Donning sweaters and Snuggies to combat the office’s deep freeze in the heat of summer

Enter air conditioning, says Gail Cooper, a Lehigh University historian who wrote “Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment.”

“Air conditioning and fluorescent lights made block buildings possible,” she says.

Really. You shouldn’t have.

What’s interesting about the introduction of air conditioning in the workspace, Cooper says, is that the development was tied as much to architectural design — making square, cheap buildings practical — as it was to climate. It was hard, at first, to sell employers on the notion that their workers deserved to be comfortable during the day, so air-conditioning companies tried to frame it as a productivity issue.

And productivity was an issue. As the implementers of incremental process, the federal government had contrived a mathematical formula to determine whether it was too hot for its employees to work. When the outside temperature plus 20 percent of the humidity reached 100, workers would be sent home — a sort of reverse snow day policy that could have drastic effects in a place like Washington. In 1953, the city slogged through a week-long heat wave that resulted in illnesses, heat stroke and at least 26,284 federal workers being sent home.

In 1956, the General Services Administration got a large appropriation to retrofit all federal buildings with air conditioning. A quarter of that went to buildings in Washington.

Salvation had come to the city.

‘A matter of poor science’

And then hell froze over.

“My colleague does the fingerless gloves,” says Elisa Ranck, who works in public health in the District. “She’s excited because now they’re easier to find” year-round, what with everyone’s fingers tapping on smartphones.

Her colleague is a woman. While it would be a stretch to say that all frozen office workers are women, please feel free to count how many of the summer cocoa-clutchers in your office are men. None. There will be exactly no men, swaddled as they are in the suits and the neckties and the socks. There will be at least two women, and one who keeps an electric kettle at her desk along with several packets of Earl Grey.

And yet, recommended office temperatures do not seem overly extreme. In 2009, the GSA came out with several recommendations for saving energy and boosting performance in office buildings. The GSA affirmed that the optimal temperature for office spaces in summer was between 74 and 78 degrees — but that 40 percent of the buildings surveyed were keeping their temperatures lower than that, leading to 61 percent of building users feeling too cold.

The reason for the overly cold offices?

“It’s really a matter of poor science,” says Alan Hedge. Hedge directs the Human Factors and Ergonomics teaching program at Cornell University, meaning that he spends a lot of time thinking about how humans are impacted by their work environments.

The trouble with the science, Hedge says, is that early studies of thermal comfort were based on absolute data: temperature, humidity and air flow. New models take into account more relative information, like the fact that your body is constantly recalibrating itself to what it expects the temperature will be.