The Days Before Air Conditioning

Fiona
So, electricity was an essential precursor of air conditioning, and there was electricity in Singapore from as early as the 1870s. And then you have the developments in the early, late 19th to the early 20th century of refrigeration techniques and newer cooling technologies. So, air conditioning really comes in during the 1920s and the 1930s, first with mechanical ventilation, which is based on fans and air purification. And then by the 30s, something that’s more recognisable, is our modern style of air conditioning. 

Jimmy
When was air conditioning actually invented? 

Fiona
I think in the early 1920s. 

Jimmy
Okay. So, Singapore wasn’t that far behind then.

Fiona No. So, I mean, the idea of cooling the air is ancient. Lots of countries in Asia have had ways of cooling air for a very long time, but the technology of air conditioning really developed commercially in the US. And then it was exported out, and it came directly to Singapore. 

[Music playing] 

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating. 

If you’re living in Singapore, you may have noticed that the weather here tends to be somewhat hot and humid on an average day. The temperature can go up to a high of about 33°C, while the humidity level hovers around 82 percent. That’s an average day, though. On Singapore's hottest day recorded so far, which is Saturday, 13 May 2023, the mercury reached a scorching 37 degrees in Ang Mo Kio. 

All of this is to say that when Lee Kuan Yew described air conditioning as the greatest invention of the 20th century, well, some days in Singapore, it’s hard to disagree. We work in air-conditioned offices, we shop in air-conditioned malls, and many of us live in air-conditioned homes. As ubiquitous as it is today, though, I still remember a time when it was much less common. 

So, I was surprised to learn that air conditioning is not that new a technology. It first came to Singapore about 100 years ago. Of course, it took a while for the technology to catch on. Here to tell us all about the history of air conditioning in Singapore is Fiona Williamson, who’s a professor in environmental history at the Singapore Management University. 

She’s written an interesting article in BiblioAsia on how air conditioning was introduced here. It’s based on her recent book, Imperial Weather, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Welcome to the BiblioAsia+ podcast. Fiona. How’ve you been? 

Fiona Williamson
Very well, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Jimmy
So nice to have you. How long have you been in Asia? 

Fiona Williamson
Around 15 years. 

Jimmy
So how have you adapted to the weather? You came from the UAE before that? 

Fiona
UK. 

Jimmy
Oh, in the UK before that? 

Fiona
Yeah. So, it was a very big contrast from the classic English weather with the gray drizzle. Yes. The cooler temperatures. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Fiona
I’ve been here long enough to acclimatise. 

Jimmy
Speaking of acclimatising, before air conditioning, how did people keep cool in Singapore in general? 

Fiona
Well, long before air conditioning, it was more a question of architectural solutions. So, we all know, structures like the incredible Peranakan building, which is just around the corner from the National Library on Armenian Street. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

Fiona
But these buildings were created with central air wells with sort of things like high ceilings, which encourage airflow. The windows are placed in a particular way to encourage airflow to come through the building. And we must also remember that the temperatures weren’t quite as high in those days. Because of climate change, up until the 1950s, 1960s, temperatures were a lot lower. 

So if we’re talking about pre air conditioning days, the temperatures would have been about 1.5 degrees lower on average and there was less urbanisation, so you don’t have so much of the urban heat effect. So to keep cool, it wasn’t quite so much of an issue because it wasn’t so hot anyway. You would have periods of heatwave but yesterday’s heatwave is more like today’s normal. 

So, yeah, it wasn’t quite so bad. The only one caveat I would mention, though, is I’m talking about kind of incredible buildings like the, you know, the Peranakan Museum. These were homes for the wealthy. Your average person wouldn’t have lived in these types of places. 

But even then, things like shophouses, which were a large part of the Singapore city centre. They still had high ceilings. They had the verandas, the five-foot walkways. All of this was designed with the idea of airflow and ventilation. So, you know, these older-style buildings were perfectly designed for the tropical weather. 

Jimmy
Right. Okay. But that’s like, you know, buildings for homes in general. When you start talking about bigger buildings, like in concert halls or cinemas, it must be different. 

