How did free people in USA thrive in high heat before air-conditioning?

You would have eventually found it more tolerable. Adaptation time is typically on the order of a couple weeks. Above a certain temperature (~100F for myself ), you'd still be uncomfortable regardless.

Historically, in hot climates you'd also spend some of the hottest parts of the day doing things inside, which helps tremendously. That can be tens of degrees cooler. On top of that, you'd also have a house designed for the climate. In the desert that might be a big adobe building, which would get you another significant reduction in temperature.

Bedouin-type clothing also helps a lot. The point is actually to be flowy and generate lots of airflow over your skin while blocking the sun.

Beyond that, historically you just didn't live in places where it was unlivably hot. Typically those are places without much water, which is a bad thing. Dangerous wet-bulb temperature was significantly less common prior to the modern era as well.

I also have a relevant Askhistorians answer about the desert southwest you might find relevant [1] which gives real numbers and some further discussion of historical strategies.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c8rizq/how_d...

My wife, kids, and I lived in an old farm house located in a marshy area of the Midwest without AC for nearly a decade. Summers in the upper 90s with really high humidity. I've also spent a fair amount of time with family who don't have AC south of Flagstaff.

* Windows and doors wide open all night, always paying close attention to the temperature outside. Once it's hotter outside than in, we'd close up the windows and blinds. Typically this only lasts for a few hours.

* When you live without AC, your body adjusts to temperature more quickly. So, you turning AC off for the day feels markedly worse than if you didn't have it at all. We'd be "fine" outside on a hot day while our family members with AC would turn into puddles.

* When it's really bad at night you tuck your pants into your socks and your shirt into your pants (bugs), then go sleep in on the ground in the yard.

* You eventually just accept that you're going to be hot and uncomfortable. Personally, once I hit this point I realized the feeling that you can't escape the heat is often worse than the heat itself.

Interestingly enough when you live without AC it's common to get headaches when you go into a HVAC controlled building.

Edit: grammar

“From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.”

— Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner

Read Faulkner or Dos Passos to experience heat as people did a century ago.

The populations in those areas used to be far lower, and temperatures were lower during the "Little Ice Age", which covers much of that period.

People just put up with it, or adopted appropriate traditions such as siestas during the hottest periods of the day. We also adapt to conditions remarkably quickly, and are physically capable of surviving far outside what we normally consider comfortable. When visiting the south, it's not uncommon to see people complaining of cold in 60F weather which is quite comfortable to northerners, who start to complain about heat past 70F.

Building materials and styles of construction were different - before modern transportation and logistics, you couldn't build exclusively with wood in areas with no trees and few rivers to float barges, and insulation was accomplished through thicker walls.

People used parasols, shawls, and other clothing to cover up and insulate their bodies rather than their entire surroundings. Swamp coolers have been known for thousands of years.

Before modern A/C, in some parts of the US they used "swamp coolers", which as I understand it was basically a large box of damp wood chips through which outside air entered the house. These were a type of evaporative cooler - they work by the heat in the hot air being used to evaporate the water on the wood chips, leaving cooler air which then flowed into the house. No electricity required - just keep the wood chips damp!

My parents grew up without AC. Their families used a series of open windows and window fans to create a housewide draft.

You can't just point a fan at yourself...a big problem is the air in your house getting hotter than outdoor air due to greenhouse, electronics, warm bodies, and ground temps. So recycling air out helps a lot.

That said, we had that same setup as a kid for about a month and it was still rather miserable compared to AC. Mainly because AC removes humidity, whereas fans don't.

In 1900, the population of Las Vegas was 22. One way of avoiding high heat back then was trying not to live in it.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is challenging the assumption that people thrived. Most of the time they didn’t.

Hot summers were essentially downtime where people didn’t get much done. You can still see this in occupations and projects that occur outside, and on hot days people just don’t work.

To me this is one of the major reasons why The South is generally perceived as “behind the times”, or “slow”. However this seems to be changing in the past few decades as AC has become more affordable.

I grew up in the most extremely hot/humid part of Florida for the first 18 years of my life (I’m about 40 now). My dad didn’t believe air conditioning was necessary and he was right. It’s possible to survive, but it’s absolutely miserable.

