Global climate change is starting to have some real effects on how people are living their lives – and where they’re living them.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950s, it seemed that the planet’s warming had already arrived. Granted, those hot days and sultry nights made the tall corn grow, but it also made for uncomfortable humans in that era before affordable air conditioning.

For most of us, the only time we enjoyed air conditioning was at the barbershop or at the movies. Automobile air conditioners existed – we saw them in newspaper and magazine advertisements – but I never knew anyone who had one. Taking trips during those years was a trying experience since the entire nation seemed to be under construction as the interstate highway system was being built. Driving through those endless construction areas meant either suffering stifling heat with the windows rolled up or getting covered with road dust with them rolled down.

And while window air conditioners for the home were available they were expensive and scarce. Only one family in our farm neighborhood had one, and it was a marvel, keeping the ground floor of their farmhouse cool.

The rest of us had to deal with the hot weather of those years with a bewildering variety of electric fans - oscillating fans, box fans, window fans, hassock fans. On hot Sundays at church, the big floor fans barely seemed to move the humid air as parishioners vigorously cooled themselves with cardboard fans with the local funeral home’s advertising on the front.

The climate the settlers encountered here when they arrived from the East, especially those who came from the Atlantic coast, was challenging. Summers were extraordinarily hot and humid and winters were extraordinarily cold and humid. No ocean breezes existed to moderate summer’s heat or winter’s chill. Instead, westerly winds came sweeping down across the Prairie Peninsula from the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains driving fierce blizzards in winter and hot dry spells in summer.

The wool clothing that worked pretty well for all seasons out East wasn’t appropriate on the Illinois prairie, so lighter weight linen and linen blends became favored for summer wear until cotton became cheap enough for all income levels to afford.

Residential architecture, too, was influenced by the prairie climate. Houses had to somehow be kept cool in summer and warm in winter. During the brief log cabin era, that wasn’t much of a problem. Log cabin walls have good insulating properties, so those cabins tended to stay cooler in summer and warmer in winter. But as settlement continued, there simply wasn’t enough timber available to build enough log buildings, so the balloon frame method of construction was invented. Essentially, it is the way we build houses today, using sawn lumber of set dimensions to build a structure’s frame to which roofs, walls, ceilings, floors and siding are attached.

In fact, balloon frame construction was, if not invented in Chicago, at least perfected in northern Illinois over a period of several years. Along with putting buildings up, carpenters and architects – sometimes one in the same skill back then – had to account for those prairie weather variations.

Gradually, designs began to include features that helped deal with both cold and hot weather, along with such refinements as window and door screens in place of shutters. Metal screens permitted windows to be open during the summer months to encourage ventilation while keeping out insects and other pests. That was no small consideration during the era when insects were still carrying serious diseases such as malaria.

Tall ceilings allowed summer heat to rise away from living areas, while double-hung windows featured movable upper sashes that could be opened to vent hot air that had collected at ceiling level.

Mechanical cooling of private homes was, however, not much more than a dream during the 19th and well into the 20th century.

But other innovations were developed that would one day lead to just that. Starting midway through the 19th century, keeping food cool through the use of home iceboxes grew in popularity. Ice was harvested during the winter months on virtually every river and most lakes in the upper Midwest to supply ice for home ice boxes and other uses. Ice harvesting operations were located at almost every Fox River dam, with thousands of tons warehoused each winter. The ice was then used to cool food in homes and businesses, as well as for the meatpacking industry that used it to preserve animal carcasses shipped east from Midwest meat packing plants.

Mechanical ice manufacturing plants began replacing ice harvesting operations early in the 20th century. By then, refrigeration technology was advancing and electrical power was available to operate ice-making machinery. The ice harvesting industry put up a fight, disdainfully labeling the mechanically produced product “artificial ice.” But increasing pollution of Midwest streams and lakes made using natural ice a chancy business; it was much easier to manufacture uniform quality ice. By 1910, several of Chicago’s 71 ice dealers were advertising manufactured ice.

Once the technology was understood, it wasn’t a big leap from making ice to producing cool air to make buildings more comfortable.

Some of the first air-conditioning systems were installed in movie theaters and barbershops. Many early systems were simple heat exchangers that were hooked up to a town’s municipal water supply. Water flowed through the heat exchanger’s fins and coils as an electric fan circulated the cooled air through the occupied portions of buildings. The systems were efficient and relatively inexpensive to operate, provided there was access to plenty of cheap municipal water.

By the 1930s, refrigeration technology had gotten to the point that it was being used to cool buildings. Gradually, those systems became more efficient and more compact until by the 1950s home air conditioners were available – at a price. Air conditioners cost about $200 back then, which translates to about $2,000 in 2022 dollars.

Nowadays, we consider central air almost as important a home necessity as hot and cold running water and indoor bathrooms. But it wasn’t all that long ago that summer heat was just something we were expected to deal with.

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Copyright © 2022 Shaw Local News Network

Copyright © 2022 Shaw Local News Network