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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?"
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Well, finally...an old-school hacker gets some credit. Some guy working in a factory, invents such an important device for modern society...bravo Mr. Carrier
Cool!
The Moo went "Cow!"
Here I am, sitting in a tiny room with a very small oscillating fan trying in vain to fight the muggy late-night heat. In the other corner, my computer is quite happily chugging away, heating the room up even more.
And, here, a story about air conditioning. That I don't have. Meanies.
From the article.
"Carrier graduated from both Angola High School and the old Hutchinson-Central High School in Buffalo."
How do you graduate from two high schools?
A few quotes and the standard journalist rambling. It might be appropriate on this day to find out/brush up on how they work.
I read this story the other day. I found it quite interesting that they were using AC in airplanes several years before it was adopted in most buildings.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Anybody knows whether there are studies about the impact that air conditioning may have on the climate? expecially in cities/towns.
At least the microclimate near air conditioned buildings is influenced: sometimes you can't just pass near them because of hot air.
I know that there are some places around the world where you couldn't live without AC, and that there are places where you need it for computers and other sensible stuff, but I feel that in most places it is abused. (Things like 18C inside when outside there is only a perfectly tolerable 25C)
8' (as opposed to 10') ceilings, poor placement of windows leading to no cross-ventilation, cutting down all the trees around a lot to ease construction but destroying the shade, the death of the porch.
I love air conditioning, but I want to hate it. . .
On slashdot, we celebrate and wish Code Red, one of the biggest pains in the ass in recent memory, a 'happy birthday' .
Then we drop a note to... point out that it's the anniversary of airconditioning.
This is probably a pretty unpopular comment to make to a crowd of geeks in the heat of summer, but I'll say it anyways. While air conditioning is a great scientific and engineering achievement, I'm not sure that it's been a great advantage to society. It's done very little to improve the quality of life for humans and quite a bit to degrade it. I am by no means an avid environmentalist, yet anyone can recognize all the damage caused by freon and the tremendous strain that condensors place on the power grid.
What amazes me most is how Americans have begun to view air conditioning as a "necessity". Are we insane? The necessities in life are food, oxygen, and heat in climates with extreme cold. Nevertheless, the petroleum supplies are depleted at an increasing rate so that people can be more comfortable as they sit in traffic with the A/C on full blast.
Yes, it's a nice invention. Hospitals can benefit tremendously from it. But it's nowhere near a necessity and if humans would tolerate a little discomfort, the Earth might be in much better shape.
"Software is like sex. It's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
I've been tempted to explore the old abandoned plant, in the style of infiltration.org... but I have no real idea of what the security there is. When I was a kid in Buffalo, I used to hang around abandoned buildings, partly out of necessity. The old DL&W Terminal was a really cool place...
This space available.
this poll that's currently running on /.? BTW, it seems that most /.ers don't have the luxury of being cooled by ACs (according to the poll).
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Personally, I am looking forward to more widespread use of geothermal heat exchange systems (see this document and a few links at the bottom of that page for more info) to gain efficiency and save energy (and money). As every VW Bug owner knows, air is okay as a heat exchange medium, but it is not the best. Using the ground to move the energy around makes a whole lot of sense, and can be tacked on to an existing A/C setup (with a whole lot of digging, of course).
Living in Phoenix as I do, I can definitely appeciate this invention, and let's not forget Carnot.
I thought the air conditioners used the same principle as refrigerators. And that was first built a bit earlier (19th Century in Pennsylvania and Australia, ether machines) and the first practical system was built by Ferdinand Carre (France). Isn't air conditioning just an application of an earlier invention to a "new" area? You know, instead of cooling dead meat, it cools the living? :-)
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IIRC, I read a few weeks ago that Tokyo's had twice as many 30+ degC days per summer, attributable mainly to aircon outlets on the roofs of buildings. They have some plan to pipe water from the bay and do underground heat exchange, in the hope of reducing the temperature by a bit. I can't find a copy of the story on the web, though...
"I can think of no sin greater than central air"
Dogma
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
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!
Outdoors the sky would be turning darker as a shadowy purple became the predominant tint to the surroundings. The most prevalent sound was the synchronoized chatter of cicadas (locusts) with their bizarre rhythm of cyclic rattling. Oh, and of course their were the silent fireworks of the fireflies.
