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A Brief History of Keeping Cool: Air Conditioning Through the Ages

Perhaps you too have lined up a bunch of glasses of ice water in front of a box fan in front of your face in a desperate attempt to cool your overheating brains before full-on cranial core meltdown. It didn't work all that well, probably. Life without...

Perhaps you too have lined up a bunch of glasses of ice water in front of a box fan in front of your face in a desperate attempt to cool your overheating brains before full-on cranial core meltdown. It didn’t work all that well, probably. Life without air conditioning sucks, at least within a certain band of latitudes. Of course, our general overheating situation is just going to get worse, exacerbated by our increasing energy needs driven by things like, say, air conditioning. Turns out we’ve been at the A/C game for a long time, and history is full of fairly ingenious schemes of keeping cool, most of them a bit more renewable than your standard wall outlet.

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The timeline above first appeared on Motherboard in June, 2011.

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