A life in invention
Willis Carrier: A Father of Modern Air Conditioning
One inventor. One drawing. One industry that didn't exist the day before. Meet Willis Carrier, see what he did on July 17, 1902, and follow the 125 years of invention that came after: from the first conditioned room to the systems underpinning modern medicine, food, computing and the buildings we live inside.
Angola, New York, 1876
Before the invention, the inventor
Willis Haviland Carrier was born on November 26, 1876, in Angola, New York, the only child of Duane Williams Carrier and Elizabeth R. Haviland. He grew up on a dairy farm outside Buffalo, attended a one-room schoolhouse, and never missed a chance to play baseball or swim in Lake Erie. His mother, who repaired the family clocks herself, taught him to take a problem apart before trying to solve it. It stuck.
When Willis was 9 years old, long before becoming a brilliant engineer, he struggled grasping the concept of fractions. His mother helped him master the idea by cutting apples. Carrier remembered this event fondly as “the most important thing that ever happened to me.” He continued to use the simple logic to help conceptualize difficult problems throughout his life.
Education, 1893–1901
Angola Academy to Cornell
After graduating from Angola Academy, Willis took a short break from attending school, to teach His sacrifice helped to support his family during the Panic of 1893. When he returned to continue his education, he attended Buffalo's Central High School where he performed well and received a scholarship to Cornell University in Ithaca.
Never one to slow down, between semesters, Carrier would start exploring his business acumen as a door-to-door salesman for viewing cards and stereoscopes. By 1899, he and a partner endeavored to create a laundry business for the students at Cornell. In 1901, Carrier successfully graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
First Professional Role, 1901
Buffalo Forge Company
After graduation, Carrier accepted a role at the Buffalo Forge Company, drafting plans for heating and drying lumber and coffee.
Settling back in Buffalo, he was salaried at $10 week.
The Breakthrough, Pittsburgh, 1902
A formula emerged from the fog
Fog wasn't the obstacle. Fog was the mechanism. He noticed. Nobody else had.
It wasn't even hot that day. Willis Carrier was standing on a foggy railway platform in Pittsburgh, turning a printing plant problem over in his mind for roughly the hundredth time. Paper was swelling. Ink was smearing. Everyone had told him the air simply could not be controlled. Looking into the mist, he understood that fog was not the obstacle. Fog was the mechanism. Pull air through a spray of water and the moisture comes out of it. Control the dew point and you control the room. Cooling would be the side effect. Control was the point. By 1903, he had completed the apparatus first visualized on that foggy Pittsburgh evening, the world's first spray-type air-conditioning system able to both wash and humidify or dehumidify air. Modern air conditioning now had its fundamental building block.
The Chief, 1905
At 29 years-old, Willis Carrier was named head of Buffalo Forge's Engineering Department, earning him the nickname "the Chief." His 1906 catalog debuted the first published psychrometric chart, predicting "comfort" cooling would spread to theaters and restaurants. In 1907, he made Carrier's first international sale, to Japan's Fuji Silk Spinning Company; by 1909, Buffalo Forge incorporated the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America. In 1913, at an American Tobacco plant, he invented the "pan outlet" for gently distributing cool air from the ceiling.
Founding Carrier Engineering Corporation, 1915
Starting Over: Founding Carrier Engineering Corporation
The outbreak of war in Europe in July 1914 led Buffalo Forge to dissolve Carrier Air Conditioning Company, keeping only Willis Carrier and J. Irvine Lyle. "The entire country went into a tailspin," Carrier recalled — but rather than give up, the two resolved to start their own company: "If Irvine Lyle is willing to take the chance... we could make a go of it."
On June 26, 1915, Carrier Engineering Corporation was incorporated, with Carrier as president, Lyle as treasurer, and five colleagues — seven men who scraped together $32,600 in capital. Offices opened in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago. Early milestones included the company's first dairy and meatpacking installations, and in 1917, the hiring of Margaret Ingels, its first female engineer. In 1918, Carrier moved to New York City, finally working alongside Lyle 17 years after they first met.
Milestones at a Glance
If Willis Carrier Were Here Today…
Willis Carrier would be unsurprised that air conditioning ranks among the 20th century's most important inventions — and likely gratified by how global it's become, fulfilling many of his own predictions. He'd recognize the relentless innovation of today's engineers, even as they still rely on calculations from his 1911 Psychrometric Formulae.
He'd also be proud of the company's commitment to sustainability and to tackling modern challenges like climate change and indoor health. The words are new — healthy, safe, sustainable, intelligent — but the mission of bringing air conditioning's benefits to people everywhere would feel exactly as natural to him now as it did over a century ago.
More to The Story
History is filled with stories of ingenious people who tried to stay cool before the invention of modern air conditioning. In some warm weather regions of the world, residents constructed homes of thick limestone to reduce indoor heat. In 3000 B.C., an Assyrian merchant devised an evaporative cooler by spraying water on the walls of the basement below his courtyard. Leonardo da Vinci designed a water-driven fan to cool his patron's bedroom while Sir Christopher Wren constructed a gravity exhaust ventilating system for England's House of Parliament. More recently, architects have provided us cooling ideas such as the transom, awning, and sleeping porch. And in every culture, those who could travel to escape the heat sought relief at the shore and in the mountains.