Now when you walk the street at dusk, you see no one, not even someone washing dishes, thanks to the ubiquitous dishwasher. Kids are nowhere to be seen. The steady drone of each and every house's air conditioning compressor fills the air, drowning out even the cicadas. You might as well be walking through a 24 hour per day widget factory. It is an industrial noise which blocks out all sounds of nature.
Sky watchers complain of light pollution; I would like to add to their complaint, the noise pollution of air conditioners which have helped to destroy the summer night.
... that air conditioning was invented in Buffalo?"
;-)
The "Armpit of America"? Have you ever smelled that city?
I rest my case...
NO CARRIER
Americans seem to be rather crazy about the air conditioners. Not that they are nice in a hot day, but why the hell do they have to turn their houses into freezers with them?
I mean, last time I was in Florida, I was shivering all the time I was indoors. Being indoors with shorts and a T-shirt was very unconfortable. In my hotel, the entire room was filled with a freezing gale from an enormous air conditioner. I tried to find some controls or a switch to turn it off, but couldn't. Luckily the beds had enough blankets to sleep in Siberian winter, so I didn't have to sleep outside.
After a few days, I got a bad cold, and had to end my conference&vacation trip early. I wasn't in a condition to be able to go to the Space Center, Epcot, or other sights in Orlando. Some other Finnish people I know tell that they get a cold every time they visit US.
What's the problem with you? Is it that the businessmen and others have to be able to wear a suit in hotels all the time, or what?
Here. And Washington DC is a town that really needs AC.
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Ironically enough, the Philadelphia Inquirer had an article yesterday pointing out how AC is actually making cities up to 10 degrees hotter versus rural areas.
In summer, all that extra heat - as much as 25 times more than in suburbs - tends to get trapped close to the ground by high-pressure systems. The result can be a vicious cycle.
"It's hotter, so we use air-conditioning, which makes it hotter, so we use more air-conditioning," said J. Scott Greene, director of the environmental and verification analysis center at the University of Oklahoma.
A great read for anyone who's interested...
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
This frickin' humidity sucks. I think the only way to beat it is with beer. The Buffalo-area chapter of slashdot members should hold it's meetings just over the river, at the Canadian ballet. (if you're from the area, you'll get it)
do not read this line twice.
... that Buffalo invented air conditioning? We're EXPERTS on cold. :)
Matt
I know. The house I grew up in had all of those features you love. Inside the house it was still hot as fuck in the summer, even at night. Can't sleep outside in this part of Virginia as the bugs would drain you dry. I sweated my ass off every summer for 18 years. I don't miss it. 'Course, after I left for college my parents had central AC istalled....BASTARDS...:)
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!
Boy can't add eh? Look and add all of the temp ranges and you shall see 6,291 have air conditioning and keep in in some crazy ranges. I don't like my house like an ice box, so I have to say that I am in the 73-76 range. I applaud those who have there's greater then 80, but BOY I bet they have shweaty balls and boobs (geek girls too ya know!).
Gorkman
Bastian,
However, modern air conditioning has made it possible to do two things:
1. Live in desert environments. You wouldn't want to live in Phoenix, AZ without air conditioning, especially with temperatures in the daytime hitting 45 degrees C. and higher during the summer.
2. Live in warm, high-humidity environments. Try living in the southeastern USA with temperatures in the high 30's C. and 75-plus percent humidity during the summer without air conditioning.
A big benefit of air conditioning is a huge boon to museums. Works of art and historical items are much more easily preserved in temperature/humidity controlled environments that air conditioning systems provide.
The air conditioner completely changed the south every bit as much as the cotton gin did 100 years prior.
Before AC the only people who could tolerate southern weather were those unfortunate enough to have been born there. It's only after AC that you see the large migrations from the north that enabled large cities such as Atlanta to develop. Only after AC does the south start to economically resemble the rest of the country.
In turn, AC also helped destroy the south as a region. That migration of money and people from other places fueled the suburbanization of the region, all but wiping out its regional identity in a sea of highways and Burger Kings.
Just reflecting on this as I sit in a 65 degree room in the middle of a 95 degree summer.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
If it weren't for air conditioning, you can forget about living in the US Southwest.
Can you imagine large scale cities in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the interior of California without air conditioning? I didn't think so. Especially in the summer these parts of the US can zoom well over 40 degrees C. easily.
AC was also an important feature of the U.S. Navy's fleet submarines in World War II
I was a crew member of one a few years ago. We could stay submerged for weeks or months. Air conditioning was pretty vital. We had two huge R-114 units. Man, it got hot during drills involving loss of non-vital electrical loads ...
