Got my first AC when I was 16, found it in the garbage. Fixed it and charged it at my friends dads shop and had to pay my dad 25 bucks a month to run it. Summers in NY are awful, worth every penny.
Before AC we lived at the edge of the mountains and we had a huge window fan in the dining room pulling air out of the house and the windows open in the bedrooms with a floor fan pulling air into the house from the bedroom nearest to the mountains. It was hot and sticky but bearable if you slept in your underwear and used no covers. We survived just fine.
My Dad’s company ran multiple coolers and there was one big walk in. Sometimes in the summer me and my brothers would go to his work on our bikes and grab a coke and just go stand in the big walk in to cool down. Finally in the midst of a blistering hot summer he got a good deal on an AC unit and installed a massive AC unit over the front entrance of his business and we were introduced to air conditioning.
After that half summer of having it at his business he waited until the fall and got a better deal and he bought a big window unit for our living room and the next summer we ran it from about 11:00am to up into the morning with a floor fan pulling the cool air down the hallway into the bedrooms. Needless to say on many a hot July night me and my brothers would grab a sheet and pillow and camp out in the living room to sleep.
My wife grew up with central AC and can’t imagine living without it. In my current house a couple of summers ago it was hot and the AC went out on a Friday night. Well the second floor was shall we say quite toasty. What are we going to do she asked? I said open the windows, set the desk fan we use for noise in the window of the bedroom and open the bathroom window and we will get a breeze moving across the bed. No covers and no pajamas, you will live. The kids had ceiling fans in their rooms they turned on and opened the windows. She survived, lol!