Category: Sustainable living

My heat pump (which also is a cooling system) had been working perfectly for fifteen years. It chose to stop running on a hot Saturday afternoon when the outdoor temperature was 88F. The temperature inside the house slowly rose to a miserable 89F.

When critical systems in a house fail, the perversity principle requires that they fail on a weekend, when the kind of businesses you need are closed (though they might make an emergency call for a hefty additional fee). Lucky for me, my nearest neighbor is retired from the heating and cooling business, and he came to take a look.

His diagnosis, in which he says he is 90 percent confident, is that an electrical relay on the air handler has failed. That’s a relatively minor thing, and if we can acquire a new relay on Monday then the fix won’t take long.

Two rooms in the house have ceiling fans, which help. But my upstairs office does not. I went up into the attic and fetched an oscillating fan that had been used in the downstairs bedroom before I had a ceiling fan installed in that room. I had forgotten how amazing fans can be!

I well remember what it was like growing up in the South in the 1950s, when some businesses had air conditioning but pretty much nobody had it in their homes or cars. It was fans that made life in the South bearable before the age of air conditioning. Architecture and landscaping were important, too. It’s why houses of that era had big front porches and shade trees.

Here in the American South, heat pumps have been common for decades. Almost everyone has a heat pump and has some understanding of how they work. In a climate that doesn’t get too cold, heat pumps are an efficient source of heat. The heat pump’s true magic, though, is that it’s reversible. It can pump heat into the house from outdoors, or it can pump heat out of the house. There is a limit to a heat pump’s efficiency, though. When heating, a heat pump can raise the temperature of the outside air only about 50 degrees F. So, if it’s 20F outdoors, a heat pump will have to rely on assistance from electrical heating coils, which are not efficient.

I have seen a good many stories lately about how efforts to introduce heat pumps in the U.K. aren’t going very well. A friend recently returned from a visit to a Scottish island, where a local had complained about the cost of operating a newly installed heat pump — £2,000 for one winter’s worth of heat. My guess would be that the problem is not so much the heat pump as a drafty and poorly insulated house. Here in American South, people who live in older houses often use heat pumps for cooling but still use gas or oil for heating.

The sound of the fan, and the start of the Democratic National Convention tomorrow, have stirred up clear memories of the summer of 1960, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with the sound of her large floor-model oscillating fan and watching the party conventions on television. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon.

Correction: Upon reflection, I realized that my summer memory had to have been from 1960 rather than 1956, and I have edited the paragraph above accordingly.

I’m also remembering the importance of ice for living in the South before the days of air conditioning. My grandmother was fond of Pepsi. Pepsi over ice was regular thing with my grandmother, especially in summer. At home we drank far less Pepsi and far more iced tea. There was always iced tea in the refrigerator, and there was always ice in the freezer.

Normally, now, I don’t use much ice, even in the summer. But one of the first things I did after the air conditioning stopped yesterday was to turn on the icemaker.

Click for high-resolution version.

One of the finest writing instruments ever made is the No. 1 pencil. Whenever I have bought No. 2’s, because No. 1’s are often hard to find, I have regretted it. Pencils with harder lead don’t produce good contrast. And one has to bear down harder.

The first twelve or so years of my career were as a newspaper copy editor. (In the mid-1980s, when newspapers started using publishing systems built on computers, I became a systems guy, because I was good with computers, and it paid better.) In those pre-computer days, the type was set in the composing room with hot-lead Linotype machines. The newsroom was full of typewriters, always heavy office machines, usually Royals made between 1945 and 1958. The copy paper actually was cut from the same huge rolls of newsprint that went onto the presses. A big hydraulic knife in the pressroom was used to cut the copy paper 8.5 inches wide by about 20 inches long. When you loaded a typewriter with paper, you always used two sheets of copy paper, with carbon paper in the middle. The top sheet, of course, went into the production process. The carbon copies from the entire newsroom were collected each evening (by a copy boy) and filed away, in case there were ever any questions about whether errors originated with reporters or whether the errors were made during the editing and production process.

Copy editors made their marks with, and only with, No. 1 pencils. This was not so much because the marks ever needed to be erased. It was because No. 1 pencils make clear and readable marks, and the need for less pressure meant much less fatique for the copy editors’ hands. To have edited with hard-lead pencils would have been miserable work.

So, when a copy editor’s evening started (usually around 4 p.m. for morning papers), he or she would sharpen a handful of pencils. During the evening, there would be multiple returns to the pencil trimmer. We wore out a lot of pencils.

In those days, everyone recognized everyone else’s handwriting. By the time a piece of copy was ready to go to the composing room through the pneumatic tube, there would be many pencil marks on it. Every editor would know quite well who had done all the edits, all the way back to the reporter.

Years before I entered the newspaper business, one of the jobs of copy boys would have been to carry copy from the newsroom to the composing room. By the 1930s, pneumatic tubes were the rule, larger versions of the pneumatic systems that large department stores used to use for making change from a single room somewhere where all the cash was kept.

While I’m on the subject, one of the nicest things that ever happened to me was getting a weekend job as a newspaper copy boy when I was in high school. There was no job in the world that I would have been better suited for. One of my favorite parts was looking after a room full of Teletype machines — loading paper, changing their ribbons, tearing off copy, sorting it, and distributing the copy to the right editors in the newsroom. I also typed stories going out to the Associated Press onto a Teletype system that had a keyboard and a tape punch. Punching paper tape before sending the stories allowed typing errors to be corrected, and sending stories out with punched tape meant that the Teletype machine could operate at full speed (about 60 words a minute), reducing the time used on the Teletype’s telephone circuit. Typing directly onto the wire was possible, but it was frowned upon.

Maybe someday I’ll write about the machines that were used to transfer photos over telephone lines, from coast to coast as well as transatlantic. One of those machines (in Nuremberg) actually appears briefly in the Netflix series on the Third Reich (now streaming on Netflix). The machine involved a rotating cylinder to which the photo is attached. Anyone who noticed it in the documentary is unlikely to have figured out what it was. A few of them must still exist in museums.

A few years ago, Ken saw the copy tube (below) in my attic and said, “What is that.” Oh how things have changed, that someone as deeply immersed in writing and publishing as Ken didn’t recognize it.

⬆︎ This copy tube used to belong to the San Francisco Examiner. The typewriter is a Royal HH from around 1952. I have about a dozen typewriters in my collection. Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ This recipe for quiche was typed on a Royal KMM typewriter on newsroom copy paper. You can see some of the pencil marks over pâte brisée and the scratched-out typos. As for pâte brisée, you can be very sure that copy editors were as careful with French punctuation as with English. Whereas the uncaught typo “parpare” embarrasses me now, 45 years later. I have used this recipe for 45 years. Click here for high-resolution version.

(The Royal KMM typewriters were made from the late 1930s into the 1940s. It’s one of the models of typewriter that helped fight World War II. It has been said that World War II could not have been won without typewriters. The logistics of war are formidable. But consider also how the Nazis managed logistics and kept records, and what the evidence at the Nuremberg trial might have looked like had it not been neatly typed.)