General Electric’ s advertisement for its Thinline air conditioner, published in Time magazine on May 21, 1956.

By Michael A. Martorelli

Visitors to the Museum of American Finance’ s new home in Boston are experiencing another one of that city’ s hot and humid summers. Like those visitors, the readers of Financial History are undoubtedly thankful for the relief provided by most buildings’ air conditioning systems. Air conditioning was introduced in this country at the beginning of the 20th century. It was first intended to improve work efficiency and productivity in the country’ s factories. But this technology was not routinely used in American homes or offices for another seven decades.

Early Efforts at Indoor Cooling

Air conditioning was not invented by a single person. It did not spring up instantaneously in a particular place. There is a long history of humans using passive techniques to minimize the buildup of heat and humidity in their indoor habitats. In 1842, American physician John Gorrie made the first scientific effort to create an active system for accomplishing that goal. He noticed that patients in his Apalachicola, FL hospital suffered higher fevers than normal in the stifling heat of summer. He devised a way to chill the bedsides of malaria and yellow fever patients by blowing air over buckets of ice suspended from the ceiling. But ice was expensive, and not always available in the quantities needed to maintain that environment. So he began working on a machine to make ice.

Gorrie built on the earlier work of Benjamin Franklin, Scottish physician William Cullen and others who demonstrated how compressing a gas and then expanding its volume would decrease its temperature. In 1845, he installed in his fever ward an awkward-looking contraption that did help cool the patients. After developing it further, in 1851 he obtained US Patent # 8,080 for his“ Ice Machine.” It worked, but it was a bit balky and hardly robust enough to produce the enormous quantities of ice needed to make it a permanent addition to any room.

Gorrie went to New Orleans to seek investment capital to improve the efficiency and reliability of his device. But in doing so, he was challenging the existence of the powerful“ Ice Lobby” that had been bringing block ice from New England to Florida for decades. Few investors were interested in the doctor’ s machine.

Without capital, Gorrie could not commercialize his invention. Financing aside, he faced another unusual obstacle. Enlightened citizens who thought nothing of using stoves to heat their indoor environment believed it bordered on the sacrilegious to challenge God’ s work by using artificial means to create his naturally occurring ice.

The Impact of New Technologies

And yet, more than one putative inventor thought well enough of Gorrie’ s idea to make their own adjustments to his machine. Frenchman Ferdinand Carrie substituted ammonia for air and patented his own ice-making machine in both France( 1859) and the United States( 1860). Europeans who thought themselves immune from the negative publicity campaign that“ Ice King” Frederic Tudor waged against Gorrie promptly began using ice machines to replace their own ice harvesting programs.

Over time, American businesses took advantage of the opportunity to manufacture so-called“ plant ice.” Railroads installed compartments of ice in special boxcars; several companies developed specialized ice-making machines for breweries

34 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2026 | www. MoAF. org