Air Conditioning, Part 2

buildings to increase circulation of air. Some involved chilling air by passing it through like underground channels of cold water to particularly ingenious solution information persia. But today we're going to be getting into the modern science and chemistry of

air conditioning. Yeah, because, as we discussed in the last episode, all these various techniques of the past, they were they all ranged from like mild to moderate in their effects, and when used together, you know, they could imp prove the quality of life for the individuals that we're living with them. But modern air conditioning, as we'll explore, was a huge game changer. Yeah. Now, this is going to be one of those episodes where we can't name a

single person as the undisputed inventor of modern air conditioning. Instead, I think what we see is a lot of different engineers and inventors at different times coming up with new versions and variations of cooling and refrigeration technology. So it's going to be inevitable that we're not going to be able to talk about all of the people who contributed some important early experiment or design that led to modern

refrigeration and air conditioning. Instead, we're going to be focusing on a few highlights we found interesting, and likewise, we tend we're going to discuss some things that are more refrigeration based in the technology, but where we're focusing mostly

on air conditioning. And yet at the same time, the history of these technologies is kind of in they're kind of interwoven with one another because they're they're both attempting to do a very similar thing, and that is to take a warm substance, be it uh, some water or a certain body of air and making them cooler or making them absolutely cold. And in many cases, modern air conditioners and modern refrigerators work on the same principles. Not

in every case, but in a lot of cases they do. Uh. And so the more I thought about this, the more I thought it would make sense to start with a brief, simplified explanation of how modern air conditioning generally works, and then we can after that go back in time and work our way up to it with some of these

interesting stories about early stabs at it. So, as we mentioned in the last episode, there are multiple ways to cool the air in a room or cool the people in a room, but the most common method today uses a system of hollow coils filled with a fluid called a refrigerant, which is usually something chosen because as a low boiling point, meaning it changes from a liquid to a gas at a low temperature, and the fluid in this coil system flows constantly in a circuit that takes

it back and forth between the inside and the outside of your house or whatever building or space you're trying to cool, converting back and forth between a liquid and a gas and carrying heat with it one way as it goes. So so the whole way and air conditioner works. The simple version is is just using this refrigerant to absorb heat from the air in your house and then dump it outside. And I'm not going to get into

super technical chemistry or anything like that. We're just giving you the cliffs notes version here, so the cliffs notes version is when when you got this fluid the refrigerant, it's in a cold liquid form. It flows through this coil on the inside of your house known as the evaporator coil, and these coils get they get that there's a blower motor that blows the air over them really fast, and this causes these cold coils to absorb heat from the warm air inside your house and cool that air off.

In the process, the heat from the air is going into the coils and then the nice cold air of course that the results from this blows out your ace events and it's just it's just now the indoor air that has been nice and dehumidified and cooled off by passing over these coils. The heat from the warm air inside your house heats up this fluid inside the coils and converts it from a liquid into a gas. And the air in your house can do this because of

the refrigerant. Again, it's got a really low boiling point, so it's very easy to convert this liquid into a gas. This is something we see commonly in many early experiments with with refrigeration and with air conditioning is they find some kind of chemical like ether like alcohol that has a low boiling point, so it's easy to cause this evaporation. As we know from the last episode, evaporation sucks energy out of the surroundings. It's an energy hungry process and

so it cools off everything around it. But now you've had these coils full of refrigerants that have absorbed the heat energy from the air in your house, and that heat energy has to go somewhere, right, It can't just disappear. It's got to be dumped. So the fluid then blows

outside and somewhere along the way here. Often, if you've got like a you know, an outdoor unit, uh, it will go through a compressor, and that compressor will be in the outdoor unit, and the compressor is powered by a mechanical device that forcibly smashes that vapor and increases its pressure by using electrically powered components to reduce the volume, smashes it down, and then this pressurized refrigerant flows through

condenser coils. These are in the unit outside the house or in the part of the air conditioner that's sticking outside, which are another set of coils exposed to the outside air. And this of course, it has another fan that rapidly blows the outside air over these coils, so the outside air rapidly absorbs the heat from the hot compressed refrigerant inside the coils. The heat gets just dumped out into the air outside, and this allows the refrigerant to cool

off and condense back down into a liquid. And then finally, before the refrigerant can go through the evaporator coils inside again, it passes through a device called an expansion valve, which lowers the pressure that the compressor forced into it. So now you're back to what you started with. You've got this low boiling point liquid that can again be exposed to the air inside your house. Blowing that air over it really fast with a fan and it cools the

air down and removes humidity from it in the process. Yeah, when you lay it all out, it it's a it's the celaborate process. I mean, we see again it's easy to take air conditioning for granted when it is working. Um, but it does remind me how when when I was a kid, we would go to my my grandfather's house and he he had window units in you know, the major rooms of the of the house. And when one

was not was was not functioning. He was a superhanded guy, so he would take it out of the window and he would take it apart and repair it and tinker with it. And I remember at the time just marveling at all the things that seemed to be going on inside of that air conditioning um and he was able to patch it up and get it back on the window and functioning again. Yeah, it is weird. I tried,

