The first car I ever owned was a rinky-dink 1993 Toyota Tercel. It was factory white with a stick shift—and little else. As a penny-pinching young journalist in Los Angeles, my sweat-drenched daily commute through the stifling San Fernando Valley in that bare-bones buggy reminded me of what a luxurious marvel air-conditioning really is.
Every perfectly chilled home, office, movie theater, mall, factory, hospital, and lab owes its existence to the pioneers of “manufactured weather”: Willis Carrier and Irvine Lyle. These early-twentieth-century inventive giants brought air-conditioning to the market and to the masses. Willis Carrier was the scientist-tinkerpreneur whose lifelong stream of epiphanies and experiments fueled historic technological advances in heating, refrigeration, and air-conditioning. Irvine Lyle was the creative salesman who imagined countless new commercial applications for Carrier’s work—and successfully turned those ideas into a multibillion-dollar business through relentless promotion, pitches, networking, advertising, and outreach.
From Hollywood to the pharmaceutical industry to textiles and tobacco to the retail industry to the military to homeowners, there isn’t a sector of the American economy that Carrier and Lyle didn’t help transform. Their zealous focus on helping businesses provide better products at lower cost resulted in the invaluable by-products of increased health, comfort, and happiness. Air-conditioning changed everything, but Carrier and Lyle stayed true to the core tinkerpreneurial values that brought them together in the first place.
Willis Carrier’s preparation for a prolific and practical inventive life began in western New York, on a dairy farm near the Quaker village of Angola. The only child of Duane and Elizabeth Carrier was born in the fall of 1876, the centennial year of America’s founding. His ancestors came from New England pioneer stock. Young Willis showed promising mechanical aptitude early on. After he had done his farm chores, Willis would tinker on a perpetual motion machine. Or tackle math problems he made up for himself. Or create his own games to amuse himself, including imagining a zoo of mechanized animals. He assembled the family farm thresher and “worked geometry in the snow.” From his aunt Abbey, he also learned how a well pump worked. He never forgot when she explained how “the atmosphere exerts a pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch.” It whetted his appetite for learning about the miracles and mysteries of air.
His father, Duane, was a teacher and merchant who had once aspired to be a doctor. But Willis credited his mother, Elizabeth, for his relentlessly curious mind. She fixed alarm clocks, toured a paper mill, and provided Willis with problem-solving skills that would serve him (and the two-hundred-plus industries that his company would later support) well. Carrier described how his mom helped him understand fractions after he came home angst-ridden from school at age nine:
My mother told me to go to the cellar and bring up a pan of apples. She had me cut them into halves, quarters, and eighths, and add and subtract the parts. Fractions took on meaning, and I was very proud. I felt as if I’d made a great discovery. No problems would be too hard for me after that—I’d simply break them down to something simple and then they would be easy to solve.
Mrs. Carrier died when Willis was eleven years old, but he carried her pragmatic Yankee spirit from that day forward both in words and in deeds. “Figure out things for yourself,” she urged. And self-reliant Willis did just that. The economy was in a slump during Willis’s high school years. He rose at five in the morning, every morning, to help his father milk twenty-four cows. He delivered the milk, rushed home for breakfast, walked a mile to get to school, excelled at all his classes, and then rushed home to do more cow-milking. After winning a scholarship to Cornell University, he continued to balance a rigorous academic schedule and athletic activities (boxing, cross-country, crew) with more work, including lawn-mowing, furnace-tending, and table-waiting. With a college friend, Carrier invented the first student “co-op” laundry in the nation. Those co-ops remain ubiquitous on college and university campuses today.
On another college campus, at the University of Kentucky, Joel Irvine Lyle was also thriving as a scholar-athlete. Lyle played varsity football for the school and joined Sigma Chi (the social fraternity) and Tau Beta Pi (the honor society for engineers). A farm boy, football star, fraternity brother, and natural-born salesman, Lyle graduated in 1896 with a degree in mechanical engineering and earned a master’s in the same subject five years later. He was hired by the Buffalo Forge Company upon graduation.
Willis Carrier graduated from Cornell in 1901, five years after Lyle. His alma mater, established by self-taught tinkerpreneur Ezra Cornell in 1865, emphasized technical innovation and applied science. The son of Quaker merchants, Cornell worked at his father’s pottery business at six, on a farm at twelve, and as a carpenter at seventeen. Cornell had made his fortune as a pioneer in the telegraph industry—first by designing and patenting a plow (personally approved by telegraph inventor Samuel Morse) to dig trenches for laying telegraph cable underground. After he researched electricity and magnetism at the U.S. Patent Office and Library of Congress, Cornell concluded that he needed to fix faulty cable insulation problems by stringing the cables on glass-insulated poles above ground. Morse hired him to string up the overhead line between Washington and Baltimore, through which the telegraph inventor delivered his famous “What hath God wrought?” message.
