I was thinking back to when over 90% of the cars didn't have air conditioning and neither did the houses. This was in the 1950s when I grew up. Houses usually had Swamp coolers on the roof, however. Swamp coolers are basically a big fan that blows air into your home sucked through fiber gauze wet with water continuously. So, basically if you are in the desert your home now feels and smells just like a wet swamp but it really doesn't reduce the temperature that much but it does humidify and make you feel a little cooler if you stand directly under the vent from the roof or window where the swamp cooler is mounted.
Before the 20th Century the tricks for staying cool when the temperatures were over 100 degrees Fahrenheit were to get under a tree(hopefully with a good breeze), get into a root cellar underground where the temperature stays about 60 degrees or so year around, or to put a cool wet cloth on your forehead and not wear too many clothes. Starting in the early 20th Century Ice became more available as big refrigeration units were first manufactured. Then Ice could be chipped and set in front of an electric fan inside a house or office and this might make the temperature bearable.
My memories of the 1950s and 1960s were mainly without air conditioners anywhere but in large stores, restaurants, or fast food places. So, generally life was pretty hot everywhere when it was hot. I remember spending 4 hours or more stuck in traffic in Los Angeles in smog so bad you couldn't get your eyes to stop watering and barely able to breathe on the freeway and people passing out in cars and getting headaches a lot from the combination of smog, smoke from cars, heat and the inability to get out of over 100 degrees temperatures while being stuck on the freeway.
However, even when we would travel in 115 degrees to 120 degrees across places like the Mojave Desert and Arizona and New Mexico traveling with a headache on the verge of passing out with heat prostration was a normal thing. So, finally my Dad would buy me an electric fan built on top of a squirt bottle and that helped a little. Without that we wet cloths and put them on our faces and then stuck our heads out the window. This helped a lot but then after doing this for a few hours your face would get chapped and this would cause another problem of bleeding sores on one's face.
So, being innovative in whatever weather condition one finds oneself in is the key to surviving it.
Another interesting thing used up to the 1950 and maybe for some into the 1960s was the Desert water bag. You filled the desert water bag that held likely a quart or 2 of water and since the bag was made of canvas when you drove your car the bag (that was hung over the front latch to your hood in front of your grill and radiator got air cooled through evaporation much like a swamp cooler did. So whenever you stopped you had emergency air cooled water across a desert or other wide expanse. Or if your radiator boiled over you could put the water in your radiator so you didn't die alone in the heat of the desert and get to somewhere you could fix your car, refill your desert water bag and move on.
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