Like it's hard. I remember when I was younger not understanding how air conditioning worked and being kind of amazed by it, and and I even remember having it explained to me and like just in not clicking. And I gotta admit, when we were preparing for this episode, I spent a long time like looking at the diagrams and trying to hack at it and make sure, like, okay, am, I sure I'm understanding this right, because it's not very intuitive, right it's And the thing is, it's household. Peers are

rather into it. It's like a hot water heater. It's rather simple. You know, you don't have to do much tinkering with it to understand it. I just explained to my son how one works that the day because I neglected, I think, to ever, like tell him where the hot water came from. So I was like, oh, let's talk about where all the hot water went. Just now. Likewise, you know, the furnace, I feels a lot more. It's a lot easier to understand Washington seeing a dry or

an oven. But yeah, the air conditioning requires a few more steps of understanding and really grasp what it's doing well, I think, especially because it involves chemistry and phase changes having to do with like phase changes between liquid and gas and gas and liquid and compression and condensation and all that. So these things I think are less intuitive to us than just putting heat into something. But another way you can think about an air conditioner is that

it's a heater for outside. An air conditioner is just a heater from outside, and the heat energy that it draws to heat the outside comes from the air in your house. And of course it accesses that heat energy very rapidly by by having this this low boiling point liquid and blowing air over it really fast. All right, So we're going to talk about how we got to this modern technological marvel that is the air conditioning unit.

But before we get there, I want to talk to us a little bit about but we want to basically drop in on a favorite invention and stuff to blow your mind historical figure, and that is, of course Benjamin Franklin. Oh yeah, so he actually did some early air conditioning style experiments. Yes, Now to be clear, Ben Franklin did

not invent air conditioning. And I it's interesting you see this tippit about Benjamin Franklin, either correctly attributed or sometimes incorrectly attributed, show up on a lot of different air conditioning company websites. I don't know if it's about just you know, adding engaging content on the website. So it's about you know, you know, ranking and search and so they just put some some some fun content on there,

getting some of that founding father Mojoe. But if you've read anywhere that Ben Franklin invented air conditioning, uh, he did not, I want to be clear on that. But he did experiment with the refrigerating effects of various liquids and the role evaporation plays in the process. He experimented with Cambridge professor John Hadley using ether and a bellows to cool a mercury thermometer down to twenty five below freezing.

And this makes sense because while this is not exactly an air conditioning unit, it is basically taking from the same principles that will be employed in the kind of air conditioning unit we just described, having something with a low boiling point, like while water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees fahrenheit or a hundred degrees celsius, the boiling point of ether, I think diethyl ether is around ninety four degrees fahrenhydro thirty five degrees celsius, so it

boils much more easily. Blowing air rapidly over a massive ether is kind of like the blower in a modern AC unit blowing air over an evaporator coil full of refrigerant. It rapidly evaporates, and it steals energy from the surrounding air, thus cooling the air. So Franklin wrote about all this uh and about sort of the general knowledge of cooling technology to do is aware of in a seventeen fifty

eight letter to John Lenning and UH. And this this letter is available online, and I want to read read a portion of it here, referring to the experiment that we just mentioned. Quote from this experiment, one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer's day if you were to stand in a passage through which the wind blew briskly, and to be wet frequently with ether, a spirit that is more inflammable than brandy or common spirits of wine. Okay, Franklin maybe

knew something about brandy and wine. No, no, I don't mean to. I imagine he did. I believe he did. But yeah, so he's talking about the evaporation principle. Then again, especially if you have something with a very low boiling point, you like put alcohol or ether or something all over a person because it evaporates very readily, and then you blow a fan on them, it will chill them even more than blowing a fan on like a person wet

with water. Right now, this first part of the letter about freezing a man to death on a warm summer's day, you see that thrown around a lot, and it does show up on a number of air conditioning websites out there. But the rest of the weather the letter is really cool too, So I want to read the next passage of it. It's a bit longer, where he just talks

about refrigeration technology in general. Quote. It is but within these few years that the European philosophers seem to have known this power in nature of cooling bodies by evaporation. But in the Yeast they have long been acquainted with it.