An intrepid capitalist, Cornell took a large part of his pay in stock and became Western Union’s largest stockholder. He used his fortune to construct his namesake university, which was the first in the nation to establish an electrical engineering department. Willis Carrier earned his degree in mechanical engineering at Cornell, but in the spirit of his school’s entrepreneurial founder, the farm boy from Angola would answer without hesitation when opportunity knocked. Though he had never heard of the company before, Carrier accepted a job offer from the Buffalo Forge Company instead of applying to famed General Electric as he had originally planned. Buffalo Forge, cofounded by a Cornell grad, made blacksmith’s forges, upright drills, steam engines, heaters, dust collectors, blowers, and bandsaws.
In June 1901, while riding public transportation on his way to a meeting with the company, Carrier asked a stranger for help finding Buffalo Forge’s office. The young man turned out to be J. Irvine Lyle, who was also headed to the headquarters to discuss an office transfer from the Syracuse branch to the New York City office. By chance or fate, Carrier and Lyle boarded the same Broadway streetcar that day to get to Buffalo Forge’s Mortimer Street building. They parted ways, but the two bright, ambitious engineers would be meeting again soon enough. There were problems to solve and fish to catch. As Carrier famously explained of his practical approach to research, inventing, and business: “The ‘catch’ must be edible or I don’t try for it. I only fish for edible fish and test for useful data.”
Indeed, long before the idea of “comfort air” for humans became the norm, Carrier and Lyle’s work targeted industrial factories and plants. Their first project focused not on helping sweaty people, but on fixing sweaty paper.
The spring and summer seasons of 1902 were scorchers in New York City. Families flocked to public baths. Slum-dwellers slept out on their stoops and unleashed fire hydrants for relief. “MANY ARE HEAT STRICKEN IN SUDDEN TORRID WAVE,” the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Daily Eagle reported in late May of that year. President Theodore Roosevelt escaped from the sweltering Washington, D.C., swamp to the cooler confines of his Sagamore Hill beach home on Oyster Bay, New York. And businesses of all sizes grappled with the deleterious effects of high temperatures and high humidity on their goods and machinery.
At the Sackett & Wilhelms Printing Plant in Brooklyn, workers struggled with the muggy air’s damage to its multicolor printing jobs. The Fifth Avenue shop produced show cards, business cards, pamphlets, and illustrations of all kinds. A team of thirty-five employees operated the plant’s twenty-five steam-power presses and forty hand presses at all hours to meet grueling deadlines. One of the company’s most important clients was Judge magazine, a leading, Republican-leaning satirical publication that featured bold four-color chromolithographic covers, political cartoons, and artistic spreads. (The magazine’s most famous cartoonist: Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, who was hired at age twenty-three as a writer and artist in the late 1920s. Another famous Judge alumnus, Harold Ross, left in 1925 to found The New Yorker.) Renowned for its fine color work, Sackett & Wilhelms found that the heat wave ruined its print runs. Paper is “hygroscopic,” meaning it retains moisture from its surrounding environment through absorption or adsorption. Humidity caused the paper to shrink and expand and warp. The colors bled together. Haywire weather resulted in disastrous ink realignment and required costly reprints or cancellations. Additional heat was generated by the lights, the steam engines, the presses, the workers, and leakage from outside.
As temperatures spiked, a consulting engineer for the print shop sought help from Irvine Lyle at Buffalo Forge’s New York City office. Lyle forwarded the project to that fellow he had met on a Buffalo streetcar the previous fall, Willis Carrier, who had quickly made a name for himself at the company by initiating experiments to improve the firm’s design and installation of heating, drying, and forced draft systems. Unsatisfied with the industry’s traditional “rule of thumb” guesstimates, Carrier systematically constructed tables of heater data to make it easy for engineers to figure out how much heat air would absorb when it was circulated over steam-heating coils. Carrier’s bosses wisely supported his research and allowed him to establish an in-house industrial lab.
Now, his task was to fix the hot mess at Sackett & Wilhelms. Just as his mother had taught him to do as a child with apples and fractions, Willis Carrier broke down the problem into digestible pieces. He needed to conquer the four factors that define air-conditioning: control of the temperature, humidity, cleanliness/purity, and effective distribution of air. Previous tinkerpreneuers had used fans, snow, and ice to try to cool air in enclosed spaces. But no one had yet succeeded in both reducing the air’s humidity and holding moisture content steady at a specific level. Sackett & Wilhelms needed a system to maintain an indoor temperature of seventy degrees F in winter and eighty degrees F in summer, with relative humidity of 55 percent kept constant year round. Carrier decided to adapt Buffalo Forge heating machinery for the new cooling apparatus. Instead of steam, he would circulate cold water through a set of heating coils. Carrier pored over U.S. Weather Bureau tables that Lyle sent over to aid him in constructing a system to dehumidify the air. From the data, he chose dew-point temperatures that would maintain the right amount of moisture for the air in the printing plant. (Dew point is a measure of atmospheric moisture. The higher the dew point, the more moisture is present in the air.)
