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Essay on Willis Carrier: The Father of Air Conditioning

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Willis Carrier: The Father of Air Conditioning

It is a hot, humid evening in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and you find yourself dripping with sweat. The air is still, and you stick to your sheets as you toss and turn and try to sleep in your house that has retained all of the heat from the summer sun’s rays. Uncomfortable and miserable, you think to yourself, “How did people ever live without air conditioning?” yours has been on the fritz, and you cannot imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have the luxury of an air conditioning unit in your home. If it weren’t for Willis Carrier, and his ground-breaking invention of a mechanical air conditioning unit in 1902, our lives would be drastically different.
Willis Haviland …show more content…

Shortly after graduating from Cornell, Carrier got hired at Buffalo Forge Company as an engineer. Carrier was first assigned a position where he was in charge of designing systems for the heating plant to dry supplies. It was there he designed a system to dry coffee, as well as a kiln responsible for drying lumber. Here, Carrier defeated his long battle with math, and developed what has been accredited as his “first contribution to climate-control technology.” Carrier had developed a chart which calculated the amount of surface area required to heat a given space. With this discovery, Carrier not only saved his company roughly $40,000 but he was promoted to the top of the engineering department. It was not long after this that his focus switched from systems which dried materials, to systems which controlled both humidity and temperature for functional purposes. The blueprint for what has been considered the world’s first air conditioning unit was dated July 17th, 1902, by Willis Carrier, and it was then the world changed forever. Carrier had been assigned to design a solution for a printing company out of Brooklyn, New York, known as the Sackett & Wilhelm’s Lithography & Printing Company. They had come to Carrier because their current system became somewhat defective due to environmental conditions. When it was hot, the ink seemed to run, when it was humid, the paper seemed to swell, and it was meddling with their production. The

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