The history of air conditioning is a history of Carrier, and there’s more behind the comfort we take for granted on a sweltering summer day than you might think.
When Willis Carrier designed his first air conditioning system in 1902, his customer was a frustrated Brooklyn, N.Y. printer who couldn’t print a decent color image because changes in heat and humidity kept changing the paper’s dimensions and misaligning the colored inks.
For nearly two decades, Carrier’s invention that allowed us to scientifically control the temperature and humidity of our indoor environment was meant for the comfort of machines or industrial processes rather than people. It wasn’t until 1906 that Carrier, then employed by the Buffalo Forge Company, patented his first device — "An Apparatus for Treating Air."
Southern U.S. textile mills were among the first users of Carrier’s new system. A lack of moisture in the air of the Chronicle Cotton Mill in Belmont, N.C. created excess static electricity that made cotton fibers become fuzzy and hard to weave. Carrier’s system raised and stabilized humidity levels to eliminate the "fuzzies." It conditioned the fibers. The first overseas sale of a Carrier system was made to a silk mill in Yokohama, Japan in 1907.
The history of air conditioning is a history of Carrier, and there’s more behind the comfort we take for granted on a sweltering summer day than you might think.