Fiona
Yes and no. I mean, they were still all designed with this idea of kind of like, large spaces, ventilation. You would have had fans in the ceiling, of course, whether they were manual before the days of electricity. But if you think about things like, you know, the obviously iconic Raffles Hotel, again, it’s built in this style where you have blinds, you have these verandas, everything is designed again for airflow. If you walk through the Raffles Hotel, you can actually feel a breeze because it’s designed in a way to maximise airflow. 

Jimmy
Okay, tell us about how air conditioning was introduced to Singapore. When and where and how did it happen? 

Fiona
Okay. So I think one of the important things to remember about this is, there have been precursors. You couldn’t have air conditioning until you had electricity. So electricity was an essential precursor of air conditioning, and there was electricity in Singapore from as early as the 1870s. And then you have the developments in the early, late 19th to the early 20th century of refrigeration techniques and newer cooling technologies. So air conditioning really comes in during the 1920s and the 1930s, first with mechanical ventilation, which is based on fans and air purification. And then by the 30s, something that’s more recognisable, is our modern style of air conditioning. 

Jimmy
When was air conditioning actually invented? 

Fiona
I think in the early 1920s. 

Jimmy
Okay. So, Singapore wasn’t that far behind then. 

Fiona
No. So, I mean, the idea of cooling the air is ancient. Lots of countries in Asia have had ways of cooling air for a very long time, but the technology of air conditioning really developed commercially in the U.S. And then it was exported, and it came directly to Singapore from the U.S., actually through the Carrier [Air Conditioning] Company, which was a U.S. company. So, Singapore was a relatively early-adopter. 

Jimmy
Okay. It is impressive. But then how prevalent then was, you know, air conditioning in the 1920s? What kind of buildings had it? 

Fiona
Well, here’s the thing is, it’s very much based on who had electricity. 

Jimmy
Ah, okay. 

Fiona
So, in those days, there was a power station. But the power station was mainly for some of the commercial infrastructure, like the trams. The main buildings would have been the ones that were large enough or could afford to have their own generator, like electrical generators. So, you’re looking at commercial enterprises, basically. 

To have an air conditioning unit in your home, it would have been very expensive. And you would also have had to have had your own personal electrical generator as well, because most houses, domestic houses were not on the national grid. There wasn’t a national grid. They would have been commercial enterprises that could have afforded it. 

[It was also available where there] would be a real reason to have it. So, for example, hospitals – the operating surgery in Tan Tock Seng was one of the first places to have it because operations go better if you’ve got cooler air rather than heat and humidity. And places where you have a lot of people gathering, like hotels, concert halls, dance halls – dance halls in particular were one of the early adopters because it was part of the USP, the unique selling point, you know, [people] came to our dance hall because [they had] air conditioning. 

Jimmy
It's obviously more pleasant to dance with air conditioning than with tropical heat. 

Fiona
Exactly. And another thing about air conditioning that we tend to forget about today is that in those days, everybody smoked. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Fiona
And if you’re in a dance hall where you’re, you know, maybe breathing a little more deeply because you’re being physically active, and it’s full of cigarette smoke, as well as being hot – it’s going to be pretty unpleasant. 

Jimmy
That does not sound that fun. 

Fiona
Yeah, so a lot of these early commercial enterprises were like, okay, come and dance with us, you’ll be cooler, but you’ll also be healthier. You know, it’ll purify the air. It will get rid of all the fumes. And it’ll just be this much nicer environment to dance in. 

Jimmy
Okay. So, do we know the first building in Singapore to get air conditioning? 

Fiona
One of the first buildings was the Capitol. 

Jimmy
All right. 

Fiona
Which actually, you know, very close to the library. And this, of course, was a major cinema. And owned by wealthy entrepreneurs who could afford to invest and they actually had the mechanical ventilation first and then updated again around 1936, I think. 

Jimmy
Right. Well, all this to say that, you know, with mechanical ventilation systems in the 1920s or 1910s, but, prior to that, you know, people coming from Europe or wherever coming to Singapore or to Asia had to encounter the heat and humidity. And so how did they sort of react? How did they write about it? 

Fiona
So, there’s a really big kind of historical literature about adaptation in Europeans in tropical atmospheres. And there are two sides to this story. On the one hand, there’s this kind of fascination with the tropics and the incredible colors and the heat and the vibrancy. But on the other hand, there’s a negative side where a lot of European doctors felt like the heat and the humidity would be unhealthy. 

