Who Invented Air Conditioning?

Perhaps the invention of air conditioning has not been decisive for the destiny of humanity, like the wheel or the computer, but on hot days, this appliance is still one of the gadgets progress most appreciated worldwide, even when we know that it is not advisable to use it in excess, for our health and that of the environment.

The ancestors

The first attempts to cool the air in a room date back to the 19th century, when a certain John Gorrie, a doctor by profession, tried to alleviate the suffering of malaria patients. To do this, he had installed a rudimentary tool that, by blowing into some ice containers hanging from the ceiling, cooled the air in the room. Later, in 1851, the American physician improved his "creature" by making a real gas-cooled machine.

But that was an age of inventors and therefore many people embraced Gorrie's idea of building a machine capable of cooling air on demand.

The history of air conditioning

Thus began a race to create an efficient tool for freshening up rooms that were eventually won by the eccentric Willis Carrier.

He was an engineer in an industrial plant factory, but he was constantly interested in everything around him. According to the testimony of his goddaughter Edna M. Littlehales (Edna was the daughter of a friend of the inventor, but when the man died, it was Carrier who raised the girl) "Uncle Willis" spent most of his time doing experiments scientists and observations.

Right after his studies on air humidity, Carrier began work on a system to combat the heat in closed environments. When he was young, he realized the importance of keeping some spaces cool when working with a color printer; he realized that heat altered the quality of photos.

His idea was to develop an artifact equipped with two coils of pipes: the first coil contained cold water, and the other was crossed by cold water by the evaporation of ammonia. Carrier's invention provided a continuous circulation of the various liquids and therefore the air was dried, that is, the humidity was avoided, and even cooled for long periods of time. This ended up being the first air conditioner.

Name

The term "air conditioning", however, is not due to Willis Carrier, but was coined by another American engineer, Stuart Warren Cramer, who spoke about it in 1906, the same year the invention was patented.

Let's use the air conditioning ... but with caution

Thanks to the invention of Carrier (who in 1915 founded a real company for the production of his air conditioners), today's air conditioning allows us to work and study in closed spaces without having to go through heat, but this does not mean that we have to abuse of the.

In fact, recent studies have shown how the emissions produced by air conditioning systems are harmful to the environment. Therefore, although the new models have already reduced their environmental impact, it would be better to turn on the air conditioning only when the heat is really unbearable.