Our house (he designed/built it) was wide open, essentially one big room with huge ceiling fans and screened in windows. It was built inside of a ton of tree cover for shade. House was full of bugs (occasionally snakes) and still hot and humid. Take a shower/bath and never get dry. Clothes had to be stored in our cedar closet (designed like a humidor) or they would smell dank and moldy.

You do get used to it though. It’s just that it’s not worth getting used to.

Moved away to college and my first A/C bill was something like $300. Didn’t care at all.

Before electricity they had things like sleeping porches which were just like what the name implies. After electricity and before AC, they used an attic fans. These are giant belt driven fans with an electric motor that have a sort of trap door in front of them - usually with some sort of mesh covering the trap door (I’ve owned two houses in the southern US built in the early 1900s with these fans).

In the summer months, you’d open all the windows, open the trap door, and turn on the fan. Historical homes were also built with crank windows above the doors to also help increase circulation when the attic fan was on.

It’s also about what you’re used to. My grandparents keep their central AC on in the mid 80s - which to me is very uncomfortable but they are in their late 80s and this is what they’re used to.

1. They didn’t. The hottest parts of the US were heavily settled in part due to AC availability. 2. Houses were designed better.

Architecture used to be much more regional to account for environmental differences and take advantage of them.

https://archive.curbed.com/2017/5/9/15583550/air-conditionin...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/tim-har...

Interior spaces were built taller, more attention was paid to ventilation, giving a natural draft where possible.

People sweated and drank more alcohol.

It was easier for many, before air conditioning, to adjust their schedule to the hot months, rise earlier and nap in the afternoon.

The houses were designed differently. I live in a 120+ year old house in the middle of corn country in Illinois. We finally installed central AC only three years ago. How is the house designed different from current construction methods? WINDOWS! My 2400 sq ft 2 story house has 54 (FIFTY FOUR!) windows. Every room in the house (except the bathrooms) has windows on two separate walls. After the sun goes down, by opening all the windows in the house and leaving all the doors open, the cooler night air can permeate throughout the house. In the morning (before dawn), all the windows are closed and the curtains are closed. This will trap the cool air and reduce solar heating.

High ceilings, windows places in such a way to facilitate cross ventilation .. lots of trees if possible.

Most parts of the world are not meant to be densely built up or populated. The west is mostly hostile terrain. That’s why there is a band in the temperate/tropics that used to be densely populated and still is because they had the climate and natural resources to thrive.

I was getting what was close to heat strokes while working at the farm. I don’t sweat in CA like I used to in India because of the dry heat and lack of humidity. Dehydration is deadly. My body was constantly in a state where it thought it was maintaining an internal fever but had no way to cool down because I was only (genetically?) primed to sweat when it’s humid.

An Ayurvedic vaidya suggested something that I thought would never work but it did!! I started soaking vetiver roots in an earthen pot filled with water ..overnight. And had it throughout the day. I sweat now and I am aware when I start getting dehydrated.

I don’t know why it worked. I don’t care if no one can find a rational explanation as to why it worked. It has been literally life saving.

I remember vetiver mats beings used as curtains/fans in the South Indian villages I visited during summer vacation as a child. I don’t remember exactly how it works but they’d throw water on it and then pull it with a rope and it would be hung high up on the ceiling. You just had to tug the rope now and then ..it would be like a fragrant fan. No electricity needed.

While average temperature is up a bit, the typical high has not increased terribly much. Many record high days in my part of Canada still date to that 1936 heat wave.

You would adapt, a little bit. I personally find the swings in humidity between AC'd and non-AC'd environments to throw me off, like I don't know how much I should perspire. But I think people mostly just didn't actually thrive when it was really hot, historically. If nothing else, heat burden imposes real limits on the physical work both humans and domesticated animals can do. I can only assume in the distant past, like in the recent past when I worked landscaping, that many hot afternoons were basically write-offs, everyone lying in the shade.

> Air-conditioning is not even a hundred years old

High-intensity artificial lighting isn't much older than that. I think there's some analogy there. In the winter, people only got 6 hours of real work done each day, because they only had 6 hours or so of daylight. The way we construct artificial environments with ideal working conditions, is a major component to modern prosperity.

