It’s been a hot summer. How does 2025 compare to Lexington’s hottest days?

Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history — some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.

It’s been a long, hot summer.

While temperatures in August will stay in the upper 80s and lower 90s, they don’t come close to the record-setting heat of 1936.

Now is the time to channel your inner grandparent, head out onto the porch, look wistfully off into the distance, and say to no one in particular, “It’s bad now, but not as bad as that summer of 1936.”

That was the year Lexington broke the record for hottest recorded temperature — twice. On July 15 and July 10, 1936, temperatures reached 108 degrees both days.

A heat wave was affecting much of the United States. Poor farming practices had led to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s around the Great Plains. A drought had settled in, and the lack of vegetation to mitigate hot temperatures made the heat worse.

In July 1936, states in the Plains, Upper Midwest, and Great Lakes regions experienced the hottest summer on record. That summer produced weeks of scorching weather in Lexington.

Between June 29 and August 22, 12 of the top 15 hottest recorded days in Lexington occurred. According to the National Weather Service, that year saw 21 days above 100 degrees — three in June, nine in July, seven in August and three in September.

It was weeks of intense heat.

Between July 8 and July 15, temperatures never fell below 103 degrees during the day and hovered between 70 and 76 at night. After a few weeks of temperatures in the high 80s and mid 90s, the temperatures soared again, hitting in the triple digits between August 18 and August 22.

Between 1900 and 2019 there were only 19 years that saw any days with temperatures over 100 degrees. The years with the second-most number of days above 100 degrees were 1954 and 2012 — each with seven days in the triple digit temperatures.

Keep in mind, this was all before in-home air conditioning. While the first air conditioner was patented by the Carrier Engineering Corporation in 1922, those systems were mostly for larger buildings like movie theaters and office buildings.

Modern air conditioning has a Lexington connection, too.

Lexington’s Margaret Ingels worked for Carrier in 1931 and invented the sling psychrometer, a device that measures relative humidity in a smaller space. It’s the component that causes the air conditioning to kick on and maintain the temperature within a space.

Thanks to her work, air conditioning in homes became more viable.

Still, air conditioning was pretty big and pretty expensive. In 1932, H.H. Schultz and J.Q. Sherman filed for a patent that put an air conditioning unit on a window ledge. Henry Galson developed a more compact and inexpensive version and by 1947, there were 43,000 of the units in windows across the country. It wouldn’t be until the 1960s that central air really started to take off in American homes.

Have a question or story idea related to Lexington’s 250-year history? Let us know at 250LexKy@gmail.com.