And, in particular, it was unhealthy for the European body because it was unused to, it was not acclimatised. So, there were a lot of medical studies, talking about the heat and the humidity in the 19th and very early 20th centuries. By the early 20th century, a lot of that thinking was dying away because it was kind of accepted that it was not as bad as people once assumed. 

But at the same time, I mean, it’s going to be hard to adapt, certainly to start off with, if you’ve just arrived, and you’re not used to living in such heat. I think one of the things that’s interesting to me is thinking about transport at that time. These days you get off the plane. I can go all the way from the UK to Singapore in 12, 13 hours. 

I get on the plane, it’s cold and wet, winter maybe, and I get off and the heat and humidity just hits me. But in those days, you have to think, you would have been coming by boat. You would have taken weeks and you’d have been actually adapting all the way. It wouldn’t have just hit you like walking out of the door. 

You would have adapted as you went through the Middle East. You would have been on deck as you kind of came past India. And the heat would have gotten stronger as you came along. So, over several weeks, the body would have already started to acclimatise. The other thing to think about as well is that most of the Europeans who came here were not coming here. They were relatively middle class. They were colonial service. They’re working for the civil service. And so, they would have had relatively larger houses. And those larger houses would probably not have been in the city centre, but maybe slightly outside. In the area now, there is the Tanglin area on top of Orchard Road. So, these are houses that are usually on slightly in elevation, or have a lot of land, big gardens. 

So you would have got more air flow, more ventilation. 

Jimmy
Right. Talking about colonial civil servants. Tell us about meteorology as an imperial science or a colonial project. How does one understand meteorology within that particular framework? 

Fiona
So, meteorology has been really important to the colonial enterprise, right from the very beginnings of European expansion or exploration. Firstly, because of oceangoing or seagoing navigation, you need to understand the weather. Especially, you know, in the days before steamships, you were completely reliant on the winds, on the weather. But when talking about the British colonial context, when they first came here, they went to Penang in the 1780s. 

And one of the very first things they did was take the temperature and the rainfall. And they did this for about six months after they first arrived, because it was super important for them to understand whether, you know, the area around Penang Island would be suitable for habitation. The weather, of course, is important for that, but more importantly, suitable for long term habitation in the sense of growing fruit, vegetables, crops, ultimately ones that could be commercial. 

So, they did lots of studies of the natural environment, the soils, the local plants, flora, fauna as well as the weather. And you see these arguments in the very early days of settlement establishing the Straits Settlements, that arguments were being used like, well, you know, this place has a deep harbour, but then this place also has a great climate. 

It would be fantastic for growing commercial crops at a later date. So, the weather was really important right from the beginning as part of this commercialisation of the new areas where the British were going. 

Jimmy
Right. And I think in Singapore, when the British first arrived, rainfall and temperature were one of the first things that they began recording. Records actually go quite far back, don’t they? 

Fiona
They do. There are records here literally from 1819. There are gaps, huge gaps, but so there are records. Actually, I think there’s some early ones even going back to about 1815 from Singapore. With early commercial, just exploration. And then from 1819 onwards, right through, well, until the present day, there are gaps around the 30s, 40s and 50s, because meteorology wasn’t being kept by anyone in particular. It was a bit of an ad hoc affair. But from the 1860s onwards, it became more of a kind of a government-owned enterprise. And from then on, we’ve got more accurate continuous records. 

Jimmy
In Malaya, I mean we have these observational stations that are used to gather meteorological data. You know, why do we need a station and how do they, can’t you just put it in a cup with a machine with a ruler or something to measure rainfall. 

Fiona
Well, early rain gauges are pretty much like that. I mean, they tend to be like a standard size. But yeah, they are pretty much just, you know, a very large kind of cup. With a measuring apparatus. So rainfall is actually one of the easiest things to measure. And rainfall has been measured in countries in Asia since the 1500s in places like Korea, China. So, this is very early technology that was well known around the world. 

Temperature was harder because you had to wait for the invention of the thermometer. So, the Fahrenheit thermometer was brought in from the UK. It was made by instrument manufacturers in London. And then brought in by the East India Company ships, via India and then down to Malaya. 

