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Few of us know the long history of air conditioning. From its early days in second century China, it’s grown to become central to many of our everyday lives. Its influences have reached into factory design, manufacturing, architecture, cinemas and even into medical research. It’s helped populate huge great swathes of middle America and made those of us who live with it, less able to live without it. The influence of such an everyday appliance or system can’t be underestimated.
The concept of air conditioning or the chilling of air goes way back into history in second century China and an inventor named Ding Huan. He invented a three-meter-diameter rotary fan that was human powered via a crank, with a series of interconnecting wheels. It was effective enough to cool an entire hall full of people, despite using only human power to create a breeze. Hand fans were very common throughout history and were replaced by electric fans during the early 1900s. Whilst these don’t actually cool the air, they produce a ‘wind chill’ by evaporating any moisture on your skin and giving the effect of lowering your body temperature. Air cooling began being discussed in around 1758 by the American inventor Benjamin Franklin, who experimented with the evaporation of alcohol to reach freezing temperatures. It took some 70 years more for this to be developed into commercial refrigeration as, according to Wikipedia, it was in 1834 that the first working vapor compression refrigeration system was built. Prior to all of this however was a Floridian Doctor called John Gorrie, who, in 1842 developed a machine that made ice in order to cool the air for his patients. He was granted a patent to create a similar machine for homes and buildings, but sadly died before he could create it. He’s often described as the ‘father of air conditioning’. Before the invention of the air conditioner, these ice-based cooling systems became the norm. So, when air conditioners were first introduced in 1903, their output ratings were measured based on how much ice you would need to create the same cooling power. This was known as the Ice Power Rating, but has now been replaced with a more logical BTU (British Thermal Unit) or KwH rating.
Perhaps the most surprising fact is that air conditioning wasn’t developed for people, but for paper. The inventor Willis Haviland Carrier, a 26-year-old engineer from Buffalo, New York, in 1902 worked at a publishing company. They were looking for a way to control humidity in the building to help ink dry faster and to stop paper expanding in the moist air, to allow them to increase production speeds. He called his invention the ‘Apparatus for Treating Air’ and finally received a patent for it four years later. It wasn’t until this patent was received that the term ‘air conditioning’ was first used, by a textile mill engineer from North Carolina called Stuart Cramer.
The first office-based system followed in 1903 in the New York Stock Exchange. The system designed by Alfred R. Wolff, used three ammonia-absorption machines, each of which had a cooling capability equivalent to a hundred and fifty tons of ice. According to the New Yorker magazine, he went onto become the leading air conditioning engineer in New York City. Whilst commercial systems may have been his everyday work, he also later designed three systems for residential properties too, for the Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Astor residences. As you can imagine, these didn’t come cheap.
All of the early development in air conditioning took place in the United States and it was also here where the first domestic system appeared. It took another seven years in 1910, before it was installed in a domestic mansion in Minneapolis. The lucky recipient was Charles Gates, the son of the barbed wire inventor John Warne Gates. Sadly, Charles was killed aged only 37 years in a hunting accident before he ever got to experience his newly cooled home. This ‘domestic’ air conditioning system was 2.5 meters high, 2 meters wide, and over 6.5 meters long, but looking at the scale of the house it was effectively an industrial scale system. Because of the size and cost of the systems at the time, only incredibly wealthy people with huge homes could afford air conditioning systems. In those days, they cost anywhere from £6,000 to £30,000, which today would be a price more like £70,000 to £360,000.
The next big investor in air conditioning was the cinema or movie theater market in the US. To overcome a drop in numbers during the sunny summers in the warmer US states, they installed air conditioning as a way of attracting customers, to both cool down and enjoy a summer film. The term ‘refrigerated air’ was often a highlighted in cinema advertisements, hoping to entice cinema goers who were seeking solace from the heat. During the 1930’s, this became so successful that it wasn’t long before the movie makers and cinema owners began to plan the launch of their biggest movies as their ‘summer blockbuster’ series.
Herbert Hoover, the 31st US president, served from March 1929 to March 1933 and in his first few months, he suffered under a blisteringly hot summer. He took the decision in 1929 to spend $30,000 on a new air conditioning system for the Oval Office, even though only months before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 happened, starting the Great Depression. So, at least his four years in office were cool. Herbert Hoover has never been rated as a popular US President, which could have been because of the time in which he served, but also as the son of a Quaker Blacksmith, perhaps more prudence could have been expected of him instead of such an extraordinary expenditure during such difficult times.
The first single-room air conditioner was invented in 1931 by H.H. Schultz and J.Q. Sherman. It sat on a window ledge and vented through the window opening. It was initially eye-wateringly expensive, costing at the time nearly £300 against a typical weekly wage of around £20.
By the 1950’s these small domestic units were far more affordable and became a common sight across the United States. Once these cheaper units were developed, it only took three years for more than one million units to be sold.
They are now so prevalent that they are one of the biggest users of energy in the entire country. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Americans spend more than $22 billion per year and use more than 183 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity just to cool their homes every year. This energy consumption for air conditioning alone is equal to the amount of energy Africa uses every year to power the entire continent.
Now it is very difficult to imagine our life without air conditioning and the benefits that it gives us, and to which we are so accustomed. Air conditioning is a truly revolutionary discovery with an interesting story, which was discussed in this essay.
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