Peter’s Musings

With rivers dammed, hurricanes plotted, and rain shed, nature’s powerful forces are reduced to curiosities and tourist attractions. No invention has spurred this domestication of the environment more than the air conditioner. A simple flick of a switch and the setting of a dial creates an ideal temperature for nearly any indoor environment we like.

Tragic? Who knows. We shall leave such philosophizing to the poets. For the rest, air conditioner is a god-send, a life-savior. But how did it come to be? Did it arrive, like fire, from a wayward Greek god? Or, like suffering and war, from an opened Pandora’s box? There we go philosophizing again.

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The Chinese used water-powered fan wheels, the Persians used wind towers, the Muslims used cistern wind catchers, and the Egyptians used ventilators. AC was mostly relegated to temporary snatches of cooling wind and fresh water.

Several thousand years later, things hadn’t changed much. However, men such as Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday and John Gorrie pioneered the development of the modern air conditioner, one that depended upon chemical refrigeration and evaporative cooling. The world was still waiting, however, for that one explosive breakthrough.

This was provided by Willis Haviland Carrier of Cornell University. In 1902, Carrier built an evaporative cooling air conditioner utilized to stabilize the temperature and moisture of a room to control the lithographing process of the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Co. Excited with his invention, Carrier started spreading his air conditioners like flying daisy seeds and formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation in 1915, becoming the first proverbial HVAC contractor.

However, with rudimentary air conditioning, repair was still required. Thomas J. Midgley, Jr., added the finishing touches in 1928 when he introduced his chlorofluorocarbon creation, Freon, beating more toxic refrigerants such as ammonia and propane.

Built upon the shoulders of such giants, air conditioners and refrigerants cooled brows, froze food, and made life generally more bearable. Countries in Central America, in Indonesia, in Northern Africa, in the Middle East and other areas now sustain massive populations, due in a large part to air conditioning and refrigeration.