When
someone asks my wife how people lived in Texas before air-conditioning, she says
that no one did. That is partly true and partly false, but we can all agree that
the a/c makes surviving Texas’ summers a happier experience. The old timers coped,
however, and here is how. The first Texans of European extraction, the Spanish,
built adobe houses with thick walls with a door or window on all four walls which
were opened in the evening to allow cooler, night air to circulate throughout
the room. All openings were closed at sunup, trapping the cooled air inside which
most days survived until mid-day. Likely the family would sleep outside, where
the air was cooler still. This is more practical in western Texas, where air contains
less humidity.
In the nineteenth century, German dairymen cooled the milk
coaxed from their cows by draping wet clothes over the filled milk cans, and allowed
evaporation to keep temperatures inside the cans between 70 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
Later Texans adapted evaporative cooling to rooms, then homes and larger facilities.
Once more, this works better in dryer climates than in East Texas.
Some early East Texans built kitchen facilities in separate buildings to keep
heat generated while cooking out of the living/sleeping areas of their homes;
this also helped with fire control since kitchens were the most likely part of
the home for a conflagration to commence. Others dampened bed sheets before retiring,
another evaporative trick.
The arrival of electricity enabled the use of
fans powered by a source that did not tire. Emerson and other manufacturers offered
oscillating fans, ceiling fans, and eventually window or attic fans. The latter
partially reversed the Spanish/adobe principal because one closed all doors and
windows except a few and the fan drew air through them in the process of pushing
it out of the room or house. The movement of the air provided a cooling sensation—as
long as one remained in its path. But, not until the advent of refrigerated cooling
did real air-conditioning reach East Texas and revolutionize the lives of East
Texans. It appeared first in theatres, then retail stores and office buildings,
and in homes and autos, and finally in trucks and even enclosed tractor cabs.
Now we can live, not just survive, East Texas in the summertime. |
