By Michael E.C. Gery

• Introduction
• The First Air Conditioner
• The "Hot Weather Blessing"
• Download the article as a

The first air conditioner

In 1902, 20 years after the nation’s first electric power plant went online in New York, Willis Carrier, the “father of air conditioning,” headed the “experimental engineering” department of the heating equipment engineering firm, Buffalo Forge Co., when he conceived of air conditioning. Carrier said he was standing in a hot Pittsburgh train station when he realized that air could be dried by saturating it with chilled water to induce condensation. That year he designed an air cooling and dehumidifying system for a Brooklyn printer who had complained of an inability to make color reproductions because changes in heat and humidity altered his paper.

The North Carolina textile industry played an early role in the advancement of air conditioning when in 1906 the Carrier Corporation installed its first industrial-strength system at Chronicle Cotton Mills in Gaston County. The project is also considered the point when the term “air conditioning” first entered the language, according to the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute.

Air conditioning came to urban movie theaters in the 1920s, to department stores in the 1930s, to the Packard automobile in 1938 and into affluent urban and suburban American homes after World War II.

Residential air conditioning accompanied the post-war economic boom. But price remained an obstacle in all but
the wealthiest neighborhoods. Installing air conditioning in
a new house in 1952 added about 8 percent to construction costs.

The 1960 U.S. Census found 12.4 percent of the nation’s houses equipped with central or room air conditioning. The South reported 18 percent overall, but among non-white Southern householders the figure was 3.8 percent.

Ackermann reports that automobile air conditioning developed at a much slower pace than home cooling. In the early 1960s, factory-installed AC added about $600 and considerable weight to new cars selling for less than $3,000. Most air-conditioned cars were sold in the South and Southwest at the time. It wasn’t until 1969 that half the nation’s cars contained air conditioning.