A large swathe of the southern US experienced a series of massive thunderstorms the other week. Hundreds of thousands of people were left without electricity.
For me here in Mississippi, not having electricity meant trying to work without air-conditioning. It was not a productive experience.
As I sweltered in the heat, I was left wondering how people in Mississippi managed before the advent of air-conditioning?
Invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier, within living memory, there were plenty of homes and offices across America that did not have any AC. For a start, it was once very expensive. According to the website HumanProgress.org, the cost of AC units has fallen by 97 percent since the early 1950s. AC only became ubiquitous in cars and shops within the past two or three decades.
Imagine what life would be like if you did not have refrigeration? As late as the 1950s, that was the norm for millions of Americans.
When the first self-contained refrigerator, the Frigidaire, went on sale in 1919 it cost $775 – or about $12,000 in today’s money. Today, you can buy a vastly better refrigerator for only a fraction of the cost.
It’s not only the costs of keeping cool that have come down.
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