The fist use of conditioned air was by the army corps. of engineers for the short bed stay of ABRAHAM LINCOLN after receiving his fatal shot. They used blocks of ice in a trough that drained down through strips of cloth, into a drain trough. A fan was used to force air through the cold cloth strips.
Get a free ipod.
A little tidbit about keeping cool in summer: before the widespread use of air conditioners, in many parts of the Mojave Desert in California they built special buildings nicknamed submarines to keep people cool.
This is how author John R. Signor described the original submarine building design in his book Beaumont Hill (Copyright 1990 Golden West Books, ISBN 0-87095-105-X):
This unusual contraption was roughly man-sized. It had a hood of galvanized steel that rolled back over a bed, similar to a rolltop desk. It contained a built-in trough that held 20 gallons of water with a blanket covering the hood. A sleeper would get inside and pull the hood down over the bed. Then he opened a valve that allowed water to drop from perforated pipes, which would saturate the blanket. The evaporation cooled the steel hood and the inside of the chamber. The outside temperature might register 130 degrees, but inside [Bob] Richardson's bed, the air was a comfortable 70 degrees.
Developed by Southern Pacific railroad engineer Bob Richardson 1906, submarines became an extremely popular way to keep cool in the summer, especially in the Mojave Desert. Richardson in 1922 developed a larger version that could hold larger beds and a even a small desk or nightstand.
Submarines, however, had one big downside: they didn't work well in high humidity environments. That mean these structures weren't so useful during the later summer when rains coming from the Pacific Ocean southwest of the Mojave Desert were common (usually the remanants of hurricanes that spawn off the Pacific coast of Mexico).
The development of modern air conditioning essentially ended the age of submarines, mostly because air conditioners continued to cool even in higher humidity conditions of later summer desert monsoon rains that occurred in the Mojave Desert.
So when do we get the anniversery story on the toaster? The refrigerator? The vacuume cleaner? Oh, I know! Indoor plumbing! That's gotta be on par with air conditioning, right?
~Sigh~ Imagine a beowolf cluster of those. 9_9
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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."
It was built for the construction of Hoover dam. The dam slowly went up in 8 foot sections to allow time for each section to cure and cool before putting more concrete on top of it. It was calculated that if the dam had been poured at once in one big pour (yeah, impossible but they calculated it), it would have taken 125 years to cure. Set aside the fact that the concrete would have been extremely fragile... Ah the joys of the Discover Channel. Gotta love it.
Amherst is where the rich people live
;-)
You're thinking East Amherst (West Egg, Nouveau Riche). West Amherst isn't all that rich.
The nice thing about Buffalo is that the temperature has never been recorded at 100 degrees or higher.
On the other hand, it's not the heat, it's the humidity that will kill you.
All things considered in Buffalo, you don't get hurricanes, you don't get mudslides, you don't get forest fires, you don't have all these things to worry about. You just have to worry about snowfall and the impossible Canadian invasion force
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I live in Minnesota now, but grew up in various parts of Arizona, and as long as you're not in Phoenix, you can get by just fine with swamp coolers, which I like a lot better, 'cos it keeps some moisture in the air. That doesn't work in Phoenix, which is way more humid than you'd think, so there you *need* airconditioning.
And so, by following a regimen that involves never being outside in the summer for more than a couple of minutes, driving from your airconditioned house with its irrigated lawn, to your airconditioned office park over by the golfcourse, or to the restaurant in the mall, you can move straight to Phoenix from Kansas and never realize you're in the desert at all. Whether that's a good or bad thing I'll leave up to someone less cranky than I feel at the moment.
-- 'intellectual property' is oxymoronic
ctually, I would even :%s/Williamsville/East Amherst/... Williamsvilel is where all the middle class retirees are. The "nouveau riche" are in East Amherst, and now moving out to Clarence, and Lancaster to go create more suburban sprawl.
"How many UB students does it take to change a light bulb? 25,000. 20 to write a grant to get money to study the effects of earthquakes on light bulbs, 1 to change the light bulb, and 24,979 more to complain about how much the light bulbs suck compared to those back home on Long Island"
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
While working at a General Motors truck plant last summer I noticed that nearly every truck we built had an air conditioner and a radio except for the ones we sent to Mexico. You would think somewhere as hot as mexico they would want A/C. At first I thought this was because nobody down there could afford it, but then I realized it's because they are more adapted to living in the heat than we are. IIRC most buildings in Mexico don't have A/C, but nobody really cares either.
