Willis Haviland Carrier

willis haviland carrier November 26, 1876 - October 7, 1950) was an American engineer and inventor, best known as the man who invented modern air conditioning. He is considered at least partially responsible for the economic boom of the American Southwest, as his invention meant that people could move into areas previously considered uninhabitable in the summer months.

Biography

Carrier was born in Angola, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie and inherited her mother's love of 'tinking around,' with watches, sewing machines and other household gadgets. He loved math and studied it every chance he got, when he wasn't busy inventing his own devices.

In 1895 he received a scholarship to Cornell University and graduated in 1901 with a degree in electrical engineering. After college, he worked for the Buffalo Forge Company, a company that manufactured heaters, blowers, and exhaust and exhaust devices. In his heating engineering department, he designed heating systems for drying wood and coffee.

Carrier soon developed a better way to measure the capacity of heating systems and was appointed director of the company's experimental engineering department. In 1902, at the age of 25, he devised his first major invention, a system for controlling heat and humidity for Sackett-Wilhelms, a lithographic and publishing company in Brooklyn. The firm had been unable to fix the colors at times due to the effects of heat and humidity on the paper and ink. Carrier received a patent for his method in 1906. He went to work hard on other refrigeration and humidity control inventions, eventually becoming part head of the company named Carrier Air Conditioning Company in his honor, a subsidiary of Buffalo Forge. .

By World War I, the Buffalo Forge was forced to cut costs and eliminated its air conditioning division. Carrier, with six colleagues, invested $32,600 in his own company, Carrier Engineering Corporation. Some of the company's first clients were Madison Square Garden and the United States Senate and House of Representatives departments.

He installed the first domestic air conditioner in a home in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1914.

Carrier moved his company to Syracuse, New York, in the 1930s, and the company became one of the largest employers in New York. In 1930, he launched Tokyo Carrier in Japan, which is today the world's largest air conditioning market.

The company was a pioneer in the design and manufacture of large space refrigeration machines. By increasing industrial production during the summer, air conditioning revolutionized American life.

The introduction of residential air conditioning in the 1920s helped start the great migration to the warmer South. In the year 2000, Carrier Corporation already had sales of more than 8 billion dollars and employed some 45,000 people.