And then that was what was being used in Georgetown, in Singapore and in Malacca for very, very early observations. So, the Straits Settlements, the urban centres have got those observational sites. Originally, they were more likely to be military sites. So, observations would be kept at Fort Canning because it was a military site where you had officers who were used to making measurements because they would have done it on board ship. 

And later you have more ad hoc stations. So, plantation owners, for example, were really interested in rainfall because they were growing crops. So, they might make their own observations. So those were some of the reasons for the kind of observational sites that were either plantations or civic sites. So libraries often were places where – 

Jimmy
Oh, really? 

Fiona
Yeah, libraries would, they would keep observations. And I think mainly it’s because these were government owned. You know, so it’s like a government exercise. And these are government-owned sites. Botanic Gardens, obviously, I suppose. But then hospitals, from the 1880s, hospitals were the main observation points for the whole Malay Peninsula. And Tan Tock Seng actually had its own observatory. 

Jimmy
Oh. When you say an observatory, what did it have? 

Fiona
Instruments like the barometer, rain gauge, thermometer. 

Jimmy
All right. Did the colonial government attempt to manage the weather and make Singapore or Malaya more livable? 

Fiona
Yeah. I mean, I think they would have loved to have done more, to reduce the humidity. But, you know, the technology simply wasn’t there. But, what they did try to do was to manage the weather through infrastructure. 

As the town started to grow, it was obvious from the beginning that there was an issue particularly with water, not just the lack of water for people to drink as the population grew. But water was also required for the port because ships would come into the ports, to take on fresh water. So, as the population grew and as the commercial enterprises grew, there was a need for more fresh water. And actually the commercial reasons were probably even more so than the population increases. But then conversely, you have the opposite effect. 

You know, this is a monsoon climate. Every December, January, there were heavy rains and we don’t really notice it in modern day Singapore. Yeah, we can get annoyed because, you know, it’s been raining for the entire week. It’s, you know, difficult to manage. But in those days, if it rained for an entire week, whole parts of Singapore would have flooded. 

And not just like a little bit of inconvenience, but, like, seriously flooded for days. And this then had a knock-on effect in terms of disease as well. So, it was really in the government’s interests to both provide better sources of water through reservoirs, but also to control water that fell so that it wouldn’t flood. 

So, lots of big engineering projects were taking place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Jimmy
Clearly with Singapore becoming increasingly urbanised, cutting down forests. You have the urban heat problem. Can you talk about how the environment in Singapore began to change during this period? 

Fiona
It changed quite quickly. And I think it’s interesting actually, looking at colonial sites like Singapore because say, in England, towns developed much more slowly over long, long, long periods. Here, because of the kind of rapid migration and the rapid development, you get this kind of lesson in environmental change in microcosm, you know, some things that will happen over like 100 years rather than 500. 

So, you can almost see change happening. If you were here in the 19th century for one generation, in your lifetime you’d have seen so much change happen. And from very early on, land was cleared for plantation, commercial use. But the city grew as well, very, very quickly. Not through birthrate, but through immigration. And the sheer numbers of people coming in to seek new opportunities from all over Asia, and then settling here, staying for the long term. So, urbanisation happened very, very fast. The majority of the changes actually happened probably post-1950s. It’s actually been because of, again, you know, urbanisation happened mainly since the 1950s, but a lot of that original kind of forests and stuff that was developed into plantations was already gone in the 19th century. 

And after the plantations, a lot of them shut down. A lot of the newer housing estates that we have are actually built on old plantation sites because they had already been cleared. 

Jimmy
You know, that obviously has implications, right. Because obviously, if you have a city and you have roads, you don’t have earth and grass and trees to absorb the water. 

Fiona
Or the heat. 

Jimmy
Or heat, yes. So, that increases flooding. Of course, you have a greater population, so more people are affected. And then, you know, it’s much hotter. 

Fiona
Yeah. It is a vicious cycle. It is very difficult for governments, especially in those days with limited resources to do really too much about it. And I think one of the things that I found interesting is that you always think of the British Empire as being incredibly wealthy. And certain people in certain parts of it were, but really, when it came to a lot of the colonies in Southeast Asia, the government in London kind of said, okay, you can just do your own thing. You look after yourself. And so, when it came to creating a big reservoir project or something, the local people here had to rely on a lot of donations. Major philanthropists, to actually give the money to sponsor some of these projects. So, you can see engineering projects that were proposed, but they just never got enacted.

