When Air Conditioner Was Invented And How It Was Invented

Air conditioners, the things we take for granted during the hot summer days, have a long history that dates back to the 1800s. However, it was not until 1902 that the first air conditioning unit came to this world thanks to 25-year-old Willis Haviland Carrier. In fact, our lives would have been very different, very uncomfortable without air conditioners. But you may ask how and when air conditioner was invented. Here, we take a look back at history.

1758: There is a cooling effect to all liquid evaporation. This was discovered by Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley, a professor at Cambridge University. The two discovered that when alcohol as well as other volatile liquids evaporating faster than water evaporated, it could lower an object’s temperature, enough to freeze water.

1820: The same discovery was made by Michael Faraday, an English inventor, as he compressed and liquified ammonia.

1830s: Dr. John Gorrie worked at the Florida hospital where he built an ice-making machine. So how did the machine work? It made buckets of ice using compression and then blew air over them. The idea was patent in 1851. Dr. John Gorries was hoping that his invention could be built all over the world. However, he wasn’t able to realize his dream without any financial backing.

1881: Following President James Garfield’s assassination on July 2, naval engineers built a boxy cooling unit to offer him comfort. They filled the device with a water-soaked cloth. There was a fan that blew hot air overhead while the cool air was kept closer to the ground. The device was capable of lowering room temperature by a maximum of 20F. But in two months, it consumed a half-million pounds of ice and it couldn’t save President Garfield.

1902: The first modern AC was invented by Carrier for the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Co. located in Brooklyn, NYC. In order to control the temperature and humidity inside the room, the machine blew air over cold coils, preventing paper from wrinkling and causing the ink to align. When he found out the other factories also wanted to build a cooling system, Carrier founded the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America.

1906: Stuart Cramer, North Carolina textile mill engineer, created a ventilating device adding water vapor to textile plants’ air. With the humidity, the yarn would be easier to spin and wouldn’t break easily. Cramer was the first one to give the process a name, “air conditioning.”

1914: This was the year when air conditioning arrived in households. The home air conditioner unit installed in Charles Gates’ mansion in Minneapolis was around 6 feet wide, 7 feet high and 20 feet long. But because the house was left vacant, no one ever used the cooling unit.

1931: J.Q. Sherman and H.H. Schultz built an individual room air conditioner that could be placed a window ledge. And since then, this design has been ubiquitous for apartment buildings. A year later, the units were available for purchase. They were thoroughly enjoyed by the people who didn’t like to sweat, the wealthy. With the large cooling systems, people would have to pay somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000. And today, that is around $120,000 to $600,000.

1939: Packard invented the first-ever air-conditioned car. However, it was later when the dashboard controls to control the a/c was created. If the passengers became chilly and wanted to turn off the air conditioner, the driver needed to stop the engine, then open the hood to disconnect a compressor belt.

1942: The U.S built its first power plant to handle the air conditioning’s growing electrical load.

1947: S.F. Markham, a British Scholar wrote that this century’s greatest contribution that humans made to civilization might be air-conditioning with praises for America.

1950s: In the economic boom post-World-War II, purchasing a residential air conditioning unit was one way to show off to your friends your wealth. In 1953 along, over 1 million units were bought.

1970s: Central air came along and became more popular than window units. A central air conditioning system consisted of a fan, coils, and a condenser. The air was drawn in and passed over coils and blew through the ventilation system of a house. R012 or Freon-12 was used as the refrigerant.

1994: Several countries banned freon because of its connection with ozone depletion. Auto manufacturers were forced to use R134a, which was less harmful. Brands like Carrier and Honeywell started to work on more environmentally-friendly coolants.

2009: 87% of households in the U.S owned an air conditioning unit.

So that is how and when air conditioner was invented. Although AC brings to us comfort during hot, humid summer days, AC’s emissions are threatening the environment, contributing to climate change. Annually, around 100 million tons of CO2 are released into our atmosphere.

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