A friend tells me there is a passage in Bernis travels through Indostan, ridden near one hundred years ago, that mentions it as a practice, in traveling over dry deserts in that hot climate, to carry water in flasks wrapped in wet woolen cloths and hung on the shady side of the camel or carriage. But in the free air, whereby as the cloths gradually grow drier, the water contained

in the flask is made cooler. They have likewise a kind of earthen pots, unglazed, which let the water gradually and slowly ooze through their pores, so as to keep the outside a little wet, notwithstanding the continual evaporation which gives great coldness to the vessel and the water contained in it. Even our common sailors seem to have had

some notion of this property. For I remember that, being at sea when I was a youth, I observed one of the sailors during a calm in the night, often wetting his finger in his mouth and in holding it up in the air to discover, as he said, if the air had any motion, and from which side it came. And this he expected to do by finding one side of his finger grows suddenly cold, and from that side he should look for the next wind, which I then

laughed at as a fancy what. Some people didn't like Ben Franklin at the time would not have accepted that the cold side of a wet finger is where the wind is coming from. His youth him. Yeah. So this letter and and various other documents can be found at founders dot archives dot gov. Um Uh, there's a number of writings from figures like Ben Franklin there. Ben Franklin's writings are are are typically worth checking out. A lot

of his letters are just fantastic. There was one we quoted at length in a couple of stuff to Blow your Mind episodes we did about the early days of electricity experiments, where Benjamin Franklin describes his attempts to uh to kill and roast a turkey for a big party using laden jars. Yeah, Franklin is an interesting figure. It would be kind of potentially interesting to come back and look at him in greater detail in a future episode of one of these, uh these shows, because he did

have his hand in a lot of science. You know, he's a true Enlightenment character. Um. You tend not to see individuals involved in American politics so involved in the

sciences these days. Right now, before we get onto the more recent notable attempts to actually create some kind of air conditioner for rooms, I guess we could briefly mention one other important figure around the same time in early refrigeration and cooling research, and that would be the Scottish physician and inventor William Cullen who lived seventeen ten to seventeen ninety, who invented a process for evaporative cooling in the seventeen fifties, which he described in an essay from

the mid seventeen hundreds with a hilariously bad title quote of the cold produced by evaporating fluids and of some other means of producing cold. Well, it's not that that. Basically he got ethyl ether to boil by creating a

partial vacuum. So you put ethel ether, which has a low boiling point in a chamber, and then you you lower the pressure in the chamber, which causes the liquid to boil at an even lower temperature, and the evaporation that that causes, of course again sucks energy from the surroundings and has a rapid cooling effect on on whatever's around this chamber. But we're gonna find maybe our first real attempt at creating an air conditioner for a room, not in Scotland, not not in Ben Franklin's labs or

in his experiments at Cambridge or wherever. We're gonna go somewhere else that's right, and you'll find out right after this. Great alright, we're back. So I'm not saying it doesn't get hot in Scotland, but I know a place where it definitely gets hot here in the United States, and that is, of course, the Panhandle of Florida. Did you

ever live in Florida? No, but it's I've always, well not always, but I've much of my life has been lived in the American South, So Florida has always been a place to go for vacations and so so generally in summer months when it is it is sweltering. Right, So we're going to be turning to a figure a Florida man named John B. Gory. Yes, so, John B. Gory lived eighteen oh three through eighteen fifty five was

an American physician. Born in the West Indies, raised in South Carolina, educated in New York, and then he moved to Appalachicola, Florida in eighteen thirty three. And Appalachicola is a small coastal town in the Panhandle of Florida. It's near St. George's Island. I think, which at some point in my life, I think I actually went on a vacation too. Yeah, I mean I've been to Appalachicola, and

