Who invented air conditioning?

Last updated on December 2nd, 2024 at 07:41 pm

Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876–October 7, 1950) is widely regarded as the father of air conditioning. Through his work at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company, Carrier was tasked with creating a solution for excess humidity that plagued the company’s printing processes. He was just 25 years old at the time.

A FEW HONORARY MENTIONS

Willis Carrier is widely credited as the father of the modern air conditioner. There are a few who came before him, though, and these great minds contributed greatly to the research and breakthroughs that led to the ideas and theories behind his invention.

The Scottish physician William Cullen evaporated liquids in a vacuum as early as 1748, thus creating the first principles behind system evacuation.

In 1758, Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley conducted the first documented tests for using evaporation as a means to rapidly cool an object. Through various tests using a mercury thermometer, they discovered that liquids lost heat as they evaporated and, as such, dropped in temperature. They also noticed that blowing on the liquid sped up the evaporation process. More volatile liquids, such as alcohol, had a greater cooling effect and could be cooled down well below the freezing point of water. This research was critical in our understanding of the concept of the latent heat of evaporation and laid the early groundwork for the development of refrigerants.

In 1820, Michael Faraday discovered that compressed ammonia turned to liquid. This liquid ammonia cooled the room around it as it evaporated. Ammonia would later be used as one of the more prominent refrigerants in the industry. This natural gas has made a resurgence in recent years as part of modern refrigerant blends.

In 1842, John Gorrie built an ice machine that used compressor technology to compress air and water to make ice. Air then blew over the ice, which then cooled the air in the room. His ice machine was patented in 1851; however, Gorrie died in 1855, before his machine could be widely distributed.

WILLIS HAVILAND CARRIER

Willis Haviland Carrier was born on November 26th, 1876, in Angola, New York. He studied at Cornell University and graduated in 1901 with a Master of Engineering degree. One year later, Carrier was tasked with remedying a humidity issue at the Sacket-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company.

Humidity during the summer caused the paper to expand and contract and, as a result, negatively effected the picture quality. The printing process ran the same piece of paper multiple times, each with a different colour ink. On July 17th, 1902, Carrier submitted drawings for a machine that used an industrial fan to blow air over water-filled steam coils. The cold water in the pipes caused the excess humidity to condense on the coil and produce cooler air while lowering the humidity in the room, and in 1906, Carrier was issued US Patent 808,897 for an Aparatus for Treating Air. That same year, he would discover the law of constant dew-point depression. In 1908, the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America was founded as a subsidiary of the Buffalo Forge Company.

On December 3rd, 1911, Carrier presented the Rational Psychrometric Formulae at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a document that was a marriage of the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus allowing for a more precise design of air conditioning systems. In June 1915, Willis Carrier, J. Irvine Lyle, Edward T. Murphy, L. Logan Lewis, Ernest T. Lyle, Frank Sanna, Alfred E. Stacey, Jr., and Edmund P. Heckel pooled together their life savings to form the Carrier Engineering Corporation. By 1922, Willis Carrier had created the more powerful centrifugal refrigeration compressor as a precursor to the modern air conditioning system.

STUART W CRAMER

In 1906, Stuart Cramer, an American engineer, invented a device that helped him control the humidity in his textile factories. He achieved this by combining moisture with ventilation in order to ‘condition’ the air. Over the course of his career, he acquired more than 60 patents for humidity control and ventilation equipment. In his 1906 speech before the American Cotton Manufacturers Association, he coined the term air conditioning. Willis Carrier later incorporated the term into the name of his company.