Title: How air conditioning changed America forever - Vox
Headings: How air conditioning changed America forever
How air conditioning changed America forever
When air-conditioning was first invented, hardly anyone wanted it
"the machine pretty much fell into oblivion"
PEOPLE OBJECTED TO IT FROM A MORAL STANDPOINT
SOME doctors recommended drinkING as little as possible ON A hot day
"energy efficiency - yes, that is a problem, however it is also a problem to die of heat exhaustion"
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Content: I think they objected to that from a moral standpoint. So the idea that human comfort would be mixed up with morals, well that's sort of a bad place for the PR of air conditioning to exist. And when we got into the idea of having a machine that could actually cool the air (and the first examples of that were in the 19th century), there was one man who was ousted from his church because he had seen such a machine. And it was powered by a steam engine, and his church committee had accused him of lying because such a thing could not exist. It was against nature. So transferring that into the modern time, I think there were many people who thought "God made bad weather so you should just put up with it." And I think the idea of dealing with heat was to ignore it. Indeed, in Victorian society, one must ignore hot weather because it did not exist. That was simply the given standard of behavior for the time. And so many people would ignore it and then keel over from heat stroke.