I did not realize it's significance in history. I mean, obviously I didn't spend a lot of time or I might have seen a statue too of the man we're talking about now. But of course you might imagine Florida in the eighteen hundreds, there's going to be a good amount of disease going around. This is going to be basically a tropical disease environment. Yeah. So while he was in Appletrico, he practiced medicine, but he also studied these

tropical diseases, especially yellow fever and as miasma. Theory was still in fashion at the time. He considered bad air to be the key factor in these illnesses. Now, we've discussed miasma theory before. I know, we discussed it and stuff to build your mind. I can't remember if it came up on invention or not, I'm not sure, But basically,

miasma theory was the idea that diseases it was. It was a pre germ theory hypothesis on the origins of disease that postulated that diseases were spread by bad air or bad vapors, often associated with bad smelling things like carrion, or like swamps or marshes. But then there were also more supernatural versions of it that believe that like bad

vapors would come down off of the planets or something. Yeah, yeah, I remember the discussing those the planets, Uh, in the planets in graveyards, for instance, certainly, you know, not places you're gonna catch a supernatural illness like this. But of course you can see where the correlation comes in when you're dealing with unburied corpses or swamp lands that are loaded with say mosquitoes that are of course, uh, you know,

carrying potential human diseases exactly right. Yeah, I think the swamp lands thing being a really important, uh point of comparison. There were these ideas of like night vapors coming off of the marsh or the swamp, where the real problem is that you've got a mosquito giving you malaria or giving you yellow fever. But I also want to say that I think it wasn't just a belief in miasma theory that led to a desire to cool the air and hospital rooms for patients suffering from diseases like yellow

fever and malaria. I think part of it was also just the idea of the comfort of the patients. But something this did make me think about was that it's interesting that it seems like we have a I was gonna say natural association. I don't know if it's a natural instinctual association or if it's learned, but this association between cold fluids and cleanliness and warm fluids with uncleanliness, Like,

I don't think that's just me. I think that's a common cultural association, like cold air and cold water automatically feel clean, while stagnant warm air and tepid water feel dirty. And I don't. Do you think that's like something you know from deep in our brains and our primate ancestors, or is that just something we learn in life through culture. I mean, I don't know. I've never really thought about it much. I mean, obviously, if you're in a hot room,

you're likely to be sweaty. And if you're sweaty over time, that can produce a certain odor and you can feel, you know, dirtier because of it, I guess, and we and and certainly in the air conditioning age, you come to associate the outdoors is a place where you sweat, and sweat being the product of toiling. Uh. And then inside you're gonna have access to air conditioning. This is going to be a play. So you know, generally you know of of more relaxation uh and uh and maybe

cleaner activities. You're not getting his dirty. But at any rate, Gory definitely was responding to the idea that a hospital should be cool in part because of the you know, the of the maasthma theory that you need some you need some good air in there, which means you need some cold air cool it down, especially for those feverish patients. Yes, uh and you know, there's still some truth to this today.

I mean, you go into a hospital now, not because of miasthma theory, but hospitals now tend to be pretty chilly places. I would say, yeah, yeah, absolutely, of course that's really come to be the case of most like large you know, buildings of like schools, libraries like these are these are places that are refuges of of the

cool in hot climates. Usually, So Gory wanted to cool down the hospital, and his first approach to this simply involved hanging tubs of ice from the ceiling, which is actually a pretty solid idea given that that that cool air is going to descend, right. But of course this brings us back to the historic Roman problem. Uh and uh and also I suppose the the Aztec problem as well,

of of how to transport that ice. You know, if you're getting that ice from somewhere, uh, you've got to transport it all the way to your hospital and then hanging up in the ceiling. Yeah. And so at this time we talked in the last episode about, of course, yeah, this Roman problem, like bringing snow down from the mountaintops, snow or ice. In ancient Rome, there were people who sold it, but it seems like it was something of

a luxury. Right. It's gonna take a lot of work to bring snow down, and someone's gonna melt on the way. Uh So, yeah, it's an expensive proposition. The large scale transport of ice had actually only recently become a big business in in Gorey's time here, so in the eighteen thirties or forties, due in large part to the efforts of a single ambitious business man from Boston named Frederick the Ice King Tutor. Like an Adventure Time, Yes, Oh wait, I didn't know, is there? Yeah, there's an ice king

on Adventure Time. He's you know, he's a king, an evil king with with ice based powers, but he is the Ice King. Okay, well maybe you be. I haven't seen this, so you'll be the judge of how well this fits with Frederick the Ice King Tutor. So, Tutor's shipments of block ice traveled not only to customers in the American South, of course, they went to New Orleans and to Charleston and all over the place, but also

all over the Caribbean, from Havana to Martinique. They even went around the world to Brazil, into Europe, into India and India. Apparently his ice was hugely popular, and the story of Frederick Tutor's ice business, I think is in

itself pretty fascinating. Basically, Tutor developed a process for mass harvesting of ice from frozen lakes and ponds in and I think rivers too in the winter in New England, and then taking that ice harvested from these bodies of fresh water two warmer destinations down south, where the ice was sold for various refreshing purposes, often for cooling drinks, but at least occasionally for cooling rooms. Alla gory. And this would have been to most people a very new

