WILLIS CARRIER CREATES THE FIRST AIR CONDITIONER

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Willis Carrier, the American engineer who created the first air conditioning on a day like today in 1902.

Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876-October 7, 1950) was an American engineer, best known for inventing modern air conditioning, inventing the first electrical air conditioning unit in 1902.

In 1915, he founded Carrier Corporation, a company specializing in the manufacture and distribution of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

Willis Haviland Carrier was born on November 26, 1876, in Angola, New York, the son of Duane Williams Carrier (1836-1908) and Elizabeth R. Haviland (1845-1888). He graduated from Angola Academy in 1894 and from the Buffalo High School in 1897.

He studied at Cornell University starting in 1897 and graduated in 1901 with a Master of Engineering degree.

After graduating, Carrier joined the Buffalo Forge Company as a research engineer.
In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to an air quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, New York, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognized as the world's first modern air conditioning system. It was so humid in summer that the paper grew and shrank, which resulted in poor quality images, because the color printing process involved running the same piece of paper up to four times, each with a different color ink.

The 1902 installation marked the birth of air conditioning because of the addition of humidity control, which led to the recognition by authorities in the field that A/C must perform four basic functions:

-control temperature

-control humidity

-control air circulation and ventilation

-cleanse the air

After several more years of refinement and field testing, on January 2, 1906, Carrier was granted U.S. patent 808,897 for an Apparatus for Treating Air, the world's first spray-type air conditioning equipment. It was designed to humidify or dehumidify air, heating water for the first function and cooling it for the second.

In 1906, Carrier discovered that constant dew-point depression provided practically constant relative humidity, which later became known among air conditioning engineers as the law of constant dew-point depression. On this discovery he based the design of an automatic control system, for which he filed a patent claim on May 17, 1907. U.S. patent 1,085,971 was issued on February 3, 1914.

In 1908, the Carrier Air Conditioner Company of America was created as a subsidiary of the Buffalo Forge Company, with Willis Carrier as its vice president.

On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented what is perhaps the most significant document ever prepared on air conditioning -Rational Psychrometric Formulae- at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the Magna Carta of Psychrometrics.

This document tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.

With the onset of World War I in late 1914, the Buffalo Forge Company, where Carrier had been employed for 12 years, decided to confine its activities entirely to manufacturing. The result was that seven young engineers pooled together their life savings of $32,600 to form the Carrier Engineering Corporation in New York on June 26, 1915. The seven were Carrier, J. Irvine Lyle, Edward T. Murphy, L. Logan Lewis, Ernest T. Lyle, Frank Sanna, Alfred E. Stacey Jr., and Edmund P. Heckel. The company eventually settled on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark, New Jersey.

In 1930, Carrier started Toyo Carrier and Samsung Applications in Japan and Korea. South Korea is now the largest producer for air conditioning in the world. 

The Carrier Corporation pioneered the design and manufacture of refrigeration machines to cool large spaces. By increasing industrial production in the summer months, air conditioning revolutionized American life. The company became a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation in 1980, and remained so until 2020, when it was spun off again as an independent publicly traded company.

The Carrier Corporation remains a world leader in commercial and residential HVAC and refrigeration.

In 2018, the Carrier Corporation had sales of $18.6 billion and employed 53,000 people.

The Willis H. Carrier Total Indoor Environmental Quality Lab at the Syracuse University's Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems is named in his honour. The lab was established in 2010 with a donation from the Carrier Corp.

More information: Willis Carrier

My family lived off the land and summer evening meals 
featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, 
fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream 
with strawberries from our garden. 
With no air conditioning in those days, 
the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.

David Mixner