Willis Carrier: How Fixing Wrinkled Paper Gave the World Air Conditioning

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In the summer of 1902 the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn was scrapping print runs because humidity made paper swell and shrink between the four passes of color lithography. The Buffalo Forge Company handed the problem to Willis Haviland Carrier, a 25-year-old Cornell engineer raised on a farm in upstate New York. Carrier forced the factory air over coils of cold water so the vapor condensed and drained away, and on July 17, 1902 he submitted the drawings now recognized as the birth of modern air conditioning. His 1906 patent for an Apparatus for Treating Air used a chilled water spray held below the dew point to wring moisture out of the air, and in 1911 he presented Rational Psychrometric Formulae to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

When World War I broke out Buffalo Forge shut its engineering and installation side, and in 1915 Carrier and six colleagues pooled $32,600 to found the Carrier Engineering Corporation. In the 1920s he replaced toxic ammonia with a safe low-pressure refrigerant compressed by a centrifugal machine, opening department stores, offices and movie palaces to cooling. After the 1929 crash he merged with Brunswick-Kroeschell and York Heating and Ventilating in 1930 to form the Carrier Corporation, consolidating in Syracuse by 1937. His first wife Edith died a decade after their 1902 wedding and his second wife Jenny died in 1939. He died in New York City in October 1950, just before residential air conditioning boomed.

• The industry defined four functions every true air conditioner must perform: control temperature, humidity, circulation and air cleanliness.
• Carrier called his spray method the law of constant dew point depression, which allowed the first automated climate control.
• His 1911 paper is still called the Magna Carta of psychrometrics.
• At the 1939 New York World's Fair the company cooled a pavilion built in the shape of an igloo.
• By 2018 Carrier Corporation reported more than $18.6 billion in sales.