thing at the time. Like can you imagine how magical it must have seemed living your whole life in a tropical climate and then one day, for the first time ever, being served a cold drink with ice floating in it. Yeah, I mean it must have been magical. You know this? This reminds me of the film The Mosquito Coast. Did you ever see this with the Harrison Ford? No, I haven't seen it, but I know about it. Yeah, you

know the plot, The central plot involves this. This character played the Harrison Ford is like a brilliant inventor and kind of eccentric and very opinionated and strong willed individual. Uh. And he and they traveled to I can't remember if it's Belize or Costa Rica or it was filmed in one of the two, one of the two. It's a travels down there with the idea of constructing this ice generating machine, sheen and bringing bringing ice to the people.

And so there's this wonderful scene where they've they've they've created the ice in the machine, and they've they've transported it wrapped in leaves to to preserve it, to show it to some native peoples. And by the time they get there, they're unwrapping the leaves trying to find this tiny bit of remaining ice and like that there's and

it's just, you know, virtually all melted away at the core. Well, it also makes me think about the opening of the novel One Years of Solitude by Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, and in the first chapter of that there's this, you know, the mythical history of this family, and there's a story about the patriarch taking his children to see Uh. I think a traveler brings a chest that has ice in it. None of them have ever seen ice before? Oh well, yeah, I mean it would have. It would have been a

magical occurrence. Again. Uh, one of the marvelous privileges of the modern age that most of us take for granted. And how I mean, I don't want to like it seems absurd now that you would harvest ice from a cold climate, put it in a ship, and ship it to another part of the world. But this turned into a huge business. No. The Ice King, I should say, had a lot of early failures in like the first

decade of the eighteen hundreds. For example, some of his early shipment's just melted at their port of arrival before they could be sold and used, because there were no ice houses to keep the ice insulated after it showed up. But over the years Tutor improved the feasibility and the efficiency of his business in quite a few different ways. A few interesting examples I was reading about. One was, of course, establishing ice houses right to store the ice

when it arrived in the warmer climates. Another was this quest to find better insulating packing material to keep the ice cold while it was being shipped. Originally he used straw, but experimented with stuff like rice and even cold us, but later he found that pine sawdust worked best of all to keep the ice cold. And then later he partnered with an ventor named Nathaniel Jarvis Wyath, who yep

related to the painter Andrew Wyath. Uh and nat Wyath came up with lots of improved methods and tools for tutors business, including designs for insulated, double walled above ground ice houses, and crucially for a horse drawn ice cutter that works kind of like a furrow plow. It would saw out ice blocks in a grid pattern as it was dragged behind the horse, and then these ice blocks that were sought out could be easily broken apart from

one another and floated down to a retrieval site. And this apparently greatly streamlined the harvesting process and decrease the cost device. And I've got a picture here, Robert, you can see of what this horse drawn ice cutter looks like. But it's kind of it's surreal watching these people standing on the surface of a frozen lake that's just cut into a grid. It looks like graph paper. Wow. Yeah,

they just ditting it up to ship it out. And in fact, I found this historical connection too good to miss. The American writer Henry David throw encountered commercial ice harvesters at work in Walden Pond, and he wrote about them in his book Walden. Do you mind if I read

part of this quote here? Robert Okay, so a thorough rights. Thus, for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work, like busy husbandman, with teams and horses, and apparently all the implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac. And as often as I looked out, I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower and the like. And now

they're all gone. And in thirty days more probably I shall look from the same window on the pure sea green Walden water, there reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or she'll see a lonely fisher in his boat like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves where lately a hundred men securely a bird.

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well. Oh and he he also goes on to to contemplate his his fascination with the philosophy of the Baga Bodhida uh and eventually concludes by saying that, uh, that the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganji's And I guess in mind there he just has the fact that the ice from his pond is maybe going to end up in India in

somebody's drink. Oh yeah, it's kind of the reverse of the the the argument ever before that all water has been dinosaur p You know, it's true, all water has been Henry David Throw's bathwater that like all every every chunk of ice in every drink you've ever had, Henry David Thorreau washed his butt with. It's probably true. It's statistically it's true. Yeah. Well, you know this this brings

this boy the the whole question of water purification. The process of water purification is interesting because um, you know, we could easily do a whole well, we could easily do a whole episode on just technology involved in purifying water, but also the psychology of water purification, Like what how many steps need to be there, organic or industrial before we will accept that we are drinking something that was once potentially urine or bath water, that was essentially gray

