In 1914, Buffalo Forge made its first international sale of its "air-treating apparatus" to a Japanese company, which thus became the first firm to have an air-conditioned building, the first in the world.
It's quite possible that many people have never heard of Willis Carrier. But today, almost everyone has experienced the pleasant results of his invention at some point, so we could say that we all (or almost all) owe him a huge debt. We should at least give this engineer a thought when summer arrives and, seeing that the inside of our house reaches a rather unbearable thirty degrees, we end up pressing the button on the remote that activates a device that has become as commonplace (and essential) for us as the television: the air conditioner.
A curious engineer
Born in the hot city of Angola, in the state of New York (a place where the average temperature in summer does not fall below twenty-seven degrees Celsius), young Willis soon felt a great curiosity for everything that had to do with assembling and disassembling devices of all types and conditions.
Photo: Carrier
Sewing machines, clocks, and anything else with an intricate mechanism he could fix passed through his restless hands. From a very young age, Willis understood the importance of having a solid foundation to turn all his ideas into reality. However, the most important lesson for the development of his prodigious mind would come from his own mother.
It was a day when Willis was studying math and couldn't quite grasp the complicated world of fractions. His mother then took an apple and cut it into several pieces to explain to her son the concept of the whole and its parts using those small pieces of fruit, which she managed to do.
Willis became a talented student, and in 1895 he won a scholarship to study Electrical Engineering at Cornell University, where he earned his engineering degree in 1901. Almost immediately he began working for a company that manufactured fans, heat pumps, and air extraction and exhaust devices called Buffalo Forge.
Thanks to his excellent abilities, Willis rose quickly through the ranks to become director of the experimental engineering department, earning ten dollars a week. At this firm, the young engineer developed a device capable of drying wood and coffee. Recognizing Carrier's great potential, his boss considered him to solve a complex problem for one of their best clients.
It was the spring of 1902 when the manager of the Sackett & Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company, tired of the heat and humidity ruining the work being done at his company, asked Buffalo Forge for a system to improve air quality. That summer was exceptionally hot, and the high temperatures were affecting the quality of the work so much that the color printing process had to be carried out up to four times to achieve optimal results. How could the air quality in the printing plant be improved?.
That was the question his boss posed to Willis. And the young man managed to solve it thanks to his powers of observation: one cold night, when Willis Carrier was waiting for the train and walking along the station platform, he came to the conclusion that if he could "dry" the air by filtering it through a fine mist of water, he could condense the humidity.
In late 1902, Willis Carrier installed the device he had conceived that cold night while waiting for his train at the Sackett & Wilhelms printing house. It was the world's first spray , capable of controlling the humidity inside a building. Its basic purpose was to absorb warm, humid air and release a cool, dry breeze (although Carrier built the first device, the term "air conditioning" was coined by engineer Stuart Warren Cramer in 1906, the same year Carrier patented his invention).
The "boss" of air conditioning
But the first air conditioner wasn't like the modern units we have today, many of which we own. Carrier's was an enormous machine equipped with an industrial fan, ducts, heaters, perforated steam pipes for humidification, and temperature controls. Despite its massive size, it perfectly fulfilled the purpose for which it was designed.
Photo: Carrier
After several years of improvements, on January 2, 1906, Carrier received a U.S. government patent for his invention (number 808,897), which described it as "an apparatus for treating air," designed to humidify or dehumidify the air. In 1906, "the Chief" (Carrier's nickname in Buffalo Forge) realized that "constant dew point depression provided virtually constant relative humidity." This observation would later become known to all engineers as the "law of constant dew point depression." Carrier used this discovery to design an automatic control system, for which he filed a new patent application on May 17, 1907, which was granted on February 3, 1914.
The founding of an empire
That same year, Buffalo Forge made its first international sale of its "air-treating apparatus" to a Japanese company, which thus became the first firm to have an air-conditioned building—the first in the world. Later, the Japanese ocean liner Koan Maru would also enjoy the benefits of air conditioning. But at the end of World War I, and due to the economic crisis, Buffalo Forge closed the department where Willis worked. Then, in 1915, the engineer decided, along with six other young colleagues from the company, to found his own company: the Carrier Engineering Corporation, with Willis Carrier as president. In 1922, Carrier improved the cooler he had patented in 1906, making it an ideal device for cooling large indoor spaces.
From that moment on, fresh air reached many public spaces in the United States, making people's lives much more comfortable. Offices, hospitals, airports, and department stores were the places where the "air treatment device" became essential and indispensable during the hot summer days.
In 1925, the famous Rivoli Theater in New York also installed the air conditioning unit invented by Carrier, inviting its customers to experience watching a movie comfortably seated in a cool and pleasant environment. New Yorkers, thrilled by the novelty, lined up outside the theater, not caring how long they had to wait or what movie was playing, as long as they could enjoy the magic of air conditioning for a while.
The "democratization" of air conditioning
In 1926, Willis Carrier introduced the first domestic air conditioner, a revolutionary idea that would make it possible not only for large companies or offices to enjoy cooler temperatures, but also for any small shop or a family in their own home (in fact, Carrier sold the first "air conditioning unit" in 1928, a small appliance designed for retail stores to the Merchants Refrigerating Company to control the air in their egg storage room).
Photo: Carrier
But the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression slowed the residential and commercial use of air conditioning. Carrier's company also faced financial difficulties during this time. In 1930, it merged with the Brunswick-Kroeschell Company and the York Heating & Ventilating Corporation to form a new company: Carrier Corporation.
During the following years, the company managed to expand throughout the country, but the outbreak of World War II in 1939 again hampered the spread of air conditioning, something that wouldn't happen until the 1950s, with the boom . From then on, the development and expansion of air conditioning across the globe would be unstoppable.
Photo: Cordon Press
On Saturday, October 7, 1950, Willis Carrier died suddenly while walking through the streets of New York. But his legacy was here to stay. His invention was considered so significant that it earned him induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 1998 Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Today, the company founded by Willis Carrier has 51 factories and 39 research and design centers worldwide, employs more than 53,000 people, and serves customers in over 180 countries. And, as expected given the undeniable climate emergency, the company has had to adapt to the evolving needs of the market and the planet, demonstrating its commitment to environmental conservation and human health.
Source: National Geographic History
