Notes From a Heatwave

Two women sleeping on their fire escape, photographed on August 30th, 1948 by Tom Gallagher for New York Daily News. Days before, temperatures reached 108℉ in New York City during a heatwave that killed at least 30 people.

“Angels are unthinkable / in hot weather,” — Monica Youn, ‘A Parking Lot in West Houston’

The story goes like this: the Sackett and Wilhelms Lithography & Printing Company was struggling to keep the humidity levels in their production rooms low. Their paper was warping from all the moisture in the air and the inks weren’t drying properly. Engineer Willis Carrier was hired to find a solution. The result was a machine — the Apparatus for Treating Air — that pumped air across metal coils cooled with ammonia that drew moisture from the air. Not only were these spaces much drier but, in the hot summer months of 1902, significantly cooler than the rest of the building. It’s said that the room where Carrier installed his new invention became the preferred lunch spot for Printing Company employees.

Yet, air conditioning didn’t stay inside factory buildings for very long. Movie theater owners became one of Carrier’s biggest customers as once sweaty, crowded theaters became places where movie-goers could find relief from the sweltering summer sun. Eventually, smaller air conditioning systems would make their way into the homes of the wealthy, although it wasn’t until the 1940s that the window-sized units we know today became cheaper to produce and more widely-accessible, bringing mechanically-chilled air to more homes and buildings across the country. Now approximately 10% of households…