[whycome]

The 1896 New York heat wave lasted 10 days and killed ~1500 people. And has just 2 short paragraphs in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Eastern_North_America_hea...)

> "This was 10 days [with temperatures reaching] 90 degrees at street level and 90 percent humidity, with temperatures not even dropping at night,"

https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-18...

It wasn't necessarily a wake-up call then. But it may have at least been the crisis that spurred one guy...

[calgarymicro]

> A majority of the deaths were of working-class men in their twenties who performed manual labor.

Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.