From Ice to Air Conditioning: How Humans Fought the Heat (Part 2)

Introduction

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. I'm your host, Qiao Yulan. Last time we covered how people made ice to get through the summer before refrigerators existed. This episode jumps straight into the 20th century to talk about the stories behind air conditioning. Here's a teaser: the first air conditioners were not made for people. Cooling technology is closely tied to heating technology. So what problem did air conditioning originally solve, and how was it invented? We'll find out in this episode.

Without exaggerating, office workers in summer owe half their lives to air conditioning and cold drinks. When you step out of the blazing sun into an air-conditioned room, or sit in a car and turn on the strongest cooling mode, you may have wondered who invented air conditioning and the whole cooling technology behind this summer savior.

The Story of Carrier

The story starts with a farm boy from a small town named Carrier. Willis Havilland Carrier was born in 1876 in New York State, to farmer parents. But unlike most people with his background, his family did run a farm. Carrier liked fixing things for the farm from childhood. He could repair clocks and sewing machines, and his family saw he had the makings of an engineer, so they invested heavily in his education. He didn't let the village down. He graduated from Cornell University, an Ivy League school, with a master's degree in mechanical engineering.

After graduation, he didn't go home to live off his family's business. He joined the Buffalo Forge Company in Buffalo. And which department do you think he joined? You'd never guess: the inventor of air conditioning, the enemy of heat waves, was first assigned to the heating engineering department, which mainly designed systems for drying lumber.

At that time, a major printing plant client came to the company and asked whether they could design a system to control temperature and dehumidify their print shop. It was summer, and the high heat and humidity made the paper in the plant warp easily, so the print quality was unstable.

Thanks to Carrier's strong performance up to then, the boss didn't hesitate and gave him the job right away. I imagine the boss was thinking: if you can heat things up, you can surely cool them down too?

For a young employee, though, this was a huge challenge. Electricity had already arrived, but humans still had very limited control over temperature. Since people discovered fire, they had mostly mastered heating, and cooling was the complete opposite. The only tools Carrier had access to were the ancient eastern and western ice-handling techniques, like the methods we discussed in our last episode: storing winter ice for use in summer, or shipping ice from cold regions to the tropics.

Carrier thought about this problem for a long time, working out many designs and calculations on paper, but still couldn't find a reasonable solution. But when you want to solve a problem nature presents, you ultimately have to look to nature for the answer. Inspiration can come from anywhere. When he arrived at the Pittsburgh train platform and saw the large clouds of steam from a steam locomotive, he suddenly realized the answer was right in front of him. If steam-filled pipes can warm the air around them, then replacing the steam with cold water, and blowing air across cold-water coils, could cool the air around them and lower both its temperature and humidity!

Once he decided to act, Carrier completed the first temperature control device in less than a year, and the prototype of the world's first air conditioner was born. At age 29, he became head of the engineering department.

However, for the first twenty years after air conditioning was invented, the technology had almost nothing to do with ordinary people. Air conditioners were mostly delicate machines used in textile mills and printing plants. The early air conditioners were not the shape we know today. They were huge, made a lot of noise when running, and only large factories could afford them. Carrier kept busy during this period too, constantly optimizing and innovating the design of air conditioning units.

Then in 1924, the largest department store in Detroit bought the most advanced chilled-water air conditioning system at the time, and that was when most ordinary people first encountered air conditioning. Department store sales peaks were usually in winter, because shopping in the summer was actually quite dangerous. With crowded crowds and severe heat, people sometimes fainted from heatstroke while shopping, and some even died of the heat. But after installing air conditioning, the store's sales jumped 300% that summer.

Around that time, whoever installed air conditioning saw a significant increase in sales. Air conditioning also made going to the movies a mass entertainment activity. Cinemas were no longer stuffy, and audiences could sit patiently and enjoy every film all the way through.

Even today, Carrier is still one of the largest air conditioning manufacturers in the world, though it now focuses on commercial applications. You can find Carrier air conditioning in the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube, the Shanghai Expo pavilion, and in subway systems across many cities.

Other Impacts

The deeper impact of air conditioning goes far beyond this. It made tropical regions much more livable, and created more economic opportunities. In an interview, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew was asked about the secret of Singapore's success. Besides its multicultural and inclusive background, he pointed to another, even more important factor: air conditioning.

He believed that people can only stay clear-headed and work efficiently in a comfortable environment. Some research has also found that people work most efficiently at about 22°. Compared with the value that people create when they work efficiently, what is the electricity saved by not running air conditioning worth?

举