The swamp cooler is still the most common house-cooling apparatus in El 
Paso.  Although highly wasteful of water, it's considerably cheaper to 
buy and to run than refrigerated units.

Art Harris

Micki Ryan wrote:

>To Joan Goodbody:
>
>This process is exactly how the old swamp coolers worked in the California
>Central Valley and in Arizona, and probably in Florida too.  There were
>portable swamp coolers for cars, too, in fact I recently sold one from our
>family garage at a historical society auction. You added water to them just
>like a radiator, fit them to your partly opened car window aided by struts
>that fastened on the door, then as you drove the moving air passed over fins
>that twirled over soaked membranes made of woven jute inside the reservoir
>and moved the cooled outside air into your car through the partly opened
>window (while water dripped all over your car door). Crude, but both my
>husband and I remember as kids how nicely it cooled the car on those endless
>trips. Haven't seen one in use since about 1951, except in Tucson where
>swamp coolers were still in use through the 1970s (at least they were in
>cash-poor student housing!). Now it sounds like an excellent environment for
>Legionnaire's disease, but we're all still walking around.
>
>Check with museums in Bakersfield and Tucson, surely their ephemera
>collections contain manufacturers' instructions for operation of swamp
>coolers. And weren't there desert bags that tied to the front of your car to
>send cool air across the radiator?  They were made of jute also.
>
>Micki Ryan
>Curator
>Highline Historical Society
>Burien WA
>
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-- 
Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum
University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX  79968-0915
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