How air conditioning got its cool start
The AC we take for granted. Its genesis is actually pretty amazing. Beats talking about politics.
The summer of 1902 in Brooklyn, New York, wasn’t just hot; it was wet, heavy, suffocating. Like South Padre in August at noon with no offshore breeze.
For the workers at Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company in Brooklyn, the humidity was miserable, but for the company’s owners, it was catastrophic. They were in the business of high-end color printing, a precise art back in the day that required running paper through the press four separate times—once for each color of ink. But the relentless humidity was wreaking havoc on the process.
The first ink would never properly dry, soak into the paper, and by the time the second ink hit the press, the registration would be off. Not by much, but enough to matter.
The customers weren’t happy. Enter Willis Haviland Carrier, 25, a recent graduate from Cornell with an engineering degree in hand, willing to work for a meager salary of $10 per week.
Now you know where that “Carrier” name comes from on the side of so many AC compressors, still a leading brand in North America.
More than 100 years ago, though, Willis Carrier wasn’t tasked with making people feel comfortable. For everyone who grew up before the dawn of AC, heat was just a part of life to be tolerated.
Rather, he was given the job of saving the quality of the print jobs at the high-end printing shop in Brooklyn.
While standing on a foggy train platform in Pittsburgh one summer evening, or so goes the legend, Carrier the engineer realized that if he could pass air through water to create fog, he could also do the reverse: pass air over cold coils to condense the moisture out of it. By controlling the humidity, he could control the dryness of paper and ink. And cool the place in the process by removing the heat.
A game changer to be sure, but no one yet knew what was coming.
The Summer Blockbuster
On July 17, 1902, the same year he began work on the project, Willis Carrier finalized the design for his “Apparatus for Treating Air.”
When the system was fired up at the printing plant, the results were immediate. The humidity dropped, the paper held its shape, the workers were thrilled at the lower temp, and the ink dried like it should.
Voila. As part of the process, the modern air conditioner was born.
It would take decades, however, for the world to realize just what it now had at its disposal.
As with so many things, though, change is never easy.
Up through the early 1920s, Carrier’s invention remained a strictly industrial tool. It was the secret weapon of textile mills, where it prevented static electricity from snapping cotton threads; and capsule factories, where it stopped gelatin from melting (not even sure what that means).
Willis Carrier in 1915. | Carier Corporation via Wikipedia
It was a machine for things, not people. The very idea of “comfort cooling” was considered a luxury, by some, bordering on the immoral — a defiance of the natural order.
In other words, there have always been nut jobs living among us.
The public breakthrough came not in homes, but in theaters.
In the 1920s, movie theaters were often closed during the summer months because the stifling heat, combined with the sweaty smell of a crushed crowd, made any cinematic experience unbearable.
In 1925, 101 long years ago, Carrier convinced the owners of the Rivoli Theater in Times Square to install his system.
The marketing was simple: “It’s Cool Inside.”
On Memorial Day of that year, the theater was packed with people who weren’t just there to see the feature movie, but to experience the miracle of cold air with no block of ice in sight, which had been the previous method to cool off a room, with a fan blowing over it.
The “Summer Blockbuster” was on its way to becoming an annual staple.
In a relatively short period of time, theaters became the only place in America where the working class could escape the heat, anchoring the cinema as a central pillar of American culture.
The One Problem
The invention of air conditioning undeniably transformed humanity’s idea of comfort, and in some ways, made places like Dubai habitable, and the RGV a nicer place to live during the summer months.
Yet, this climate-controlled comfort carried with it environmental concerns.
Doesn’t everything beneficial to mankind?
The original miracle cooling agent, Freon, successfully tamed indoor temperatures only to quietly erode the protective shield of the ozone layer overhead.
When the world pivoted to hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) to “Save the Ozone Layer,” it traded an ozone crisis for a warming one, inadvertently trapping potent greenhouse gases in our lower atmosphere and supercharging the global climate loop.
“Can’t we ever catch a break where everything just works out perfect? No strings attached?”
No. Part of life unfortunately.
Hope now rests on a transitioning third generation of ultra-low impact coolants known as hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs) and natural refrigerants— a critical scientific course correction, say industry experts, aimed at finally cooling our homes, commercial locations, entertainment venues, without burning up our planet.