and meatpacking plants; others built large cold storage facilities for temporarily storing perishables. In 1881, well-meaning officials used more than 500,000 pounds of ice in an elaborate cooling mechanism to lower the temperature in President James Garfield’ s sickroom while treating him for a gunshot wound.
By 1890, many factories had begun using electric fans, pipes, air ducts and chemicals to bring cool air to their indoor environments. But there was no demand for comfort cooling by homeowners. Manufactured ice, electric fans and steam engines were expensive, making their use for such a personal goal quite impractical. Businesses generally were successful in lowering the temperature of the air in various indoor environments as long as the ice lasted. However, the melting and evaporating of the ice also resulted in a higher level of humidity in those locations.
It seemed the men building these cooling systems had an incomplete knowledge of the principles of air compression, evaporation and condensation— at least until they read German engineer Hermann Rietschel’ s 1894 book, Guide to Calculating and Design of Ventilating and Heating Installations. It identified all the variables involved in using mechanical refrigeration to control both temperature and humidity. By 1896, a handful of engineers started using Rietschel’ s ideas to design“ refrigerated rooms” in a variety of buildings in several American cities. In 1902, Alfred Wolff installed a system for heating and cooling the unusually large trading floor in the building that became the new home of the New York Stock Exchange. It was remarkably effective in both cooling the room and reducing its humidity level.
At the same time, Stuart Cramer was working on a way to reduce the humidity levels in textile mills in North Carolina. Manufacturers of towels, blankets and clothing needed a certain amount of humidity in their factories, since damp fibers were more elastic and easier to work with. But they found it hard to control the humidity levels. In 1904, Cramer patented a system to regulate the wet-bulb and drybulb thermometers and thus maintain the proper relative humidity of any room. He coined the term“ air conditioning” to describe his process. It was a variation on the term“ yarn conditioning”— exposing textile fibers to damp conditions in storage rooms before processing.
Statue of American physician John Gorrie by C. A. Pillars, located in the Hall of Columns at the US Capitol. Gorrie is credited with the early efforts to create mechanical refrigeration and patented his“ ice machine” in 1851.
Willis Carrier’ s Breakthrough
Wolff passed away in 1909 and Cramer retired in 1918, so history records Willis Haviland Carrier as the most effective pioneer and promotor of air conditioning in America. In 1902, he was an engineer at the Buffalo Forge Company, designing heating and drying systems for commercial clients. The Sackett-Wilhems Lithographing Company in Brooklyn, NY asked him to design a ventilating system that would overcome a problem— high humidity in their factory was causing the lithograph paper to swell and shrink with each pass through the printing press. Carrier’ s first effort helped the situation, but it was not sufficiently robust to solve the problem completely. He then found that using an air washer with chilled-water sprays allowed him to bring the humidity down to an appropriate level.
Carrier continued to both examine and then explain the scientific rationale behind his processes. In 1906, he was granted a patent for his“ Apparatus for Treating Air.” In 1908, he became the head of Buffalo Forge’ s new subsidiary, the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America. In 1911, he detailed his description of air conditioning in a paper titled“ Rational Psychrometric Formulae: Their Relation to the Problems of Meteorology and of Air Conditioning,” published in Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He explained the importance of
controlling the temperature and humidity in factories making products such as textiles, food products, high explosives, photographic film and tobacco( all of which tend to absorb moisture from the air), and he described the procedures to deliver the proper levels.
In 1915, Carrier left Buffalo Forge to form the Carrier Engineering Corporation( CEC). It was soon providing humidity and temperature controlling systems to several dozen manufacturing firms. As his firm gained experience, Carrier realized the importance of tailoring each air conditioning system to the specifics of the materials used to make each product, as well as the location, size and layout of each factory. He also had to understand the way the workers were performing the various tasks involved in their production processes. Carrier designed each system with commonly available parts, but he configured them in specific ways for each customer. In doing so, this innovator blended the science of mechanical engineering with the art of understanding how each building’ s attributes and operations affected the nature and configuration of an effective air conditioning system.
While CEC was the leader in developing air conditioning systems, entrepreneurial companies such as Kroeschell Brothers Ice Machine Company and established corporations such as General Electric were quick to incorporate the known aspects of air washing, centrifugal chilling and refrigerant selection to develop air conditioning systems of their own. Throughout the 1920s, these firms continued to add diverse types of manufacturing firms to their client lists.
Effective Cooling Becomes a Reality
Throughout the Roaring Twenties, motion picture theaters were springing up all over the country, multi-story department stores were transforming the world of retailing and luxury hotels were adding exhibit halls and meeting rooms to their premises. The owners of these and other consumerfacing businesses were quite aware of the engineering industry’ s success in lowering the temperature and / or humidity in various types of factories. Many expressed their interest in the applicability of air conditioning to their own facilities. So CEC and its competitors began to address this new appreciation for comfort cooling. Carrier’ s firm designed and installed air
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