Maybe all of us in the states like our A/C so much because most of us came from parts of Europe where it is a bit cooler most of the year than it is here.
What?
and I survived without AC for 9 years (so did my wife - gosh I love her.) For those not from Houston or ever been to hell, temps range only in the upper 90s, but with a 90% humidity! All year long we live and breath water. Before the 1950s, Houston had a thriving swim club culture. Now? It is a fringe sport at best (I am a swimmer.)
In the past when I didn't have AC, my pc died regularly due to over heating and I didn't have many people over (there is a limit to how little clothing you can wear!)
Now that I live in AC, I've gained 35 pounds (155 lbs.) Friends visit my house. I can't tolerate sever heat any more. I can still tolerate temps higher than my friends (I like it in the 80s,) but I can't tolerate temps in the 90s.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Air conditioning has also made it possible for the US Congress to be in session all year long. Time was they disappeared from D.C. in early June and came back in October. Now they are here most all year long. Is that necessarily a good thing?
And think of the poor Brits at their embassy in D.C.--they used to get topical duty pay!
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
It certainly seems inefficient to retrofit it into existing homes and homesites -- digging, plumbing, etc etc.
But what about *new* construction of subdivisions? This crossed my mind the last time I went to suburbia -- the development I was in had for every group of houses a pond/wetland pretty much in the center around them. What if you made this water feature a part of the geothermal cooling process when you built everything?
The return water from the houses could be pumped into a fountain (gaining evaporative cooling) and the supply water could be taken from the cooler water at the bottom; presumably a non-trivial amount of cooling would be done on the buried portions running to/from the houses.
This would in effect be not much different from the huge evaporative cooling towers that supply chilled water to the downtown buildings around me. It would add a "pretty" water feature to the homes around it and it wouldn't be astronomical to build since there'd already be tons of digging going on.
The downside would be that it wouldn't do anything for heat in the winter and the water would presumably require some serious filtration to keep the water systems functioning. I'm not terribly clear on the amount of water it would take to keep such a system for 10, 2500 sq ft houses cool in 90+ degree weather. It'd be a drag if the pond was too small and the water got too warm; perhaps burying a large loop beneath the pond for the supply side would add some cooling to it.
Nice. It's cool to see how many people here actually live right around the corner from you. I live in Fort Erie, but I work in Buffalo. And looking at the posts on this story, there are quite a few WNY folk hanging around. BTW, feel free to come over for the ballet anytime you like, just try not to clog up the bridge like the bingo grannies do. *sigh*
do not read this line twice.
Yeah... if you go to a Buffalo Sabres hockey game and they're playing the New York Islanders, it's practically an away game for the Sabres. Of course, the same thing can be said for a game against Toronto, but at least Toronto riles the Buffalonians up enough to cheer extra loud for their team.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
A big benefit of air conditioning is a huge boon to museums. Works of art and historical items are much more easily preserved in temperature/humidity controlled environments that air conditioning systems provide.
We went to the MFA in Boston 2-3 years ago in the summer and I was kind of appalled at the lack of A/C in vast stretches of the museum, including the furniture and decorative arts wings. I'm sure paintings benefit greatly from stable environments, but the wood furniture REALLY benefits from not constantly warping the summer and contracting in the winter.
Although one could reason that most of the furniture made prior to the invention of A/C had been naturally subject to that and the woodworkers of the era built a lot of floating joints that could tolerate it, but its got to be hard on the laminates and inlays.
I've been to the southwest, it isn't so bad.
I grew up in Louisiana, it's nightmareish.
Dry heat isn't too much of a problem as long as you keep drinking water. When the humidity approaches saturation, you can't sweat, and your body creates an insulating film of perspiration. It's much easier to have a heat related health crises in 90 degree weather in the swamp than in 105 degree weather in the desert.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Disclaimer: I live in Florida
It's in the hotel's best interest to have you use as little air conditioning as possible. I have stayed lots of places around here, and NEVER found one that doesn't allow you to turn off the AC. Not to mention that if you open the windows/doors in most of them, a switch will turn off the AC. This is law (or at least some sort of regulation) in some counties in Florida.
So, the "I couldn't turn off the AC in my room" argument sounds a little bogus.
The reason that large conference rooms in hotels during conferences are often too cold has more to dealing with large numbers of people than a desire to have a room be too cold.