By July 17, 1902, as New York sweated out the heat wave, Carrier had drawn up plans for what would be the world’s first scientific air-conditioning system. Two sections of pipes (the evaporator coils) were used for cooling and dehumidifying. One drew cold water up from an artesian well; the other was attached to a faster-cooling ammonia refrigerating machine. ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers) explained the basic operating principles:
The air is cooled by blowing it over a set of cold pipes called an evaporator coil. This works just like the cooling that happens when water evaporates from your skin. The evaporator coil is filled with a special liquid called a refrigerant, which changes from a liquid to a gas as it absorbs heat from the air. The refrigerant is pumped outside . . . to another coil where it gives up its heat and changes back into a liquid. This outside coil is called the condenser because the refrigerant is condensing from a gas back to a fluid just like moisture on a cold window. A pump, called a compressor, is used to move the refrigerant between the two coils and to change the pressure of the refrigerant so that all the refrigerant evaporates or condenses in the appropriate coils.
The energy to do all of this is used by the motor that runs the compressor. The entire system will normally give about three times the cooling energy that the compressor uses. This odd fact happens because the changing of refrigerant from a liquid to a gas and back again lets the system move much more energy than the compressor uses.
Carrier engineer Margaret Ingels marveled at the scope of her bosses’ breakthroughs as she documented the new system’s components: “Taken together, their cooling effect totaled 54 tons, the equivalent of melting 180,000 pounds of ice in a 24-hour day. The installation was indeed a milestone in man’s control of his indoor climate!” It was an important trial, but not an unqualified success. The retrofitted equipment was not optimal. Carrier turned his attention to leaks of moisture-bearing air in the coils’ gaps and uneven distribution of the treated air through the jerry-rigged parts. Eventually, Carrier and Lyle would initiate in-house construction of their own air ducts of the highest quality. Always striving to do better, Carrier and Lyle also turned to lowering costs of the system for the customer by recycling the water drawn from the artesian well. A year later, they replaced the compressor at Sackett & Wilhelms and Lyle reported back to Buffalo Forge that “the cooling coils which we sold this company have given excellent results during the past summer.”
Lyle pulled out all the stops to spread the word about Carrier’s new air-conditioning system. He presented technical papers before the American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers and the American Society of Refrigerating Engineers. He gave speeches and helped write product brochures and manuals. He arranged for Buffalo Forge to form a new, wholly owned subsidiary called the Carrier Air Conditioning Company to manufacture and sell the conditioners. Lyle aggressively courted new clients and provided stellar customer service. Inside the company, he served as a father figure—networking and nurturing camaraderie among his fellow engineers. An industry journal at the time gave due credit:
Those in a position to know give to J. I. Lyle the credit for a large measure of the commercial success of the Carrier Air Conditioning Company, for he standardized the Carrier designs for the various applications and to him was also due the company’s broad and liberal policy both in dealing with its customers and in the spreading of reliable information regarding the subject of air conditioning.
Carrier, meanwhile, tooled, retooled, tested and retested, pondered, and dwelled on the difficulties of humidity control. His obsessiveness was legendary. A paradox of supreme pragmatism and comical absent-mindedness, the tinkerpreneur would often neglect to eat meals or forget that there were people around him. He drew technical diagrams on tablecloths at restaurants. He once jetted off on a business trip only to discover that his suitcase contained nothing but a handkerchief. While he seemed to walk with his head in the clouds, Carrier’s brilliant mind was grounded in solving the most practical problems of mechanical engineering.
It was in the midst of a literal evening fog, while standing on a train platform in Pittsburgh, that Willis Carrier was struck by a moment of inventive clarity whose impact is still felt today in every aspect of our daily, modern lives. Here’s how he described his thought process during the “flash of genius” incident:
Here is air approximately 100 percent saturated with moisture. The temperature is low so, even though saturated, there is not much actual moisture. There could not be at so low a temperature. Now, if I can saturate air and control its temperature at saturation, I can get air with any amount of moisture I want in it. I can do it, too, by drawing the air through a fine spray of water to create actual fog. By controlling the water temperature I can control the temperature at saturation. When very moist air is desired, I’ll heat the water. When very dry air is desired, that is, air with a small amount of moisture, I’ll use cold water to get low temperature saturation. The cold spray water will actually be the condensing surface. I certainly will get rid of the rusting difficulties that occur when using steel coils for condensing vapor in the air. Water won’t rust.
This was, as his industry heirs recognize, “an insight so counterintuitive that it still dazzles.” Carrier realized in that foggy moment that he could dry air by wetting it—passing it through water and using the spray as the condensing surface. The discovery would make possible the controlled manufacture of air with specific amounts of moisture in it. The trick, as American Heritage magazine explained, “was to chill the water first and then spray it into a chamber. With a huge number of tiny droplets, a cold mist would cool and dehumidify the air much more efficiently than any set of coils and would yield a reproducible result.” After the air was misted, it was blown through a chamber with baffles to separate the water droplets from the saturated air. The mist also helped cleanse and purify the air of dust, providing revolutionary improvements in both human health and personal comfort. Carrier received a patent for his “Apparatus for Treating Air” in 1906 and would receive more than eighty other patents over his lifetime of engineering improvements and additions.
