By Amanda Green
Inventors who came before Willis Haviland Carrier tinkered with cooling machines. But it was Carrier’s creation that launched the modern idea of air conditioning. To mark the 110th anniversary of his invention, we look back at the long story of a/c.
1758 All liquid evaporation has a cooling effect. Benjamin “I invented everything” Franklin and Cambridge University professor John Hadley discover that evaporation of alcohol and other volatile liquids, which evaporate faster than water, can cool down an object enough to freeze water.
1820 Inventor Michael Faraday makes the same discovery in England when he compresses and liquifies ammonia.
1830s At the Florida hospital where he works, Dr. John Gorrie builds an ice-making machine that uses compression to make buckets of ice and then blows air over them. He patents the idea in 1851, imagining his invention cooling buildings all over the world. But without any financial backing, his dream melts away.
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