However, not until 1902, when Willis Carrier invented his system of modern air conditioning, would factories and homes be able to provide cool, dry interiors in steamy, hot weather.
History is filled with stories of ingenious people who tried to stay cool before the invention of modern air conditioning. In some warm weather regions of the world, residents constructed homes of thick limestone to reduce indoor heat. In 3000 B.C., an Assyrian merchant devised an evaporative cooler by spraying water on the walls of the basement below his courtyard. Leonardo da Vinci designed a water-driven fan to cool his patron's bedroom while Sir Christopher Wren constructed a gravity exhaust ventilating system for England's House of Parliament. More recently, architects have provided us cooling ideas such as the transom, awning, and sleeping porch. And in every culture, those who could travel to escape the heat sought relief at the shore and in the mountains.
However, not until 1902, when Willis Carrier invented his system of modern air conditioning, would factories and homes be able to provide cool, dry interiors in steamy, hot weather.
Willis Carrier designed the first modern air-conditioning system in 1902 to solve a production problem at the Sackett & Wilhelms printing plant in Brooklyn, New York. Paper used in the company's multi-color printing presses was plagued by changes in humidity, causing the misalignment of colors and wavy edges that jammed feeding mechanisms, and slowing the drying of ink. Carrier's solution, which focused on controlling humidity, would launch an industry and fundamentally improve the way we live, work, and play.
NEED COPY - WAS DUPLICATE CONTENT IN COPY DOC
Willis Carrier's first modern air-conditioning installation was designed to reduce humidity on the second floor of Sackett & Wilhelms' print shop, a space designed to hold 60 multicolor printing presses. Carrier targeted 70°F and 55% humidity in winter and 80°F and 55% humidity in summer. The air-cooling equipment was added to an existing hot-blast heating system previously installed by Buffalo Forge.
For humidification in the winter, 1¼” perforated steam pipes were placed at the base of each of the warm air risers and controlled by Johnson Temperature Regulating Co. humidistats. For cooling and dehumidifying, two sets of prime-surface pipe coils were placed on the inlet side of the fan, selected for a total cooling load of 60 tons.
The equipment for the first modern air-conditioning installation included coils, fans, ducts, heaters, perforated steam pipes and temperature controls. Cooling water was drawn from an artesian well in the summer of 1902, supplemented by a De La Vergne ammonia compressor in the spring of 1903.
We don't know the price of all the earliest air-conditioning installations but do have some examples. A Carrier system designed in 1907 for Huguet Silk Company's weaving plant in Wayland, New York, for example, was delivered for $3,100, or about $90,000 in today's dollars.
A Fortune magazine article in 1938 noted that air-conditioning had split to become a capital goods industry and a consumer industry. A “central station” conditioning system intended to cool an entire building might cost more than $1 million for a large plant or store and as little as $1,500 for a small house — about $29,000 in today's dollars. New consumer appliances, built to cool just one room, might cost as low as $400 ($7,700 in 2021 dollars) in the 1930s — still beyond the means of most middle-class homeowners.
In May 1906, industrial engineer Stuart W. Cramer addressed a meeting of the American Cotton Manufacturers Association in Asheville, North Carolina, where he coined the term “air-conditioning.” Cramer had begun humidifying or “yarn conditioning” the air inside textile mills in 1895 as a way to keep threads moist and cloth pliant.
The new practice of “air-conditioning” had expanded features over yarn conditioning, including ventilation, cleanliness, and dehumidification. Not long after, Carrier and his engineers began using the term “air-conditioning,” which became universally adopted. “The one and only time I met Mr. Cramer and had a chance to visit with him,” Willis later wrote, “was when we were on a train. I found him to be a fine Southern gentleman.”
Willis Carrier presented his Rational Psychrometric Formulae on December 8, 1911 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It provided the first mathematical method of psychrometric calculation — precisely relating temperature and humidity — and soon became the authoritative standard. Along with this paper, Carrier also presented Air Conditioning Apparatus—Principles Governing Its Application and Operation, a comprehensive discussion of humidifying and dehumidifying apparatus and automatic controls.
His invitation to present at the meeting was recognition that air conditioning had become an established industry and new branch of engineering. Carrier's psychrometric chart would be reproduced in college textbooks, taught in engineering schools, and translated into foreign languages. At 35 years old, Willis Carrier had become internationally recognized as the Father of Air Conditioning.
An air-conditioner provides cool, dry air to an interior space by removing heat and moisture and transferring it outside. From its founding in the early 20th century, Carrier defined air-conditioning as four essential and inseparable factors: the control of air temperature, humidity, cleanliness, and distribution.
Today's Carrier believes that air-conditioning can also play a critical role in building health and occupant safety and productivity.