Car swamp coolers…
And yet people presumably drove through the Desert Southwest for years in vehicles without existing air conditioning and lived in the South of the US without it as well. Did many fewer people live in the deep South before AC was widely available and affordable, using “swamp cooler-type evaporation devices? Curious about if people drove through the heat like that back before vehicle AC and how they did it?
Car swamp coolers…
Growing up in Alabama, when I was a kid we often did night driving on long trips in the summer when a car didn’t have A/C. I’m not old enough to remember cars regularly not coming with A/C. But there were times my father thought he fixed the A/C only for us to learn right before a trip that it wasn’t fixed.
You should do a read-through on this thread.
New Mexico’s US Route 285 Ranked the Most Feared Road Trip in America
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4165734/posts
“Before immigration kicked in and cars improved about overheating and batteries, and with better tires, lots of travel was somewhat challenging.
Interstate 10 was sparse in the 60s with those small-town gas stations closing at night, there were water barrels on inclines to refill all the overheated radiators on passenger cars.
Females traveling cross country without a man was very rare, with all the breakdowns, flats, long stretches, gas cans, water pouches for drinking water hanging from the hood ornament to cool, brakes overheating, vapor lock, having to spend a night in a gas station parking lot waiting for it to open in the morning so that you could fill up to continue, pay phones and towns few and far between, no air conditioning and the open car windows air frying you.
At night
As a child, our vehicles only had “4-55 air” - 4 open windows at 55 mph. I can remember sweltering pretty badly on trips. On a long trip across several states, my little brother’s blanket blew out of the back window of the station wagon (he was in the very back). We were on a relatively new stretch of interstate & exits were something like 20 miles apart. Dad said he was not going back, but after MILES of screaming with my brother as red as a beet (no joke) he did go back. We found the blankie in the road with a big black tire tread mark on it. My brother sat by the washing machine & dryer the entire time it was cleaned.
My dad had advanced heart failure - he would not have made it very long without AC. When the AC went out on his old truck, he shelled out the bucks to get it fixed - said he “had” to have it. We have come close to checking him into a hotel when the power was out at the house due to storms.
You do become acclimated to heat - the folks in the good old days were acclimated. If you had health issues affected by heat, like heart failure, you just didn’t live as long.
One thing to remember is that the human body acclimates itself to the prevalent temperature. If you are living without air conditioning, then when the temperature spikes in the summer, you’ll have a hard time for a couple weeks, and then your body adjusts. But if you are living with air conditioning, your body never adjusts.
...but tolerable before drinking and driving laws
Swamp coolers don’t work very well, if at all, in the humidity of the south.