While taking care to protect their patent rights, Carrier and Lyle interacted closely with the scientific community, sharing knowledge and opening up their offices for demonstrations. These exchanges yielded more benefits for the industry and consumers everywhere. Carrier continued to search for a better coolant. After dielene, he experimented with methylene chloride, CH2Cl2, which he dubbed “Carrene-1.” After DuPont chemist Thomas Midgely unveiled a new class of cheaper, nonflammable refrigerants, the chlorofluorocarbon Freons, Carrier reached out to discuss his research. Carrier learned of an intermediate gas produced in its manufacture. Midgely, who saw no use for it, sent his handwritten notes and a sample of the fluid to Carrier. The gas, Freon-11, CCl3F, was superior to Carrier’s current refrigerants because it was easier to compress and did not cause leaks as frequently as ammonia. Dubbed “Carrene-2,” it became the basis for Carrier’s own refrigerants for centrifugal compression.
Lyle became president of the American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers. “Psychrometrics” (the study of moist air) advanced by leaps and bounds as Carrier and Lyle, armed with slide rules and logarithm tables, published papers, catalogs, charts, and textbooks that remain gold standards today. In 1911, thirty-five-year-old Carrier published “Rational Psychrometric Formulae”—known as the “Magna Carta” of psychrometrics—and presented it before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He methodically illustrated how to determine the precise correlation between temperature and humidity. Carrier eliminated the guesswork and imprecision that his peers had tolerated and worked around for decades. His seminal paper and charts published in ASME’s scientific journal still stand today as the cornerstone of all fundamental calculations in the air-conditioning industry.
Carrier’s relentless theoretical research affected not only air-conditioning, but also agriculture, aeronautics, food engineering, pharmaceuticals, meteorology, weather reporting, and more. As Carrier himself pointed out in his “Rational Psychrometric Formulae” paper:
The application of this new art to many varied industries has been demonstrated to be of greatest economic importance. When applied to the blast furnace, it has increased the net profit in the production of pig iron from $0.50 to $0.70 per ton, and in the textile mill it has increased the output from 5 to 15 per cent, at the same time greatly improving the quality and the hygienic conditions surrounding the operative. In many other industries, such as lithographing, the manufacture of candy, bread, high explosives and photographic films, and the drying and preparing of delicate hygroscopic materials, such as macaroni and tobacco, the question of humidity is equally important.
Inspired by his Kentucky farm boy days, it was Irvine Lyle’s idea to reach out to tobacco farmers for business. He sold a $1,850 system to a Henderson, Kentucky, tobacco exporter after demonstrating how moisture control would improve the accuracy of his weighing and pricing. Building on that success, Lyle and Carrier visited a cigar plant in Newark, New Jersey, which led to nationwide contracts for an air-conditioning system that enabled mass production of tobacco products. Carrier paid a visit to one of their big-name clients in the industry, the American Tobacco Company, in 1913. He described the stifling contamination at the Richmond, Virginia, plant: “I could see only a few feet in front of me . . . could not see the windows across the room even when sunshine fell on them.” Workers tied handkerchiefs over their mouths. Dust was everywhere. Carrier installed a humidifying system in the tobacco stemming room of the factory, and then devised a set-up to blow large quantities of air into a room without kicking up dust.
Workers flocked to the stemming room for relief from the humidity, heat, and dirt. “The results,” Carrier reported succinctly, “were wonderful.”
The Carrier team sold its products to businesses, large and small, that spanned the spectrum of human needs and wants. The American Chicle Company on Long Island, maker of the famous Chiclets chewing gum that still sits on a shelf at your grocery checkout stand, bought a Carrier refrigeration system to maintain constant temperature and humidity in its gum breaking, coating, polishing, and packing rooms. Whitman’s boxed chocolate-makers, still in business today, installed Carrier’s first centrifugal chiller at their Philadelphia plant. Powder plants, chemical plants, cheese-makers, bakeries, popcorn snack designers, glass manufacturers, precision tool makers, and pencil producers all bought Carrier parts and systems. During World War I, Carrier apparatus cooled the International Arms and Fuse company in New Jersey and the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. in New Haven, Connecticut. During World War II, the military took advantage of Carrier’s top engineering talent and produced classified machinery and parts, including airplane engine mounts, sight hoods for guns, tank adapters, and antisubmarine bomb dischargers.
Two more companies that benefited directly from their work were William Painter’s Crown Cork & Seal and King Gillette’s razor empire. Carrier executive Edward T. Murphy explained his company’s role in aiding their manufacturing processes. “Did you ever consider,” Murphy asked, “that refrigeration had anything to do with a crowned seal as well as the contents itself?” William Painter’s creations were lined with a cork substance, which was mixed with a binding agent before it was pressed. The binder had to remain on the surface of the cork without penetrating its pores. “To accomplish this, cold dry air is blown into the mixers, rapidly evaporating the moisture from the agglomerate before the binder could be melted into the pores of the cork. A very successful installation of this kind was made at the Crown Cork & Seal Co. at Baltimore.”
