The development of refrigeration started early on when the need for keeping food preserved was discovered. Certain foods that are kept at room temperature can spoil really easily and become the perfect place for bacteria to grow and thrive. At temperatures below 4oC it was found that this growth could be rapidly reduced. This resulted in the development of refrigeration which followed alongside the air conditioner, humidity control and manufacturing processes.
The concept of the air conditioning started before any machines were designed to create the cooling effect that people wanted. The first attempt to make an air conditioner machine was made by Dr John Gorrie (1803-1855) a physicist from Florida. During his work in the 1830's he created an ice-making machine that would blow air over a bucket of ice. He designed it to be used for the patients in his room that were suffering from malaria and yellow fever.
In1881 when the president James Garfield was on his death bed a similar box-like structure was created by naval engineers to lower the temperature in his room. The contraption was filled with cloths that were saturated with melted ice water and a fan blew hot air above them. Although the air conditioner managed to lower the temperature by 20 degrees it managed to consume an impressive half a million pounds of ice in two months.
The next closest invention to air conditioning was designed by a man named Willis Carrier and his machine was named 'apparatus for treating air' and was built for a business in New York. Chilled coils were inside of the machine to cool the air and could lower the humidity to around fifty per cent.
After this invention of the growth of the air conditioner was huge and they started being made for industrial buildings such as textile mills, printing plants and pharmaceutical manufacturers. The first ever air-conditioned home belonged to millionaire known as Charles Gates in 1914. The units in his home were large, expensive and extremely dangerous to the ammonia coolant that was used.
By 1922 Carrier had a breakthrough and replaced the ammonia he was using in his air conditioner with the coolant dielene and added a central compressor so that the unit could be smaller. He also sold his air conditioning units to theatres in 1925 and in a short amount of time the idea caught on very quickly and units began popping up all over New York City. By the end of the Second World War window air conditioning units had appeared and sales were through the roof. It is difficult today to imagine a world without air conditioning.
Author Resource:
Dominic Donaldson is a historian with many years of experience in technology. Find out more about aAir Conditioner from Pure Air Conditioning.Distributed by Content Crooner
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