When Was Air Conditioning Invented?
The idea of using an air conditioning unit in households started even before a machine was created in order to produce a maximum cooling effect according to the user’s desire. The first attempt at creating an air conditioning unit was made and headed by Dr. John Gorrie, an American physician from Apalachicola, Florida. During his medical practice in the 1830s, Dr. Gorrie thought of creating a certain type of ice-making machine that basically blew air over an ice bucket to cool the rooms of patients suffering from yellow fever and malaria.
In 1881, when ex-President James Garfield was dying because of a serious illness, naval engineers created a box-like structure with cloths saturated and soaked in melted ice water, where a fan was blowing hot air overhead. This device was able to lower down a room temperature by 20 degrees Fahrenheit; however, it consumed nearly 0.5 million pounds of ice cubes in 2 months’ time.
In 1902, a very close ancestor of the modern air conditioning unit was first created by Willis Carrier, and American engineer. The device at that time was known as “Apparatus for Treating Air”. It was actually built for the company “Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Co.” located in Brooklyn, New York. The machine used chilled coils to lower the humidity to at least 55% and of course, to cool the air. The machine was designed with enough precision, making it possible to adjust the humidity level as desired.
After Carrier’s invention, air conditioning units began to bloom and become popular. These units first hit and became popular in industrial buildings, such as textile mills, printing plants, pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, and some hospitals. The first home equipped with an air conditioning unit was owned by Charles Gate, the only son of the well-known gambler named John “Bet a Million” Gates in 1914 in Minneapolis. However, at the first wave of installations, the air conditioning units were very expensive, large, and too dangerous because of the toxic ammonia used in the units as a coolant.
In 1922, Willis Carrier made two important breakthroughs; he used the benign coolant dielene to replace ammonia and to reduce the unit’s size, and Carrier installed a central compressor in every unit. The next advancement in the history of the air conditioning unit was when Carrier sold his air conditioning units and finally the rights to everything to movie theatre owners, with a prominent debut in 1925 at Broadway’s Rivoli in New York City. Shortly, air conditioning units were installed in department stores, railroad cars, and office buildings. The U.S. House of Representatives had their air conditioning units installed in 1928, with the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, following suit a few years after. After the 2nd World War, window-mounted air conditioning units appeared, with unbelievable sales escalating significantly from 74,000 in 1948 to 1,046,000 in 1953.
These days, air conditioning units are believed to cause partial changes in the South, and for those who have experienced and greatly enjoyed its cooling benefits, especially in times of threatening heat waves, air conditioning units are an invention that is definitely hard and impossible to live without.