So, the government had the right idea, but they just simply couldn't do a lot of things because they didn't have the money or the resources. 

Jimmy
I was reading your book where you talk about MacRitchie reservoir, but there was a mistake? Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Fiona Williamson
Actually Brenda Yeoh from NUS has written quite a lot about this as well. But that, the MacRitchie project. Yeah, it was funded in the 1840s, maybe 1850s. And it took about 20 or 30 years to come to fruition. The original money was given by a wealthy Chinese philanthropist. And he bequeathed the money saying that Singapore needs this reservoir. We need the water. And he gave the money. But the problem was the amount of time it took. Of course, you have inflation. So, the original costs and the money that he gave wasn’t enough to complete the project because of inflation. And then, of course, over that period of time, the urban centre and the commercial centre had developed so much more was actually needed. 

So, it was like it never quite kept up with need. And there was a major drought in 1877, and the newspapers were just full of complaints like, we’ve got this reservoir sitting there and it’s not working yet. And it finally partially came online at the end of 1877. And then the government kind of propaganda machine pushes out all this: Oh, isn’t it wonderful? You know, the drought has been resolved because of MacRitchie and actually, you know, the drought was just over anyway. But yeah, so it took ages and funding was a huge, huge problem. And also because reservoirs in those days (and still are in many respects) were built on what we call the gravitation principle. 

Jimmy
What does that mean? 

Fiona Williamson
So, you build it on a hill so you don’t need to rely so much on pumps to pump the water from the reservoir, to have enough pressure to actually push it into people’s taps. Or wherever it is you want it to go. You need the pressure. So, gravity provides the pressure. Of course, you know, that area around MacRitchie is elevated, but Singapore doesn’t have mountains. So, it was never quite high enough to provide enough pressure without using additional pumps. They didn’t have enough pumps and the gravity wasn’t quite enough. So, there were some flaws in the original design. 

Jimmy
Okay, okay. That’s a shame. It’s a very pretty reservoir. 

Fiona
Well, it works well now. 

Jimmy
You’re comparing present day Singapore to the early 20th century. How different or similar are discussions about climate issues? 

Fiona
There are similarities. They understood that the climate changed in the early 20th century. And they were also particularly concerned about human impacts, anthropogenic impacts on the climate. They already understood, from the 19th century, that humans could impact the climate. And things like chopping down trees would change, could increase heat, could potentially decrease rainfall. 

So, these questions were already understood. And there are questions even in the local council minutes. Governmental minutes from meetings were, you know, so and so from representing a particular area of Singapore would say, you know, Mr. Speaker, you know, what can we say about chopping down trees? Are we going to address this problem? 

So they’re actually kind of asking: given that we know that climate change is induced by people, what are we doing to address this? So, they were asking these questions over 100 years ago. Which is not that dissimilar today. I think the difference is that the science was not as strong. 

It was more like inferred. So, people knew that cities tended to be hotter than rural areas because you could feel it. It was experiential. People knew that temperature had increased slightly in areas where there had been deforestation because they’d seen it on the meteorological records, but science was still not as strong. And also it just wasn’t considered to have been a big deal. 

They were worried that if the climate changed, rainfall would change. That might have an impact on agriculture. They were not concerned that there would be the impact like we know today about the rising temperatures and how it would affect human health, human survivability and adaptability. They just didn’t think it was ever going to be that big a deal. They were just concerned about whether we would have enough rain to water the rubber plantations. So, the scale wasn’t there, so the urgency wasn’t there. 

Jimmy
Okay. I’d like to turn to your book, Imperial Weather. Tell us what the book is about.

Only it’s a big question, is it not? It’s like 260 pages or so. 

Fiona
So, I guess it’s about all aspects of thinking about weather in the Straits Settlements, especially Singapore, largely from a British colonial perspective. So, it starts off with thinking about what was weather science, how it was understood, how the climate was understood and how climate change was understood. It then moves into thinking about controlling the weather. 

