The Untold Story of the Air Conditioner
Until recently, I had never realized the importance of having an air conditioner. On a trip to Guam the combination of humidity and heat nearly knocked me off my feet as I stepped off the airplane. I spend the first night tossing and turning, drinking endless amounts of water and taking multiple cold showers. As a lay there awake, drenched with sweat, all I could think about was how they developed the air conditioner and how people lived without it.
During the 1830’s a doctor developed a machine that made ice and put a fan behind it to blow cold air around a room. He made the machine for his patients who were suffering from malaria and yellow fever. Some time later in 1881, the navy developed a box filled with ice water soaked cloths. A fan above blew air onto it, melting the cloths and bringing the temperature of the air down by almost 20 degrees.
Willis Carrier, a name that is still familiar today, was the first to modernize the contraption by adding chilled coils to lower the temperature and humidity. These machines where sold to hospitals, large businesses, mills and other industrial companies. “Apparatus for Treating Air” units were large, expensive, and also toxic due to the ammonia coolant.
Finally in 1922, Carrier replaced the toxic coolant with dielene and added a central compressor to make the unit smaller. Air conditioners were being sold everywhere including theaters, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the White House, and soon in homes all around the world.
Air Conditioners have had a significant impact and are vital to the South, Midwest, and East Coast in the summer. Not so much the Pac Northwest, which is where I reside. Spending one night without the cooling effects of an air conditioning unit would make anyone appreciate all of the hard work and time that went into inventing it and the intensive labor HVAC technicians do to repair them.
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