Air conditioning units as we know them today date back to 1902, just one year after Willis Haviland Carrier received his Masters degree in engineering from Harvard University. The first unit created by Carrier was built for a Brooklyn printing plant and treated the air for both humidity and temperature, from helping to stop the paper in the plant from warping to changes in the environmental conditions.
Granted a US patent four years later in 1906, Carrier's device was known as an 'apparatus for treating sir'. The term 'air conditioning' wasn't coined by Carrier, but by textile engineer Stuart Cramer in 1906 in a patent application for a process of his whereby vaporised water was added to the air in textile plants.
Though credited as being creator of the mechanical air conditioning unit we are familiar with today, Carrier was not the first to implement methods for cooling the atmosphere within buildings. In fact, air conditioning has been around in one form or another since Roman times! Affluent Romans used to flow water through the walls of buildings to cool them, while in Persia windmills were used to send air through buildings, and medieval Egyptians frequently had ventilators on their houses. Although it took the Industrial Revolution to bring modern mechanised air conditioning to the world, people have always found ways to keep their living or working spaces cool.
Mechanical air conditioners work on a similar principle to a refrigerator and have their roots in the 19th century. In 1820 ice was first produced in an experiment, and in 1842 Florida doctor John Gorrie created an ice machine which he used to cool his hospital
in the summer. Though commercial refrigeration units didn't come to prominence until Kelvinator released a home model in 1918, the two devices work in a very similar fashion.
Contrary to popular belief, an air conditioner does not simply pump cool air into the building; rather it extracts the warm air and reintroduces it as cool air, continuing this process until the air is at the desired temperature. It achieves this by pressurising cold Freon gas which becomes hot at high pressures. This runs through a series of coils allowing condensation to occur and the gas changing state into a liquid. This then goes through an expansion valve which causes it to evaporate back into low pressure, cold Freon gas. As some warm air is expelled through an extraction vent out of the building, the cold air created from the process is placed back into the room.
The air conditioning units we see in homes and offices today haven't changed a great deal in the century since Carrier's original invention. Indeed, the modern industry still holds Carrier's Rational Psychrometric Formulae as the basis for all chemical calculations, which he divulged to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1911. He claims the answer to the problem of controlling humidity and temperature came to him while he was waiting for a train.
Initially just used in industry, today air conditioners can be found in homes, office buildings and even cars. As with all great designs, the air conditioner has gotten faster, more efficient and more powerful over time, but at its core, it is still the same machine it was at its inception.
Author Resource:-
Thomas Pretty is an air conditioning technician with many years of experience in the air conditioning industry. Find out more about air conditioning at http://www.pureairconditioning.co.uk/
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