Murphy reported that Carrier engineers had also solved a manufacturing headache at King Gillette’s razor plant. “Mr. Gillette was very much troubled with the fact that he was rusting your razor blades before he could ship them to you.” The rust was coming from high-pressure air used for operating pneumatic machinery. “To prevent this,” Murphy said, Carrier men “installed a refrigerating system to remove the moisture from the compressed air before it was expanded in use.” Gillette was sold to Procter & Gamble in 2005 for $57 billion.
Adolph Zukor was an ambitious and visionary Hungarian Jewish immigrant. He arrived in New York Harbor in 1888, a sixteen-year-old orphan, with forty dollars sewn into the lining of his coat. Zukor swept floors in an upholstery store for two dollars a week, then became an apprentice in a fur shop and learned to cut and sew pelts. Captivated by the 1893 Columbian Exposition, young Zukor traveled to Chicago along with millions of other attendees who soaked in the sights, sounds, and stimulation of the World’s Fair and its celebration of the Age of Progress. The young entrepreneur stayed in the Midwest and established a fur manufacturing company. After the business prospered and he found a wife, he returned to New York in 1900, where he fell in love—with the movies.
Zukor invested in vaudeville, penny arcades, and nickelodeon theaters, where customers lined up individually to view minute-long films projected by Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscopes. With the advent of the Vitascope celluloid motion picture projector, the idea of mass screenings in large-scale entertainment venues took hold. The theater impresario partnered with Marcus Loew, a fur merchant turned movie theater magnate, who converted retail and office buildings into movie complexes. Zukor served as treasurer for Loew’s Inc., which later became the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures. But he wanted more creative control. From his days in the fur business, Zukor had honed a sense of high style. The budding showman wanted to produce movies with glamorous celebrities and lasting artistic value beyond the short one-reel features then in vogue. In 1912, he established his own production company. Among his founding partners: feature-length film pioneer Jesse Lasky and director Cecil B. DeMille.
By the mid-1920s, studio-owned “picture palaces” and “wonder theaters” were all the rage. America boasted twenty thousand movie theaters with a combined seating capacity of 18 million, generating some $75 million in revenue and employing more than 350,000 people across the country. Among the most famously luxe entertainment edifices of the time: the Chicago Theater in Illinois, Loew’s Penn in Pittsburgh, and impresario Sid Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theaters in Los Angeles. These buildings boasted grand staircases, majestic murals, sumptuous drapes, stately pipe organs, and lavish chandeliers. But in the summertime, all the posh accommodations and appointments in the world couldn’t compensate for the stifling heat. The theaters closed during hot weather or operated at a loss while playing to scant audiences.
Enter the entrepreneurial engineers. Inventor Walter Fleisher attempted to cool the Folies-Bergère theater in New York City with a primitive air washer, but lack of mechanical refrigeration doomed it. At Chicago’s Central Park and Riviera Theaters, impresarios Barney and Abe Balaban and Sam and Maurice Katz unveiled a new, carbon dioxide–based cooling system devised by Frederick Wittenmeier that blew chilled air out of “mushroom” vents at the feet of moviegoers. The mushroom ventilation worked fine for heated air, which rises, but since cold air is heavier, it would sink to the bottom of the auditorium and result in frozen toes and unhappy customers.
As an alternative, Logan Lewis of the Carrier Engineer Corporation offered a new system with outlets in the ceiling and return grills in the floor to create a gentle, even, barely perceptible air flow. In 1922, at Grauman’s Metropolitan Theater in L.A., he installed the new setup, which cooled the air through downdraft air distribution and bypass circulation. Lewis recounted how movie patrons would resort to wrapping their feet “in newspapers to protect them from the cold” generated by the old mushroom ventilation system. Lewis’s new method “made it possible not only to maintain low humidities with less refrigeration but also practical to control temperature and humidity independently of each other. The trick was to cool only one-third of the air about twice as much and then to mix it with warm bypass air coming back from the theater.” Carrier engineers were initially mocked by theater snobs for their “upside down system.” But they persisted and tested and perfected and adapted in a continuous feedback loop.
Two years later, the company installed air-conditioning systems in several Texas movie theaters, which combined the bypass/downdraft methods with Carrier’s groundbreaking, multipatented centrifugal refrigerating apparatus (“the chiller”). This sophisticated machinery was the first practical means of cooling large spaces. As Willis Carrier had explained to his team in a 1920 memo on “Development Possibilities for Improvement in Refrigeration,” the current technology of their time hadn’t advanced much since the advent of David Boyle’s ammonia compressor in 1872. Traditional “reciprocal compressor” devices were large units that operated like back-and-forth pistons on a locomotive. Carrier’s insight was to apply the same rotary power breakthroughs in electricity transmission, pioneered by the likes of George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, to refrigeration. Carrier wrote:
The entire system of electric transmission has been developed from nothing to an enormous industry with relatively simple motors that are high-speed rotative equipment.