or or worse water at some point is now our drinking water. Um, it's it's it's quite fascinating we start breaking down the psychology. Yeah, well, I mean H two O molecules or H two O molecules. It's like, just because H two O was once part of poop, or was once part of blood, or was once you know, something else, now it's not anymore. Yeah, Like, why don't we That's that's gross. But we're okay with having been stardust, you know, that's right. I mean we kind of pick

and choose, don't we. I Mean, it doesn't bring the poop with it unless it does. But we still want to think that, right, We still we still want to think that it is still in some way poop in the same way that we might we might listen to the song would Stock and think, yeah, there is a piece of a star inside me, and it's burning bright with the you know, with the power of of an entire solar system. That's a good connection, Robert. That's also

it's a bit of that thorough energy. And I know some people actually did I think Thorow is kind of boring, but I found that passage rather beautiful. Uh So, Anyway, by the middle of the nineteenth century, shipped ice was this huge business, and as you might imagine, it could also be fickle, right, because it's ice, it's not the

most stable of commodities. Like slight variations in the weather patterns elsewhere in the world could potentially mess with supply and demand for ice in a major way, leading to the dreaded ice shortage. So now you're living somewhere hot and you've got a taste for ice, but maybe sometimes the ice market could get mighty tight, right. And it's one thing if you're just you're looking for ways to uh,

you know, to to cool your drink down. But if you're looking at like Gory was, at a hospital, a situation where you believe that there is a there's a there's a strong advantage and having a cooled down hospital room, uh, then you're gonna want to have some way to produce ice uh locally. So he began became increasingly obsessed with the problem of artificial ice production, so much so that in eighteen forty five he gave up medicine to look

into this full time. And UH he actually acquired patents and UH he had acquired patents in eighteen thirties and the eighteen thirties for an ice machine that employed cooling caused by rapid gas expansion. It used pumps to compress air by injecting uh it with water. Compressed air was then submerged in coils within a bath of cooling water.

The interjected water condensed out in a holding tank. Then the compressed air was released into a tank of lower pressure brine, bringing the brine tank down to twenty six degrees or less. Metal containers of water were lowered in, becoming bricks of ice, which could than be withdrawn. So and then he could then he could have, you know, hang them or position them in the hospital rooms, or they could be used as such to then cool them down. Right,

So he's using compression and expansion of these substances. The rapid expansion cools everything around it. He's using that to cool water and create ice. Now, one question is why is this often considered a predecessor, an early step in the creation of air conditioning when it is really refrigeration. It's a refrigeration process. I mean, air conditioning is a refrigeration process. But he was creating ice. I think it's probably because Gory planned to use the blocks of ice

to cool hospital rooms. Right. Yeah, that was an initial um entry into the world of refrigeration. So today he's he's recognized a lot more, especially in Appalachicola. Uh. You can find a statue of him there. Uh. And thus, but at the at the time, he had problems with his invention, and Jacob Perkins beat him out for the tide of Father of the Refrigerator in eighteen thirty five.

And Uh, Gory's continued efforts to get his own invention off the ground failed for a few different reasons, and he died without achieving his his goal of becoming the master refrigeration in eighteen fifty five. Yeah. For some reason, Gory faced a lot of harsh opposition and ridicule, especially

in the press. I was reading a paper by the American historian Raymond Arsenal about the impact of air conditioning on the culture of the American South, and Arsenal just notes that most of Gory's contemporaries were dismissive of his achievements, and as an example, one journalist I think, writing for the New York Globe at some point described Gory by saying, quote, a crankdown in Florida thinks he can make ice as

good as Almighty God. Well, you know it's it's that is ridiculous and and clearly, um, you know, shows some some anti Floridian bias. Uh. However, you know that that kind of headline wouldn't be completely out of out of line today. I mean you still see a lot of headlines about about Florida and kind of like you know,

this stigmatization of of Florida. And so you can imagine stories today about a craze doctor who's quit his medical practice to try and make the perfect ice, to play God by creating ice, right, And you know, the same people might if the story we're taking place and say Brooklyn, it might be something different like, oh, this doctor he gave up his nine to five so he could pursue making the perfect cube of ice for your for you know,

for your cocktails or your your scotch um. But anyway, I mean, it is always sad on this show when we have to look at an inventor and see that they you know, they if they died penniless, or they died without finding finding the recognition that they sought in life, only achieving it after death. I'm I'm always gonna end up um as much as possible, like siding with those individuals. Yeah,

