Summer is an outstanding month and great for spending a lot of time outdoors. The perfect month for having a picnic or enjoying on the beachside, everyone loves the bright sky, the breeze and the sun shining on their face until it gets too hot and you decide to go back inside. The most relaxing feeling is when you come back home and enter your perfectly air-conditioned room. Air conditioners have become an important part of our lives and especially in the hot summer days.

It helps us keep our home cool and also maintains the humidity level instantly. Nowadays it is also very affordable and one can easily have one at their home or office but all of these wouldn’t have been possible if the air conditioning system wasn’t invented.

Air Conditioners is a very crucial invention of the 20th century and it completely changes the place we work and where we spend most of our time. People have already been experimenting from more than 100 years ago to create something which can produce cool air to keep the surrounding comfortable when there’s extreme heat outside.

Today’s article is all about the invention of the air conditioners and most importantly the who invented it. Although there have been a lot of tries to create one we will only focus on the invention which revolutionized the air conditioning system that we know today. So, let’s dive into today’s topic and take a brief look at the history of air conditioners.

History of the Air Conditioning System

Cooling yourself on a hot day is not a new idea. Long ago in ancient times, people used manpower objects such as fans and some other interesting ways to keep themselves cool and surprisingly it is still used in some places where there is a scarcity of electricity. This method was not very efficient and leads to the invention of other such appliances to get the job done. Let’s take a look at how the air conditioning system was improved over time.

1758 – This is the year when the inventor Benjamin Franklin discovered that when the liquid evaporates from a surface, creating a cooling effect. This effect is still the principle of how the modern air conditioner we use today work.

1851 – John Gorrie, a physician from Florida created an ice machine that uses compression to create ice and then the air would be blown over it to create a cooling effect. This machine was created to cool patients to prevent certain diseases. Gorrie won’t able to improve the machine further because his financial backer died.

1881 – Coming to this year, the president Garfield was shot with a bullet. To keep him comfortable a device was created which blows air over a wet cloth to create a cooling effect. This invention was very effective and lowered the room temperature by a great margin but the president died just two months later.

The invention of the Electrical Air Conditioner

1902 – The first modern electrical air conditioner was invented by Willis Haviland Carrier. He was a skilled engineer who worked at a printing plant in Brooklyn, New York. There were a lot of issues related to the temperature at the plant and because of this, the print wouldn’t come out good. To fix the issuing Carrier started experimenting with the laws of Humidity to solve the issue and this is how the first electrical air conditioner was invented.

Inside the printing plant, there were high temperatures and humidity which eventually ruins the paper when it went through the printing machine. Carrier was assigned the task to make sure the room temperature and the humidity level is in control. Although Carrier successfully managed the temperature control, there was no reliable way to control the humidity to 55%. He had to make the room less humid without making it too dry.

Carrier finally found the answer a few weeks later on a train station. He knows that the fog is air which is completely saturated with water. This made him think that if he made the room 100% humid then he will have a starting point to work on and then add dry air to reduce the humidity to 55%.

He then built a box that can trap air and then do whatever he wants to do with it inside. He added few fans, a garden sprayer, and heating coils. He then used one of the fans to suck the air inside and then cool it with a spray of cold water. When the air passed through the water it became fog. Now he had a room full of humidity, he then started adding more dry air precisely to maintain the humidity level to 55%.

1914 – Stewart W Kramer coined the term “Air Conditioning” which was later adopted by Will Carrier when he named his company. Stewart created a ventilation device that adds moisture to the air in this textile mill. This is the same year when the air conditioning was added to a home for the very first time.

1931 – Fast forwarding to 1931 the first Window AC was created by HH Schultz and JQ Sherman and was commercially sold just a year later. At that time the prices were very high and getting one installed in your home would have cost around $10000 to $50000.

Final Words

Willis Carrier’s unique idea created the perfect air conditioning system to control the temperature as well as humidity. This is why he is known as the Father of the Air Conditioner. Carrier later started his own company and is now one of the most successful companies when it comes to buying an Air Conditioner for your home or office.

Now the best ac in india have advanced a lot and come with technologies like Electronic Sensors, Vapor Compression, Wireless Controls, and so on. Carrier’s latest model is 100 times better than what the founder made but it all wouldn’t have been possible without him.