Industry has gone from low-speed reciprocating steam engines to high-speed rotative turbines. Pumping machinery is rapidly changing from reciprocating types to high-speed rotative pumps for both liquids and gases. Modern power plants have installed high-speed, direct-connected centrifugal, boiler-feed pumps almost exclusively in replacing the old type of steam-driven reciprocating machines.
Refrigeration, though classed among the older mechanical arts, has shown no such material progress. The same improvements that have taken place in electrical transmission and in steam machines and pumps must come in refrigerating machines.
Carrier went to work assembling a centrifugal compressor, condenser, and cooler with a direct drive that made “the chiller” suitable for high operating speed. The system incorporated compact and cheap heat exchangers, along with a new, nontoxic refrigerant. Carrier’s dynamic sales team approached leading movie studio Paramount Pictures to install its system at the New York Rivoli Theater in Times Square. The engineers also had to persuade city health regulators that their main refrigerant of choice—dielene (that is, dichloroethylene, or C2H2Cl2)—was safer than the toxic ammonia everyone else was using as a coolant. At a meeting with a Big Apple bureaucrat, Carrier dramatically dropped a lit match into a jar of dielene to demonstrate its safety. The nontoxic substance burned down much more slowly—and safely—without ammonia’s high level of volatility. The government relented.
The Rivoli contract called for a 133-ton machine to be in operation when the theater opened on Memorial Day 1925. Founder Willis Carrier himself (whom his loyal employees affectionately called “The Chief”) stayed up all night with his team at the Rivoli, preparing for the high-stakes demonstration. His description of that historic day was as suspenseful and cinematic as anything onscreen. Of the thousands of moviegoers lining up long before the doors opened, Carrier recalled: “It was like a World Series crowd waiting for bleacher seats. They were not only curious, but skeptical—all the women and some of the men had fans—a standard accessory of the day.”
A few logistical glitches heightened the Carrier team’s anxiety:
Final adjustments delayed us in starting up the machine, so that the doors opened before the air conditioning system was turned on. The people poured in, filled all the seats, and stood seven deep in the back of the theater. We had more than we had bargained for and were plenty worried. From the wings we watched in dismay as two thousand fans fluttered.
The clock ticked and the Carrier men held their breath:
It takes time to pull down the temperature in a quickly filled theater on a hot day, and a still longer time for a packed house. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the fans dropped into laps as the effects of the air conditioning system became evident. Only a few chronic fanners persisted, but soon they, too, ceased fanning. We had stopped them “cold” and breathed a great sigh of relief.
The most important member of the audience that memorable Memorial Day was Adolph Zukor. Remember the production company I told you he founded after he split with Loew’s Inc.? That company was none other than Paramount Pictures, the Tinseltown movie production giant and owner of the Rivoli Theater on Broadway. As Willis Carrier and his engineers sweated bullets waiting for the air-conditioning to kick in, Zukor was watching stealthily from the theater balcony. Carrier eyed the cinema mogul nervously as he focused on moviegoers’ fluttering fans instead of watching the movie. The Chief related the denouement:
We then went into the lobby and waited for Mr. Zukor to come downstairs. When he saw us, he did not wait for us to ask his opinion. He said tersely, “Yes, the people are going to like it.” That was a jubilant moment for us—we had passed the “acid test.”
The innovative weather manipulators won raves from Rivoli customers and were the “talk of Broadway” for weeks. The theater’s managers drew up newspaper ads describing their venue as “cool as a mountaintop.” The Rivoli’s main marquee blared “REFRIGERATING PLANT” and the doorway entrance sign boasted “COOLED BY REFRIGERATION.” The theater was more than just a picture palace. It had become an “ideal summer resort,” generating year-round profits and patrons thanks to the “marvelous equipment which absolutely assures a temperature that is just right.”
The happy ending at the Rivoli was just the beginning of Carrier Engineering’s success in the movie industry. In 1926, Zukor built his thirty-six-hundred-seat Paramount Theater and thirty-nine-story headquarters on Broadway, air-conditioned with Carrier’s centrifugal chiller. The company also installed its system at the famed Roxy theater in New York, a fifty-nine-hundred-seat palace billed as “the cathedral of the motion picture.” By 1930, Carrier had installed three hundred air-conditioning systems in movie theaters across the country. Theater owners weren’t the only ones in show biz who embraced Carrier’s technology, of course. Theater performers welcomed the relief from oppressively heavy costumes and sweltering klieg lights. Celluloid film companies relied on Carrier products to clean the air in their labs and control the temperature and humidity. Proper air-conditioning prevented cracks and curdling of film as it dried. The inventive genius and capitalist ambition of Carrier, Lyle, and their crew transformed summertime, once a box-office bomb, into Hollywood’s most profitable season. Among the notable, modern summer blockbusters we would have missed out on: Jaws, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Back to the Future.