It just takes time to get used to it. For example, I lived in a city with very little A/C for a few years and got used to it. One July I went to North Florida where the temps were 90-100F while being very humid, and although I was warm I was fine without the A/C. My friends who came from Chicago and were used to constant A/C were miserable, though.

There's a style of house where I am (Queensland, Australia) called the Queenslander [1] - its a timber house, with high ceilings - typically 10 or 12 feet, the walls are tongue and groove timber which is pretty leaky, so any breeze goes through. It works, I've lived in one, my mum still does, without air con, just fans and evaporative coolers for those hot days. Another thing is placing your home facing the right direction - to the north east here to catch the cooling breezes.

They don't build them any more - brick and air con is standard now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture)

I live in a hot place that is getting hotter. What bothers me is the architecture of new homes that are sited poorly and make no effort to use the design of the home to control hot / cold. A great example of this is homes across North Africa and the Levant where there is a central column through which wind blows and brings natural cooling into the home - think "whole house fan" but without any mechanization. These types of designs and thought into how a house is sited on its lot make so much sense but instead we get cheaply constructed mass tract housing. It would be very curious to know just how much energy use could be reduced by different materials and design.

> Air-conditioning is not even a hundred years old and was originally not even invented to keep people cool (it was invented to keep machines from overheating).

Nitpick, you're close but according to Wikipedia:

"In 1901, American inventor Willis H. Carrier built what is considered the first modern electrical air conditioning unit. In 1902, he installed his first air-conditioning system, in the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company in Brooklyn, New York; his invention controlled both the temperature and also the humidity which helped maintain consistent paper dimensions and ink alignment at the printing plant."

In my 20s I had an apartment with no air, you actually adapt fairly quickly, it took me 3-4 weeks of 90+, high humidity. The odd part is, I haven't been able to really adjust back, I have no tolerance for the cold now.

I grew up on the hot and humid gulf coast and was surprised after moving north that it was nearly equally hot and sticky in New York coast during summer when it hit 90-95 degrees.

In the early mid 1990s, not every place in NY had air conditioning (because the hot summer on lasted 2 months) so it was actually worse than where I grew up. The solution in NY then was fewer clothes, fans, and getting breezes to work for you in whatever space you were staying in. I fanned myself with my church bulletin in church in the summers when it got hot.

Humid heat is very different to dry heat. When I was in the Middle East, we wore a keffiyeh and it just seemed to drastically lower heat. So I can imagine the Bedouin wearing thick clothes. I suppose the American equivalent are the cowboy hats and dusters. But that doesn't work here in the jungle heat, and I presume it doesn't work for swamp heat either.

The Bedouin are in a desert, where sweat actually works to cool you down. That's not so here in the Midwest, where the humid air gets pulled northward from the gulf of Mexico.

Sleep during the day, when it's too hot to do anything, and work at night, if at all possible.

Our house is white, and has 4 large Maple trees around it, which passively cool things by about 5-10 degrees, but even so, we had to go with AC this time.

there was also the whole thing about shipping ice from frozen lake water around https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-stu...

I grew up in the desert. We were just... hot a lot of the time. Air con was too expensive. Some rooms had fans. It was hard to sleep at night. Going to the store was wonderful because they had air con.

Now I live outside of Seattle and was happy to get massive heat pump systems, plural, in my house.

Good Architecture, insulation, cross ventilation and orientation of rooms can make a huge difference.

sleeping outside a lot, whether country or city.

https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/how-nyers-endured-u...

https://www.history.com/news/heat-wave-1911-weather-insane

https://original.newsbreak.com/@pink-politic-1592786/2618190...

https://www.brikbase.org/sites/default/files/researchdesign_...

I did the same, but succeeded. Only humidity was lower then in USA south. Humidity makes it hotter.

TL,DR; Avoid anything or situation that traps heat.

