I grew up in a two-story house that had no air conditioning. The upstairs bedroom that I shared with my two brothers was unbearable for most of the summer. When I was about 8 years old, my dad finished our basement and installed two ancient dehumidifiers that made it a refuge from the heat.
Actually, it made it worse when we had to climb upstairs to bed.
When I was 10, my dad could afford a vacation for his wife and ten children to the northern part of Lower Michigan on a lake. It was 10 degrees colder there than in Chicago and much less humid. For four weeks every year, our family was together and comfortable.
My dad could afford a vacation in the north woods. Most families couldn't. They were forced to use their imaginations to keep cool. And, of course, there was always the local movie theater that, even in the 1960s, still advertised that it had AC. My mother would only let us see movies approved by the Archdiocese of Chicago, so no gory westerns and definitely no James Bond.
Movie theaters and department stores began to advertise that they featured AC at the turn of the 20th century. AC was invented in 1902, but it would be 50 years before it became affordable for most middle-class families. AC in theaters was thought to have contributed to the rise of the summer blockbuster.
Until then, the ice business was booming.
In lieu of widely available AC, Americans relied on a sophisticated infrastructure of ice transportation, sometimes referred to as the ice trade. This cross-country and transatlantic network began in the early 1800s. It persevered until the 1930s when mechanical cooling and refrigeration became more widely available. Huge blocks of ice, sourced from frozen lakes in the Northeast, were cut with handsaws and other tools, then moved to insulated warehouses where they could be stored for months.
Horse-drawn wagons would then transport these ice blocks all across the country, and special shipping vessels were even built to send U.S. ice as far away as Kolkata.
But, as anyone who’s watched an icy soda turn watery on a summer day can probably gather, moving hard ice to warm climates wasn’t exactly foolproof. Author Salvatore Basile notes in his 2014 book, Cool, How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, that an ice shipment might lose two-thirds of its weight to melt by the time it finally reaches its destination. That massive inefficiency, and the considerable labor involved, earned shipped ice the moniker “white gold.” Basile notes the price of ice in the mid-19th century was 10 times the price of beef.
The ice wasn't exactly like the ice you pull out of your fridge to put in your scotch. "Pollutants from the lakes where the ice was sourced would often get trapped inside the blocks, and horses would sometimes leave droppings on them during the journey," notes Popular Science. "When the ice finally did melt, it often emitted a foul odor."
Wealthier Americans had the ice delivered straight to their homes where it would end up in stylish "ice boxes." My grandmother called our refrigerator an "ice box" until the day she died.
This was once one of the most important things in the house.
— End3of6Days9 (Helen) 🇺🇸 (@end3of6days9) August 21, 2026
Long before most of us were around, families depended on it every single day—and keeping it doing its job meant regular visits from someone who came right to the house.
It eventually disappeared as something much more… pic.twitter.com/sDiTiaAn4U
Those less wealthy would sometimes put the block of ice on the ground and sit on it, fanning themselves to stay cool. The "ice box" was also used to keep the new-fangled ice cream treats from melting before being served for dessert.
No ice? No problem. Just carry your mattress up the stairs of your two-flat or apartment building and sleep on the roof. If the roof wasn't accessible, you could always try sleeping on the fire escape, as long as the cops didn't roust you out for blocking the fire exit.
Before central AC, homes were designed with the heat in mind. "Many houses were built with cupolas (basically the summer version of a chimney), which use a stack effect to naturally send warm air upward and out," says Popular Science.
Ceilings were also higher (12-14 feet instead of 10 feet), and porches came into vogue. There were front and back porches and even rooftop porches to catch a breeze.
Perhaps no other method to beat the heat got people's creative juices flowing more than the design and manufacture of fans.
Odds are anyone enduring a toasty day today without AC will instead turn to an electric fan. But both AC and electric fans are relatively new inventions. Manual, hand-powered fans, by contrast, date back several thousand years, at least to ancient Egypt. Fan designs evolved over the years in both size and style, with some so large they required servants to operate them.
But for the average American staying cool, the fan they were most likely to use dates back to the early 1800s, with the advent of the first mass-produced paper folding fans. They weren’t the most effective, but their cheap design meant they were often handed out for free at larger gatherings and events like churches or political rallies.
The U.S. was also a testbed for a number of failed fan innovations. President George Washington was among the early adopters of a strange “fan chair” contraption that used a foot pedal to power a connected overhead fan. Benjamin Franklin even invented his own similarly styled rocking chair, with a pedal powering a looming palmetto-leaf fan.
One enterprising fellow invented a wind-up fan.
Just 5% of European homes have air conditioning. Their stubbornness costs tens of thousands of lives every summer. So far this year, 25,000 Europeans have died of the heat. Meanwhile, 90% of U.S. homes have some kind of air conditioning.
According to the CDC's National Vital Statistics System, direct heat-related deaths in the U.S. reached a record high of 2,415 in 2023 and remained elevated at 2,394 in 2024. Many deaths where heat plays a role in heart attacks and other common causes of death are unreported, but it's safe to say it's nowhere near 25,000.
Popular Science reports that "The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts two-thirds of households worldwide could own an AC system by 2050."
It's a whole lot simpler than delivering foul-smelling ice to everyone.
