Hacker News Books

> Places that had been intolerably hot and humid — including some of the cities where Frederic Tudor had sweated out the summer as a young man — were suddenly tolerable to a much larger slice of the general public. By 1964, the historic flow of people from South to North that had characterized the post-Civil War era had been reversed. The Sun Belt expanded with new immigrants from colder states, who could put up with the tropical humidity or blazing desert climates thanks to domestic air conditioning. Tuscon rocketed from 45,000 people to 210,000 in just ten years; Houston expanded from 600,000 to 940,000 in the same decade. In the 1920s, when Willis Carrier was first demonstrating air-conditioning to Adolph Zukor at the Rivoli Theatre, Florida’s population stood at less than one million. Half a century later, the state was well on the way to becoming one of the four most populous in the country, with ten million people escaping the humid summer months in air-conditioned homes. Carrier’s invention circulated more than just molecules of oxygen and water. It ended up circulating people too.

* Via: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/06/the-air-conditionin...

Air conditioning was actually originally created for humidity control for printing presses and their ink. Temperature control for humans came later.

If you live in a somewhat humid area, it's worth considering getting a whole house dehumidifier in addition to an air conditioner:

* https://blog.totalhomesupply.com/whole-house-dehumidifier-pr...

The air temperature may be 24C/75F, and thus the AC is not active, but the RH may be >70% and you'll still be uncomfortable / "hot". If you don't have separate dehum the only way to deal with it is to drop the air setting further—in which case you start 'freezing'.