I guess. I mean, well, so it's possibly because of this mercy merciless ridicule that Gorey failed to attain or retain investors for his invention. I think he had one major investor, but then that investor died, and then he had trouble getting other investors. Uh. And so what did Gory himself attribute the failure of his invention too? Well, to some extent, he blamed guess who the ice king? Well,

he's up against big ice, right exactly? He blamed He suspected that Frederick the Ice King Tutor had arranged or financed a campaign of smears and disparagement against him in order to protect Tutor's own ice shipping business from competition. Now, was Gory correct in his suspicions. I don't know, but if so, it certainly wouldn't be the first or the only time that somebody used dirty tricks to protect an

obsolete business model from legitimate competition. Oh. Absolutely, yeah. You don't have to put on a tinfoil hat to imagine a major industry of corporation doing this. They are still doing this sort of thing now. Towards the end of

his life, Gory seemed to resign. Apparently he wrote that he thought America was simply not ready for refrigeration, but maybe maybe America was ready for refrigeration, because beginning around the eighteen fifties, there did begin to be some commercial applications for refrigeration uh, developed by some other inventors and engineers, including in food and the food and beverage industries, particularly,

I believe in meat packing and meat shipping. Yeah, it comes down to the necessity, right, Like, where are the areas where there is a definite uh necessity for refrigeration technology? Right? All right, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will meet the father of air condition Alright, we're back. So here we come to a figure sometimes called the father of air conditioning.

I don't know if that title is actually deserved, but it, you know, it's what a lot of people have said. So I don't think there's a way to argue that the guy were about to talk about was really the first person to create a cooling and humidity control system.

But because of his important role in the history of this technology, credit for the invention of the first modern air conditioning system is often given to an American engineer named Willis Haviland Carrier, who designed an air conditioning system while working for a company called Buffalo Forge in nineteen o two. Now Willis Carrier was born on November eighteen, seventy six in Angola, New York, and he grew up

on a farm. And one story that I found interesting was that apparently as a child, Carrier had difficulties with math in school, even though we would go on to become a successful engineer. And we we do have to consider the source here, but there was a biography of Willis Carrier written in the late nineteen forties by E. Cloud Wombler, who was the chairman of the Carrier Corporation. Wampler died in nineteen seventy three, but to the extent

that we can believe this story. It is, as Wampler tells it, that when Carrier was nine years old, he had an experience that he believed to be the turning point in his life and in and it was that in school he was learning about fractions and he was just completely stumped, like, could not understand what was going on with fractions. How can you have part of a number? It doesn't make sense. So his mother came up with

a plan to help him. She sent him down into the seller to get some apples, and to quote from Wampler quote, then he was instructed to cut these into halves, quarters, and eights, and to add and subtract the portions. So fractions took on a meaning for him. In addition, he made a discovery that most problems which appear difficult can be worked down into something quite understandable. Well, I mean that's quite reasonable. You know that you see more and

more of that I'm finding with mathematical education today. Uh you know, I went to some information sessions about how they're teaching mathematics at my son's school, and there's a lot more dependency on using uh you know, not apples, but like physical repert sentations of various values and creating this this physical idea of the numbers you're talking about, so that you have you have a grasp of what the numbers are and not just like a paper sense

of the numbers. Yeah. So again, you know, we often on the show express skepticism about like foundational stories, about the people who created companies and stuff like that, because you always wonder like, is this really a true story or is this being told for marketing purposes? But you know, if we just accept Okay, well, let's let's say we think this is a true story, I can certainly see things like this. I don't know, I see stuff like

this happening in real life. Like you're talking about that, like maybe math just doesn't make sense to a kid until they have a kind of like key visual metaphor moment.

And there there are I do think these kinds of breakthroughs, and and it makes you wonder about, like, I mean, how how many kids are there out there who actually could have, you know, have the potential to have really great math based careers and a lot of success in mathematics, but they just never had the right teaching approach or never like had that moment where suddenly it all clicked. Yeah. Absolutely, So on the believability scale of corporate biographies, i'd give

this one. This one was like an eight or not. You know, it's not like he was visited by the Angel of refrigeration with a coiled halo or anything. We're also going to get a Eureka brain story that's coming in a second. So he studied engineering at Cornell University, graduating in nineteen o one. So here's the Eureka brain story as told by the Carrier Corporation. Uh, they say that genius can strike anywhere. For Willis Carrier, it was

a foggy Pittsburgh train platform in nineteen o two. Carrier stared through the mist and realized that he could dry air by passing it through water to create fog. Doing so would make it possible to manufacture air with specific amounts of moisture in it. Within a year, he completed his invention to control humidity, the fundamental building block for

modern air conditioning. Now, whether or not the Eureka brain scene actually happened, that he was actually standing at the train station when he had his breakthrough vision, it does point to the importance of humidity in the creation of Carriers first air conditioning system. Carriers air conditioner was not primarily for the purpose of lowering the temperature of a room for human comfort, but for the industrial purpose of removing excess humidity from the air which could prevent uh.

