Urgh, it’s so hot I can’t think of anything else.
Where can our minds go, what energy can we pull up for anything, when all of our body’s and mind’s resources are focused on just trying to survive this smothering, stifling heat.
I’m too hot to write, but that’s OK, because you’re too hot to read.
It can be worse, though — believe it or not. The highest recorded temperature ever in Martinsville was 105 degrees, on Sunday, Aug. 2, 1942.
And THAT was during the days before air conditioning.
Sort of.
The modern electrical air conditioner was invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier, but central air conditioning wasn’t widely available and common in homes until the 1970s.
Of course, “widely available” is subjective. If you ask a lot of people around here, they’ll remember fanning themselves, taking three showers a day and sleeping on the sleeping porch in the 1970s here to escape the heat; it took longer for a lot of places to be saturated with air conditioning.
The first car to have air conditioning, by the way, was the Packard, in 1940.
Window-unit air conditioners were invented in 1931 by H.H. Schultz and J.Q. Sherman, and they were in common by the 1950s.
But let’s go back to Aug. 2, 1942, and Martinsville’s record high of 105. But a great many Martinsville residents were not in Martinsville at that time.
Soldiers and support staff were around the world at war. Those in inland France experienced temperatures in the high 70s, while those in the coastal areas of Southern France had the mid-80s. It reached 90 in Indonesia and slightly higher in parts of Asia. Though it was cooler than back home, they were under the hardship and deprivation of war.
The average high in July in Martinsville is 88 degrees, and July 21 averages out to being the hottest day of the year.
I used to blame August for being the hottest month — have you? But looking at statistics, we see that the average daily highs for July are between 87 and 88 degrees, and the average daily highs for August are very slightly cooler: between 87 and 85 degrees.
We should be getting an average rainfall of 3.3 inches in July and 3.2 inches in August.
I’m searching through weather statistics hoping to find one or some to shine some hope on cooler summer days, but alas, it’s only looking worse as I go on.
Let’s look at the coldest day of the year in Martinsville: Jan. 29, when the daily highs range between 29 degrees and a balmy 48 degrees.
The coldest recorded daytime high temperature for Martinsville was a high of 36 degrees in December 1929, and the record low in Martinsville was Dec. 30, 1917.
Let’s just leave it at that.