Today’s entertainment industry, which so often demonizes industrialists as rapacious enemies of the arts, culture, and all that is good, might very well have gone under during the Depression without profit-maximizing capitalists Carrier and Lyle. But the fathers of air-conditioning didn’t just save jobs in Tinseltown.
They also saved lives.
At Luna Park on Coney Island, amid blaring lights and carnival sounds, a hand-painted sign advertised in 1906: “INFANT INCUBATORS WITH LIVING INFANTS.” The incubator baby exhibits were run by German immigrant neonatologist Martin Couney. He ran a ten-cent sideshow for the public, allowing curious gawkers to watch and ogle as he and a full staff of trained nurses treated premature babies no other hospital would or could accept. Dr. Couney, who did not charge parents for his medical services, took the show on the road, treating babies at World’s Fairs and European expositions, the Atlantic City Boardwalk, San Francisco, Omaha, Chicago, Denver, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. Loud-mouthed barkers lured attendees away from the bearded ladies, sword swallowers, and cotton candy with crass enticements: “Don’t pass the babies by!”
Dr. Couney certainly raised awareness of neonatal care and is credited with rescuing many children. But setting aside the unsettling spectacle of preemies as amusement park oddities, there were more fundamental problems with the circuslike clinics that put babies on display for decades: The incubators Couney used were made of iron and glass, heated by hot-water pipes connected to a central boiler.
As Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America engineer T. A. Weager explained in 1916, this “sort of oven” was “kept at a uniform temperature” with “moisture supplied by evaporation,” but “with this arrangement the air became stagnant and dry.” At the Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Carrier crew installed the nation’s first baby incubation system. The conditioning apparatus, located on the hospital roof, used a centrifugal fan belted to an electric motor. The air passed through a set of heating coils, then through a Carrier Air Washer and Humidifier, where nozzles forced water into a spray chamber. Dirt, bacteria, and other contaminants in the air were removed as discharge through a set of vertical eliminators; the mechanism controlled moisture content in the air by adding hot water to the cold being sprayed through the nozzles. The purified air then traveled through a second set of heating coils, into a fan, through a duct, and into an incubator room encased in glass that had four baby beds. Carrier used the same downdraft distribution and bypass techniques it applied in theaters, so that air entered the incubation room at low velocity through the ceiling and exited through registers at the floor line.
Company engineers had gained experience a few years earlier installing an air washer at an Illinois hospital. They expanded on comfort-air principles first advanced by Dr. John Gorrie, who devised an air-conditioning system to treat yellow-fever-stricken American troops at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Apalachicola, Florida, by blowing air over buckets of imported ice into the sickrooms. He received a patent in 1851 for the “first machine ever to be used for mechanical refrigeration and air conditioning,” but was unable to create a viable business out of the invention. Gorrie’s ice maker “made enough ice to chill bottles of champagne for a party but could not get the financial support he needed to develop his idea commercially,” American Heritage magazine observed. The Carrier company, by contrast, aggressively and successfully pursued every commercially viable lead in its tireless quest to do good by doing well. By the late 1950s virtually all new hospitals were installing air-conditioning.
Carrier also made life-saving inroads in the pharmaceutical industry, most notably in manufacturing improvements for Detroit-based Parke-Davis. Carrier engineers provided air-cooling and dehumidifying systems for the drug company’s capsule-making division. The company also supplied its most sophisticated temperature and humidity equipment to Dr. Jonas Salk for the production and manufacture of his polio vaccine. Salk had worked with Parke-Davis on his previous research and development of commercial flu vaccines. Parke-Davis and fellow pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, led the commercial mass-manufacturing of the polio serum in America. Carrier executive William Bynum explained that Salk’s lab required not only precision control of the air’s temperature and humidity, but also stringent control over air purity to prevent contamination of thousands of test tubes and slides.
“Keeping the test tubes alone sealed tightly against contaminating bacteria, yeast, and mold found in ordinary air would have slowed down their work considerably,” Bynum noted. And as the polio epidemic raged, there was no time to waste.
Carrier Corp. designed a special system for Salk that pressurized his lab against infiltration of outside air, purified the conditioned air supply through five separate filtering processes, and held humidity to low levels. Like the incubation ward Carrier had built for the Allegheny General Hospital, incubation rooms in Salk’s facility used Carrier equipment to maintain constant temperatures in the vats where polio virus strains grew. Carrier cold diffusers kept the virus strains at forty degrees F. The rest is history. The Salk vaccine saved thousands of lives and spearheaded the vaccine revolution.