In the idea was they wanted to prevent humidity from affecting the properties of ink and paper in a print shop environment. Yeah. Carrier was working at Sackett Wilhelms Lithographing

and Publishing company in Brooklyn at the time. And UH, and you know this is this is certainly a reality that that that I can relate to, uh, the idea of like humidity destroying books and uh and uh and messing with your ink because there was it was like a not last summer and it was the summer before playing Dungeons and Dragons, uh on a back porch in like late summer, and it was you know, we're expecting things to cool down, but things had not really cooled down.

It was hot, sweltering. It was so sweltering that we had a marker board to h like line out the dungeon and the the erasable markers that they ink from them was just like beating up and when was just turning into a wet mess. And the players handbook that I was using at the time, like it just completely fell apart, like the binding everything got he got moist from the humidity, and it just became just a stack of wet papers. That's horrible. I mean, it wasn't enough

to drive us inside with the air conditioning. But you know,

there's one thing I don't understand. I've got a really good friend who works in uh she works for the park service, and she works in the desert, you know, out in a big Bin National Park, and she came to stay at our house recently, and she was talking about how much she loved the humidity sitting in our backyard, and I just thought that was the most what George gen is like, I just love it when it's swampy out Like we travel out out west and we we admire the dry heat, right, Yeah, I kind of forget

that one could potentially uh you know, pine after the moist, thick, humid, swimmable heat of the Georgian summer. And there's a reason related to the air conditioning technology that we've been talking about. There's a reason that so many people prefer the dry heat, which is that in the dry heat, the lower humidity content of the air aids and the evaporation of sweat from your skin. Right, the lower the moisture in the air, the faster your skin evaporates, which helps keep your body cool.

That's why when the humidity is high, heat tends to feel worse. It's like you can't sweat to get the heat out of you, or you can sweat. I mean you will sweat, but the sweating is not as efficient in rising up as gas off of your skin. But anyway, so I guess we should briefly just mentioned how Carrier system worked. His method of air conditioning involved blowing air over what would what were riginally heating coils, which you know,

steam would go through to help heat room. They were originally hollow heating coils, but instead they were filled with chilled water from a deep artisanal well instead of steam, and this cold water caused condensation of moisture from the surrounding air as that air was blown over the coils, removing the humidity and drying the air in the process, and the plane chilled water system was later upgraded I think the following year to include an ammonia compressor, which

that's especially good because that will work during the summer because now you're taking advantage of the lower boiling point refrigerant which can be expanded and compressed. And while the original air conditioner was just for this industrial purpose of controlling humidity, Carrier did see the potential if it didn't just remove humidity but also cooled the indoor air. There could be major non industrial markets for this system adding

comfort to human occupied buildings. Yes, absolutely, And so really, out of this the the age of refrigeration, the age of air conditioning is born, and it makes its way into industrial buildings, into hospitals first, but then it begins to find its way into other spaces and eventually homes

as well. And this is the point where we would generally, you know, briefly discuss the legacy of a particular invention, but we are going to have to call it and come back and do an entire episode on the legacy of air conditioning because because I mean, there are some obvious areas where it's it's impactful, but it really changed the landscape of certainly American life, and uh, you know, in in ways that you might not even instantly think of and so, yeah, we're going to come back in

a third air conditioning episode to just talk about how air conditioning change the world. Yeah, I'm really excited about that one. In the meantime, you can check out other episodes of Invention and Invention bod dot com. Uh, you can check out our other show Stuff to Blow your Mind at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You can find both podcasts wherever you get your podcasts these days,

and if you do, wherever that happens to be. We would just ask that you subscribe to our shows that you rate and review us if you have the power to do so, leave a nice remark and recommend us to your friends. Share some of the wisdom that we have unearthed for you with the people that you know, and certainly if you have anything that you would like to add about air conditioning, the history of air conditioning, you're like, personal or family history with air conditioning, we

would love to hear from you. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Maya Cole and Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic, for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, because the iHeart Radio app app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M