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Life Is Getting Better
By Douglas Carswell
Mississippi was hit by epic thunderstorms the other week. Like thousands of other people across the state, perhaps you were left without electricity?
For me, no electricity meant trying to work without air-conditioning. Not having any AC was not a productive experience. As I sweltered in the heat, I was left wondering how people in Mississippi managed before the advent of AC?
Invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier, within living memory, there were plenty of homes and offices in Mississippi that did not have any AC. For a start, it was once very expensive. According to the website HumanProgress.org, the cost of AC units has fallen by 97 percent since the early 1950s. AC only became ubiquitous in cars and shops within the past two or three decades.
Imagine what life would be like in Mississippi without refrigeration? As late as the 1950s, that was how a significant number of people in our state lived.
When the first self-contained refrigerator, the Frigidaire, went on sale in 1919 it cost $775 – or about $12,000 in today’s money. Today, you can buy a vastly better refrigerator for only a fraction of the cost.
It’s not only the costs of keeping cool that have come down.
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