So, I look at things like how the government controlled floods or droughts or tried to control heat and humidity through the introduction of cooling systems like air conditioning. So, it’s kind of about all these different ways of thinking through weather. It talks about weather and health and how that was conceptualised by the colonial government. It talks about managing the weather, but also a little bit about how weather kind of created the rhythms of life in the Straits Settlements as they were then. 

Jimmy
It’s a wonderful book and everybody should read it and buy it. What kind of sources did you have to refer to or to plumb – 

Fiona
In order to write? Well, I mean, this is one of the reasons why the book took so long to write.

Jimmy
How long did it take to write? 

Fiona
Probably about two to three years. And it’s because you can’t just go to an archive or a library and do a search for weather because the weather is so ubiquitous. It’s not catalogued. You can’t go to the National Archives of Singapore and just put in “weather” because weather accounts or meteorological records might be in something else and is not going to be catalogued in that way. So, you have to look for sources. I read a lot of things like agricultural records, plantation records, colonial government records. And you just have to go through a lot of material to find. You had to … 

Jimmy
… sift through all these… 

Fiona
…many, many different records, everything, manually. And of course, Singapore was a British colony. So, a lot of the records are not in Singapore. 

Jimmy
Oh, okay. 

Fiona
So, it would have been very convenient for me working at SMU to have just gone round the corner to the National Archives. But a lot of the records are actually in Cambridge. From the British, Malayan Association. A lot of them were in London, in the National Archives in Cuba. And they’re in different places as well, even like the Royal Society for more things like, the scientific records. I went to the Wellcome Trust in London, which is a medical archive. 

Jimmy
Oh. 

Fiona
How did it help? So that’s the experiments that they were making – medical experiments that they were [doing on] the effects of heat on the human body. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Fiona
So, there’s all sorts of things. That’s one of the reasons why it took so long, because there was just so much. And pretty much any record, so personal diaries. At some point, you’re going to come across some reference to the weather because there’s going to have been some bad weather, a storm, a flood or something like that. 

Jimmy
So, you go into personal diaries looking for people and they say, “oh, it rained really badly today”. 

Fiona
Yeah. Also the newspapers. So, what I would tend to do as a starting point is I would maybe go through all the newspapers. I went through about 100 years worth of newspapers looking for floods and droughts. 

Jimmy
Is this in Singapore? I mean, in Malaya? 

Fiona
Yes, so these are the National Library’s… 

Jimmy
Oh, NewspaperSG. 

Fiona
Yeah, brilliant resource. 

Jimmy
It is wonderful. 

Fiona
And so I went through about 100 years of that looking for floods and droughts because those are things that stand out. And so once I had those particular years, I could then maybe go to somebody’s diary and look up that particular year and see if they mentioned it. So, then I can then get context. So, if there was a major flood in 1926, for example. If I’ve got a diary from 1926, I can then go through the diary and say, okay, did they experience it? I can then go and look at district office records. So, the National Archives of Malaysia, for example, has some really good district records. So, I can then go to, like, district officer records, people who are actually employed to work in the regions, some of the rural areas, and see what they say about it. And they would often say they have records of flood heights or impact on local people in this area. You know, the floodwaters reached six feet deep and there were five casualties or, you know, information like that. So, you build this picture from lots of different sources. It’s like putting together a jigsaw. So official records, personal records. And they all come together to provide context. 

Jimmy
What was the genesis of this book? 

Fiona
Actually, more than 15 years ago, I was asked to look up, for a project I was working on back in the UK, meteorological records for Malaya. And as I started to look up the actual meteorological data, it was a scientific project. And from that project, I started getting interested in the weather here. By that time, I was living out here as well. And the meteorological data in itself is useful for scientists. But as a historian, it's not such fun, interesting information. It’s just pure data. It’s great for scientists because they can put it into models to see how climate changes are taking place. 

But for me, I wanted to start to find out a little bit more about, well, how are they making these records? Why is there a gap for this year? So, I started finding out a little bit more context. You have to find out more about the history to find out whether it’s why there’s suddenly a 10 year gap in a record. So I just started looking more and more, and it just kind of evolved over time to suddenly become this much larger project. I had lots, lots more material. 

Jimmy
[The book] could be even thicker than this? 

Fiona
Yeah, it could actually be.

