Carrier, Willis Haviland

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CARRIER, WILLIS HAVILAND

Willis H. Carrier (1876–1950) invented the equipment that made air conditioning possible and founded the company that brought cooler homes, factories, and movie theaters to much of the United States. Air conditioning, invented by Carrier in 1902, has been credited with making possible the booming economic development of the Sun Belt in the last half of the twentieth century.

Carrier was born near rural Angola, New York, and grew up as an only child in a poor farm family. He worked his way through high school and taught for three years before he could enroll at Cornell University where he was awarded a full scholarship. After graduating from Cornell in 1901 with a Master's in engineering, Carrier took a job for $10 a week with the Buffalo Forge Company, a firm that manufactured heating and exhaust systems.

One of the young engineer's first assignments was to solve a dilemma that was vexing a Brooklyn, New York, printing plant. Fluctuations in heat and humidity in the plant caused the printer's paper supply to expand and contract. As a result, colored inks were not accurately applied to the paper. In 1902, just a year after graduating from college, Carrier designed a heat and humidity control system that stabilized the atmosphere in the factory. His patent for "Apparatus for Treating Air" (Patent No. 808,897) was awarded in 1906. It was the first of more than 80 patents he was to receive over a lifetime of inventions. At the time, Carrier predicted his invention would be used in homes as well as factories.

In 1911 Carrier announced his "Rational Psychrometric Formulae" to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Fundamental calculations in air conditioning technology are still made according to these formulas. Carrier discovered these formulae as he struggled with the problems they entailed one foggy night on a railroad platform. By the time the train arrived, he understood the relationship between temperature, humidity, and dew point.

In 1915, together with six other engineers from Buffalo Forge, Carrier founded the Carrier Engineering Corp. with starting capital of $35,000. In 1921 he patented the first safe, low-pressure centrifugal refrigeration machine that used nontoxic, noninflammable refrigerant. Many historians mark this invention as the beginning of the air-conditioning era. In 1924, shoppers came in droves to a Detroit department store after three of Carrier's chillers were installed. Soon movie theaters were advertising that they were "cooled by refrigeration," and the summer film business boomed.

In 1928 Carrier developed the first air conditioner for home use. Private sales of air conditioners were slow during the Great Depression, but the business rapidly expanded when home units again became available after World War II (1939–1945). Some cultural historians have claimed that the prevalence of air conditioning in many parts of the country drastically changed U.S. society in the last half of the twentieth century. They contend that, along with television, air conditioning has kept Americans within their own homes and lessened the hours of social interaction that formerly took place on country porches and city front stoops. Cities in the South and Southwest, once considered nearly impossible to live in during the warm summer months, suddenly became very attractive locations in which to live and work. The Sun Belt was born.

Willis Carrier died in 1950, but his invention has left almost no area of contemporary American life untouched. Climate control enabled the growth of the computer industry, made deep mining for gold, silver, and other metals possible, saved many valuable manuscripts for posterity, and kept meat, fish, fruit and vegetables fresh and cool in supermarkets throughout the country. Hospitals, schools, airports, and office buildings were maintained at optimum temperature and humidity by air conditioning. Within a century, a device invented to solve a printing problem transformed an entire society.

See also: Sun Belt