If you've ever set up at one of these shows you will know that it's freezing when there only a few people in the stadium-sized room, but still can get pretty hot when there are thousands in there. You must pre-cool the room for the max crowd well beforehand, due to the size of the room.
It's a limitation of the technology (and thermodynamics to some extent) that no number of windows being open or insulation will cure. Sorry...
Again, it's to the economic advantage of the bill-payers of the gigantic room, to keep it as warm as possible. They aren't trying to freeze you out.
Finally, who would be more used to the extremely warm temperatures here in the summer, residents or northern tourists? It's you lot that demand the "ideal" temperatures inside every building that relate to northern European climes. Don't piss on us for giving you what you want, unfortunately it's our job as a tourist mecca.
And coming from someplace like Finland (apparently) to the tropics and then blaming the AC being too cold (compared to Finland?) as the cause of your illness, shows a fair ignorance of Biology and international travel.
Speaking as someone who apparently has a brain the size of a walnut, I'm disappointed that you "large brained" foreigners couldn't whine better than that. You do it with olympic caliber when you come over here, that's for sure.
Ok Finland, we'll turn off the AC in the summer, you turn off the heat in winter!
(cultural bigots come from all over, not just the USA)
It may have been invented in Buffalo, but it was invented by a Texan. Air conditioning is the only thing that makes living in Houston or Dallas bearable in summer.
Don't they still use it in larger systems? The A/C in your car and your home runs on Freon (or the PC replacements that have been devised in the past decade or so), but I thought that stuff didn't scale up to larger cooling needs.
It's also used in gas-powered refrigerators and such, like you might see aboard RVs, boats, etc...you boil the ammonia out of the water, cool the water through one radiator while you condense the ammonia back into a liquid, then you bring the two back together and fear the coldness. :-)
Years ago (well, early-to-mid-'90s anyway), I read some discussions about how this would be the most likely way you'd want to set up solar-powered air conditioning...it'd ultimately be a cheap way to keep cool here in the desert southwest. (It'd be cheaper than what Nevada Power wants to charge for power, anyway.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
My parents day in and day out wonder why I don't turn on the A/C in my room. I tell them that if you don't try to freeze yourself indoors, then when you go outdoors the heat won't seem so unbearable. But they keep on asking why I do it, as if my explanation isn't good enough. So (on those rare occasions when family members are home together) while everyone is complaining about how hot it is, I'm lounging, because it doesn't bother me.
Granted, the 80-90F we're getting in Jersey probably isn't remotely as bad as what those guys are getting South & West of us, but hey.
[o]_O
I don't know why all you non-US people are whining about our use of A/C :)
First of all, modern architects are VERY aware of how to build houses to be more naturally cool. Things like extra insulation in the attic, double-paned windows, etc can help keep the house better insulated.
This translates into a lower electric bill, which is a major concern. In fact, we are looking at getting another couple of inches of insulation blown into the attic in this house to help cut down on the amount of time we have to run the A/C.
Also note that all modern A/C systems use R-134a, which has about -zero- negative effects on the environment. Granted, it takes time to switch everything over, but it is happening.
A/C has changed the way we live. There is no sense in wishing it hadn't, because it is here to stay. Much better to make the best of the situation, with more energy-efficient units and houses with better insulation.
*P.S. temperature has nothing to do with 'catching a cold', as some posters here have seemed to imply. A cold is a virus.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
As far as I'm concerned, air conditioning is the SINGLE GREATEST INVENTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY. Yes. I know this is /. so I should be singing the praises of Linux, but I would willingly hand over my computer; they'd have to rip my A/C from my cold, dead hands.
Of course, if I were back in the Bay Area (where I'm orignially from), I may feel differently (I'm in the northeast now).
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Air conditioning, as opposed to refrigeration, dates from 1911, when Willis Carrier published his famous paper Rational Psychrometric Formulae. Carrier showed how both air temperature and humidity could be controlled simultaneously. Previous cooling systems mostly controlled temperature, usually at the expense of humidity control. Carrier put the basic theory underneath the technology, which took it from one-off demonstration systems to a usable technology.
I live in a condo with nice high ceilings, lots of open space and airflow, and don't need or miss air conditioning (though we've got one room a/c downstairs that we've never used.) I spend more on heat in the winter time than I ever did in New Jersey, where we had real winter. (Half of that is because I've got electric heat - the place was built in the mid 70s, and doesn't have much insulation, either.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks