A (hot) blast from the past

In the Germantown section rain fell shortly before midnight, bringing with it some measure of relief for all sections of the city. A ten-degree drop in temperatures, accompanied by winds that seemed cool after the frightful heat of the day, afforded relief which the weather authorities declared was only local and only temporary. Storms were general throughout Eastern Pennsylvania, but in many cases curiously local.

Soon after the heat had reached its height, the sky filmed over wioth clouds, which grew thicker and thicker as the hours advanced.

Comparatively low humidity — 38 percent at 1 p.m. — was a merciful boon granted to human kind.
Fresh death were added to the week's toll. Prostrations ran into the hundreds again. Manufacturing plants and workshops had to shut down, their workpeople simply toppling over at their labor. Hog Island registered a temperature of 122 — a terrible contrast to the 10 and 12 degrees below zero in which the men worked during the early days of the yard last winter.

Nine more direct deaths were reported yesterday. To them should be added several deaths from drowning where persons had sought relief bathing and swimming in the Delware.
 Yesterday's weather was so hot that pedestrians, stopping to look in shop windows as an excuse to stop, were seen to move away as if to escape heat borne up through gratings and from furnace and engine-rooms undreneath the pavements. This was simply the solar heat, reflected back from asphalt and from iron, brick, cement and concrete. To step from a house-door into the street was to face almost a furnace breath.

Four thousand men at Yorkship Village, near Collingswood, N.J., had to knock off work at noon, when the thermometr rose to 109. Twenty-six thousand were sent home from Hog Island, where several hundred were overcome. The Midvale Steel Company, the Navy Yard aircraft plant, the Disston works at Tacony, the Cramp Shipbuilding Company, the John B. Stetson Company, the Kirschbaum Clothing Company and the Ford Motor Company shut down. Baldwin's kept open, with no prostrations. In most of these places work will not be resumed until the weather moderates. And the weather authorities promise no early relief. …