From someone leaving in Haiti with no AC (it is usually 30C outside, right now 27C with 70% humidity), you just get used to it. One thing to remember is that outside is typically colder because electronics and bodies will warm up the air inside. In my room, it only starts to get really hot at 4pm. So I go to the balcony. Around 8pm, my room is already at a bearable temperature and I can go back in. Another trick is to never go out in the sun if you can avoid that. So, everyone does their stuff in the morning or in the afternoon. My family in my native town practically spend all their days under the trees in the yard, with all the doors and windows left open.

As for the clothes, you avoid clothes that trap heat (think heavy fabric like wool) anything else is ok (used to go to school with long pants, socks, and long sleeve shirts). Better to sweat than be sunburned. But inside, I only wear a gym short.

Climate change made heat waves more frequent and severe

Concrete/asphalt infrastructure and lack of shade makes cities several degrees hotter than rural areas

I grew up just north of Annapolis, Maryland which has high heat and humidity in the summers. Our house was built in about 1770 (yes, before the Constitution was written). (The basement was made of boulders and the kitchen was originally a separate building as they burned down all the time.). Our house did have one little air window conditioning unit which barely cooled one room in our large house and that I don't recall that we used much, so we effectively had no air conditioning. I scanned these comments to see if someone else recommended the same set up as our house in Maryland and I do not see it, so here it is.

Our building is three stories tall with a big central staircase. You use the top floor for bedrooms and in the morning (1) open the windows and (2) leave for the rest of the day. What happens is that the top floor gets really hot from the sun, and then the air goes up, which means it goes out the windows. That creates a vacuum which pulls air up the staircase and which then pulls air in the windows of the lower floors where people are during the day. This creates a constant stream of moving air which cools people down wonderfully. The effect is amplified if the second story has shut windows as the flow of the air must all come in the ground floor and the flow at that floor is therefore increased. Seems to work best if there are lots of windows on the lower floor and somehow (I know not how) seems to work better if the building is made of wood. Basically the whole building was a passive heat engine that turned on automatically when you needed it and turned off automatically when you did not. Very elegant and efficient.

People also used to cut ice from lakes in the winter and store it in special ice houses which were designed deliberately as above, but since they were special-purpose buildings, they could be engineered to be even more efficient. If I recall correctly, there would be just a tower with no internal "floors" at all (a huge "staircase") and the middle "floor" would have no windows at all. The outside of the building would be painted black on the top "floor" to amplify its heating and thereby increase the thermal differential with the bottom "floor"; recall that the thermal differential is what drives any heat engine, so we are in the ironic position of painting part of a building black so as to make it cooler.

I am puzzled that increased airflow would work to cool ice as well as people. People are hotter than the surrounding air and can drink water, so more airflow means faster cooling. Somehow this effect works to preserve ice also, but I do not quite understand how, as increasing evaporative cooling for ice means losing ice faster. I have not done the physics to check how this would help keep ice around longer, but I don't think people would have done it if it did not work as a practical matter.

Further, your body also gets used to the heat. I have not lived in the Maryland tidewater for decades and my body misses being that hot in the summer; I now live in coastal Northern California, which almost never feels warm for someone who grew up where I did. To this day I hate air conditioning and it gives me headaches and I feel terrible in it. I will not hang out in a building that has air conditioning on to the point where I leave restaurants etc. (just last Friday made a friend leave a bar and go to another with me because it was air conditioned.) I even had my mechanic deliberately break the air conditioning in my last car so that if someone asked me to turn it on I could honestly say that it does not work; I insisted on not learning how he broke it so I could not fix it. In the SF Bay Area we have micro-climates: sometimes you can stand on the top of a hill in San Francisco where it is 65 degrees F and see with your eyes the top of Mount Diabolo 25 miles away where it might be 90 degrees F. In the summer I will check the temperature on the inland side of our local range of hills and many times, when the other side of the hills has been 15 degrees F warmer than my apartment, I have driven the 15 miles just to hang out in a parking garage outside and write code on my laptop (all the cafes are air conditioned). When I have sometimes left my car in the sun and I return to find it about 120 degrees F inside, I will just sit there and just enjoy it for a while before driving off. Again, you just get used to heat. My body just craves being really hot, especially for a few months in the summer. My favorite temperature is about 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

It wasn't as hot before A/C