basement, or rec room at the time, they were basements, dark and cool!
No store or office building had air conditioning, no cars, buses, nothing! At school before July, the windows were opened. Popsicles, pops and ice cream were a luxury!
It got so hot one time, my Dad and Mom put my sister and I into our pajamas and took us to the movies. Yes, the movies! It was, the now torn down Centre Theatre, on Wyandotte just east of Pillette road. They had this new thing called “air conditioning!” We all sat through the first double bill, and when that ended, I remember my Dad going up to the front to buy new tickets for the next double bill. I remember my Mom waking me, and my Dad carrying my sister asleep in his arms home, to what was still an overly baking home!
So! Are we wimps and wusses now? Could we live not a minute without air conditioning everything? We complain about our short dashes of exposure, from one air conditioned thingie to another, and still rant about the heat!
All the above storytelling makes this book review below very relevant for today:
“Losing Our Cool”: The high price of staying cool
How air conditioning changed the American landscape, transformed our politics, and is endangering our health
In the last half century, air conditioning has joined fireworks, swimming pools and charred hamburgers as a ubiquitous ingredient of an American summer. It’s no exaggeration to say it has changed the way this country functions, shaping everything from where we’re willing to live (Las Vegas, anyone?) to the amount of sex we have (more: It’s never too hot to get it on when the A.C. is blasting). Nine out of 10 new homes in this country are built with central air conditioning, and Americans now use as much electricity to power our A.C. as the entire continent of Africa uses for, well, everything. It has so thoroughly scrambled our way of life that when the National Academy of Engineering chose its 20 greatest engineering accomplishments of the last century, A.C. not only made the list, it clocked in ahead of spacecraft, highways and even the Internet.
But as science writer Stan Cox argues in his new book, “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer),” the dizzying rise of air conditioning comes at a steep personal and societal price. We stay inside longer, exercise less, and get sick more often — and the electricity used to power all that A.C. is helping push the fast-forward button on global warming. The invention has also changed American politics: Love it or hate it, refrigerated cooling has been a major boon to the Republican Party. The advent of A.C. helped launch the massive Southern and Western population growth that’s transformed our electoral map in the last half century. Cox navigates all of these scientific and social angles with relative ease, providing a clear explanation of how A.C. made the leap from luxury to necessity in the United States and examining how we can learn to manage the addiction before we refrigerate ourselves into the apocalypse.
Air conditioning comes at a cost, have we or will we think seriously about that cost?
Tags: air conditioning, Windsor
Post Feedback
The problem is not air conditioning. AC is part of the solution.
The problem is how do we keep people cool in the heat, without disconnecting people from the environment, and with minimum environmental cost.
I was going to write a big response here, but my AC died. Here is a firsthand example of the work and other things that don’t get done, because AC isn’t there.
I grew up BAC as well (at least BAC for my family) here in Windsor, and it was pure hell. It’s not just the heat and humidity, but any illness (allergies, for an easy example) gets multiple times worse without AC because you can’t control your living environment. Even certain medications can be at risk, or may be ineffective (such as creams being sweated off).
While we may bemoan the current situation’s problems, going back to the past is simply not an option. You can have mine when I’m dead, and not one second before. I plan on living for several more decades.
Check out today’s Globe and Mail, which utilized SD’s Mark Bradley’s BAC expertise to tackle the issue as well - http://tinyurl.com/24g3qav
I agree Randy, we can’t go back and if AC was available to our parents in the way back time, I think, heck, I know they would have used it. It was another time.
I also think that we have finally woken up to using our built environment more efficiently and that again goes with advancing new technologies and building practices and a total re-think as you stated;
“The problem is how do we keep people cool in the heat, without disconnecting people from the environment, and with minimum environmental cost.”
That is what Stan Cox was getting at in his interview with Salon and his new book. Air conditioning has had a powerful affect on our lives and that was what I was trying to get at in my blog posting. We take it as a no brainer today but it has totally radicalized our life style in North America.
This just in via Salon:
Link to article with many internal outside embedded links:
http://bit.ly/959tWX
Heat wave air conditioners of doom
From China to New York, the more we cool ourselves, the hotter we’re going to get
BY ANDREW LEONARD
Let Ideas Complete / CC BY 3.0
When I lived in Taiwan in the mid-1980s, a version of the same news story would run every summer, right after temperatures spiked to their highest point of the year: “Electricity consumption breaks all-time records!”
The news was reported with pride, no matter how badly the nation’s electricity generating capacity was stressed, or how close the big cities came to black outs. Because the underlying narrative was the story of a nation whose standard of living was leaping forward each year — in this case, as measured by the growing number of Taiwanese who were able to enjoy the civilized blessing of air-conditioning.
During the summer, air conditioners are one of the biggest single components of electricity demand, a point amply illustrated this week in both China and the United States, where concurrent heat waves are pushing electricity consumption to all-time highs. In China, we’re seeing the same Taiwanese tale of a developing nation galloping up the affluence ladder, writ large. The Chinese middle class is chilling out like never before. On the East Coast of the United States — where the market for air conditioning is mature — the story is a bit different.
It’s just hot.
Once again, yes, it is a fool’s errand to attempt to directly connect the heat waves in China and the U.S. this week, or the high temperatures that ravaged India and Pakistan last month, to CO2 emissions and climate change. But there’s no doubt that high temperatures translate immediately into increased burning of fossil fuels — and, inevitably, increased concentrations of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. This year is on track to be one of the hottest years in the historical record. If fossil fuel consumption is contributing to a warmer world, then our efforts to cool ourselves are only going to make matters worse.
And there are still quite a few people in China and India and elsewhere who do not yet have air conditioners — but intend to get them. Wanna save the world? Invent a low-power home cooling mechanism.
No worries - consumption based pricing for electricity is fixing that.
After seeing my hydro bill rise faster than the hot air in the summer, I’ve now raised the thermostat to 77; and programmed it to turn on only from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. The only exception is on hot rainy days when I’m stuck inside the house. When the outside temperature is lower than 77; I open up the windows and turn off the AC.
My bills are now about $100 less each month in the summer.
Who knew that introducing market pricing would change people’s behaviour.
New windows and new programmable thermostat have lowered my hydro bill. A new washer and dryer have lowered both our water and hydro bill.
http://www.slideshare.net/vinayak/green-alternative-to-air-conditioners
Eco-friendly air conditioning known as HVAC or Ambiant Air Cooler.
Heard a great piece on “Losing Our Cool” on NPR. I grew up in the Deep (re: humid) South, and my grandmothers insisted that air conditioning used all the time was not only expensive, but bad for your health.
There are simple ways to adapt to the heat and even get used to it. There are so many great tools to keep cool, and if you don’t rely on air conditioning all the time you fare much better in the heat. One tool very popular in the South that I’m surprised I haven’t seen much of in Canada is a whole house fan, also known as an attic fan (not to be confused with an attic exhaust or vent fan).
Now we live in hermetically sealed homes and work in hermetically sealed offices and we lose our ability to adjust to and tolerate changes in the weather that should come naturally.