Slashdot Mirror
100th Anniversary of Air Conditioning
RealPerseus writes "The Buffalo News reports today in this article that the 100th annivsary of air conditioning is upon us. Who would have thought that air conditioning was invented in Buffalo?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
A few quotes and the standard journalist rambling. It might be appropriate on this day to find out/brush up on how they work.
You are correct. Various types of air cooling and conditioning have been in use for thousands of years. Here is a brief list of some of the types of air conditioning methods used in the history of Texas for the last few hundred years. It is worth noting that many large buildings still use the ice-chiller system to cool air, and it's being used in new construction, as well. "Refrigerated air" is simply not terribly efficient in large spaces.
Get off my launchpad!
Sorry, you didn't pass your thermodynamics test...
In order to move heat from a colder temperature to a higher one (which doesn't happen spontaneously due to the second law of thermodynamics) we need work. If you say it's all equal, I guess you never seen a fridge? It is one of the biggest electricity users in a normal house.
Electricity in heat pumps (the technical term for fridges and such) drives a motor that drives a compressor. The compressor moves around a special substance that evaporates (endothermic process) in the cooling section and condeses (exothermic process) in the heat outlet (for example those grilles blowing out hot air near buildings).
The amount of electricity (or actually work) needed to drive the compressor is substantial, one third to half of the heat energy being pumped away.
I remember from visiting Apalachicola, Florida, that they have a sign proclaiming to be the birthplace of air conditioning. Google it and see. Here's a decent page: http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/florida/lessons/gorrie/g orrie.htm .
He had rooms cooled by mechanical refrigeration 50 years before the usurpers in Buffalo! Let the revisionist history be cast down!
Actually, the inventor of Air-Conditioning was a doctor in Florida back in 1830's, who wanted to prevent his patients form breathing of swamp gas, which he thought was the cause of malaria. Dr. John Gorrie , "a doctor at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Apalachicola in the 1830s who was looking for a way to lower the fevers of malaria patients, is credited as the inventor of air conditioning -- and his legacy has changed life in Florida and just about everywhere else in America. (I remembered this from watching the ole BBC show, "Connections".) Gorrie started experimenting with cooling air in the 1830s, when he hung buckets of ice from the ceiling and forced air over them, according to Raymond Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida who has studied air conditioning's impact on the South. Later he used a steam-driven compressor to cool air, which led to the first patent for an ice-making machine in 1851." Cool, huh?
"I used to have a problem with multiple personalities, but now we're fine."
I would say "a few", not "many". The vast bulk of their production was smaller boats for blockading Britain.
This was damned fortunate for the US after Pearl Harbor. All the coastal shipping was completely unprotected, and it took several months before antisub patrols became sufficiently effective - long enough for a sub to cross the Atlantic, use up all its torpedos, go home to get more, and come back. But the Germans didn't have enough subs capable of making the trip, or many "tanker" subs to resupply the little boats, so the number of sinkings was limited. The panic and the disruption caused by keeping ships in port were pretty bad, though.
OTOH, the strictly temporary spot shortages of petroleum caused by tankers being sunk or kept in port became an excuse for the government to severely ration gasoline. This doesn't seem to have been necessary in the US during most of the war from the viewpoint of total available supplies versus consumption, but it helped get the civilian population into making sacrifices for the war effort, and it conserved a lot of irreplaceable tire rubber.