Jimmy
You’re a full-time professor at SMU but you’re also the co-president of – and this is something I’ve never heard of – the International Commission for the History of Meteorology. What is it, and what does it involve? You get to go up on weather balloons and things? 

Fiona
I wish. No, it was established about 20 or so years ago by a very eminent historian of meteorology in the U.S., Jim Fleming. And he and some of his colleagues were all doing history of meteorology subjects and really felt like there needed to be like a group that brought people together. And he was very successful in rallying people and making this kind of what’s been, I suppose, a largely informal group of people with an interest in the history of meteorology. There's now several hundred members across the entire world. 

Jimmy
You meet every year. 

Fiona
No, we don’t have funds necessarily to meet up and have an annual conference. But we do have events, we sponsor panels at conferences. I’ve just come back from the UK, actually. We had a nice, sponsored panel in Cambridge. So, yeah, we do all sorts of events around the place just promoting the history of meteorology. 

Jimmy
It sounds fascinating. You teach all this at SMU. If a student came up to you and said, “why should I sign up for your course”? What would you say to them? 

Fiona
Well, I would say that if you want to find out a different side of Singapore history to the one that you perhaps learned at school, and if you want to understand more about how Singapore has grown in terms of its environmental history, or climatic history, then you come to my class. Because I think that seeing the growth of a city or the development of a city is very different from thinking about, say, a political narrative of a city, for example. 

But the weather intersects with everything, it intersects with environmental issues, and it intersects with political issues. Intersects with the economy. So, it’s actually a way of seeing history through this very kind of holistic lens, but through the lens itself being the weather or the environment. It’s just a different way of looking at things. 

Jimmy
Okay. We do this with all our guests. We get them to complete a sentence. If I say to you “climate history” what would you say? Climate history is… 

Fiona
Awesome. 

Jimmy
Why is it awesome? 

Fiona
Because it teaches you about everything. You know, the climate is so ubiquitous to our existence as humans. It dictates what we eat, how we behave, the times of day in which we do things. And even today, you know, kind of very air conditioned, a world where we feel like we’re very distinct from climate. 

And this is something that I say to my students, we still don’t realise how dependent we are on the climate. For example, if there’s a major drought in Russia or the U.S., suddenly, grain prices go up. If there’s kind of problems in Southeast Asia due to major floods, suddenly it’s harder to get rice. 

And that actually affects the prices of food on your table. It really does still affect us in every way and understanding about the long history of it and how, for example, we’ve known about climate change. It’s been happening for such a long time. 

Jimmy
I think we can all agree that it is very important. You know, there’s a great understanding these days about the impact of climate change. Do you think we’re likely to make a difference and stop climate change? 

Fiona
I think we need to move quicker. I think that one of the things as a historian that depresses me slightly is we have known about it since the 19th century. That’s unsurprising. And although maybe the scale of the understanding of the impact wasn’t necessarily understood. What I also know from kind of looking at much later history, like the ’70s and the ’80s, politicians have known about it in the ’70s and ’80s and it actually really requires a lot of political will to have done more in the past. And I think we really should have started in the ’70s, in the ’80s, to have done more. So, we’re now playing a game of catch up. The Singapore government, of course, is really addressing climate change, providing a lot of funding for research, which I see through the university side.

But Singapore is a small country in terms of the world. It’s really the bigger countries like the US – 

Jimmy
China. 

Fiona
China, yeah. That needs to step up because they’re the ones that have the biggest impact but it’s a group effort. 

Jimmy
Yes, of course. Fiona, thank you very much for coming on the BiblioAsia+ podcast. We are really happy to have had this conversation with you. To learn more about the history of air conditioning in Singapore, you have to read Fiona’s article that is on the BiblioAsia website at biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg. 

Her book, Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya is available at the National Library. Fiona, thank you very much for coming on the show and I wish you good luck in volume two of your book. 

Fiona
Indeed, thank you very much. 

Jimmy
Thank you. 

[Music playing] 

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Fiona Williamson, “Playing It Cool: The Early History of Air Conditioning in Singapore,” BiblioAsia 21, no. 4 (January–March 2026).

Fiona Williamson, Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025).

This episode of BiblioAsia+ was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Nookcha Films. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Fiona for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.