subject: A Brief History Of Air Conditioning [print this page] Have you ever been in a situation where you have been sat inside during a heat wave and found yourself unbearably hot even under a roof in the relative cool? Chances are that you have and humans over the centuries have been searching for an answer to the question of how to stay cool in such hot weather. Going for a dip in a pool is one such solution, another more ancient solution is waft the air around you to recreate a cool breeze. Both are viable solutions in the short term but they do not address the problem in the long term. Thanks to miracle of human innovation there is now air conditioning which treats and cools the air in a room so that it becomes just the right temperature and it is thanks to a few historic discoveries.
Air conditioners have, rather surprisingly, been around for thousands of years with the 2nd century Chinese inventor Ding Huan creating a rotary fan consisting of seven wheels, each 3 metres in diameter which was powered using manual labour. Somewhat closer to our historical period, in 1758, Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley experimented with evaporation as a means of cooling objects and they discovered that the rapid evaporation of volatile liquids like alcohol could in fact cause the significant cooling of an object. In 1820, Michael Faraday discovered that the compression and liquefaction of ammonia could chill the air in an environment. Following this discovery of, what would become known as, compression technology John Gorrie utilised it to make ice which he used to cool air in the hospital he worked at. He succeeded in obtaining a patent for the invention but development stopped when his chief financial backer died and it was not for another 50 years that the technology was taken up again by James Harrison.
James Harrison was an Australian and he released the first commercial ice making machine in 1854 and he was awarded a patent to make an ether vapour refrigeration unit in 1855. The first air conditioner which operated on the principles that they still operate on today was created by Willis Haviland Carrier in 1902 and was powered by electricity. It was designed to improve a type of manufacturing process in printing and it not only cooled the air it affected the humidity of the air as well. Stuart W. Cramer refined Havilands invention in 1906 and coined the term air conditioning though the methods which enable the air to be conditioned are known as evaporative cooling.