Never ones to rest on their laurels, Carrier’s weather-obsessed engineers forged ahead into new areas. A year after assisting Salk’s life-saving endeavors, in 1944, Carrier installed its equipment at the lab facilities and insectarium of Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, where researchers were experimenting with cures for malaria. Temperature and humidity controls were the most important factors in rearing mosquitos successfully. A few years later, Carrier engineers traveled to Rome, Italy, to install a centrifugal chiller at Laboratori Palma, a subsidiary of American pharmaceutical company Squibb. Carrier’s equipment provided temperature control and sterile conditions for the production of the wonder drugs penicillin and streptomycin (the antibiotic for treatment of tuberculosis).
These medical breakthroughs for the public good would not have been possible without Carrier and Lyle’s pursuit of private profit. They begged, borrowed, and made stock sales to friends and neighbors. Carrier even enlisted his dentist for cash to get Carrier Engineering Corporation up and running in 1915. Carrier, Lyle, and five founding engineers together pitched in $32,600 in start-up funds.
This magnificent seven of manufactured weather raised and risked this capital in defiance of an economic depression and amid the tumult of world war. They couldn’t afford their own factory and scrounged for made-to-order parts wherever they could find them. And when needed, the leaders of these merry weather-makers dug into their own pockets to cover salary shortfalls. Carrier’s inventive genius was necessary, but not sufficient, for commercial success. Lyle’s aggressive and creative networking and promotional activities were vital in the company’s nascent days. By 1927, they had turned their initial investment into a $1.35 million business. (Today, Carrier Engineering Corp. is a $13.5 billion company.) The wealth wasn’t handed to them. Carrier and Lyle drove their men hard and themselves harder.
The company founders were farm boys turned industrial giants with big dreams, engineering know-how, and a diehard commitment to using their talents to create products and services that people wanted and needed—even if their customers didn’t know it yet.
Carrier’s industrial successes were followed by widespread adoption of its air-conditioning systems in banks and hotels, department stores and malls, office complexes and skyscrapers, trains, planes, ships, and cars. Carrier and Lyle didn’t just change how businesses manufactured their products or delivered their services. They also changed where Americans worked, which led to historic shifts in where Americans lived and how much they could work. The weather-makers of Carrier Corporation made it possible and desirable to settle in the otherwise stifling environs of Florida, Texas, and the Sun Belt. Company officials had already made inroads in southern movie theaters.
Unfortunately, the successful quest to control hot air unintentionally created more of it year-round in Washington, D.C. Carrier and Lyle secured important contracts to install air-conditioning on Capitol Hill (the House in 1928, the Senate in 1929). As a result, the business of government became a hopelessly permanent fixture. This was great news for sweaty Beltway blowhards, but not so great news for taxpayers. Washington bureaucrats and politicians who used to abandon the sweltering congressional swamp en masse in March now stay parked in their perfectly comfortable offices—devising new and endless ways to impede entrepreneurial progress all year long.
Through the 1930s, the company’s windowsill-height Weathermaster units spread across the country, from the U.S. Supreme Court buildings to Louisiana State University’s campus in Baton Rouge; multistory office buildings in Phoenix, Arizona; and the California Bank of Los Angeles. Like Irvine Lyle, Carrier engineer I. H. Hardeman recognized even more lucrative commercial opportunities for air-conditioning in the Deep South. In addition to tobacco, southern textile mills beckoned as a natural market for Carrier products.
Carrier and Lyle assembled an extraordinary industrial family of thinkers, makers, and doers who turned the seemingly ordinary—air, vapor, water—into a multibillion-dollar industry. They multitasked as scientific researchers, hands-on builders, and capitalist adventurers. They conducted workshops, opened up a training and testing facility (Carrier University), and established dealerships. Willis Carrier mastered the theory of weather control. Irvine Lyle mastered its standardization, manufacture, and practice. Their experiments and sales brought them into contact with an orbit of makers all committed to the highest quality goods and services.
Lyle died after a brief illness in 1942 while still serving as president and director of the Carrier Corporation. Carrier continued to work, invent, and improve upon his designs and products until a heart attack forced him to retire in 1948; he died two years later just short of his seventy-fourth birthday. Engineer Edward T. Murphy, one of Carrier Corporation’s magnificent seven who gave his savings and dedicated his life to getting the company off the ground, identified what bound Willis Carrier, Irvine Lyle, and the founding fathers of cool together through good times and bad:
We had faith and enthusiasm in our enterprise, with loyalty to each other and to a common cause.
We had courage and vision to seize opportunity when it appeared.
We supplemented each other in all phases of an intricate business.
We had a superior product, applied with sound engineering. . . .
We held steadfastly to a high standard of integrity in our products, in our engineering methods, and in our financial dealings with others.
It would seem also that we had fate on our team. Perhaps it was because we had selected a business that contributes to better health and living for people by which a real service is rendered to mankind.
Call it the esprit de tinkerpreneur that infuses the air we breathe, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the medicines that prolong and improve our lives, and the spaces in which we live, travel, work, and play.
Carrier’s founding corporate motto was not only a pledge to customers. It was also a reflection of the engineers’ culture of optimism—the culture of American capitalism—in which innovative risk-takers do everything in their power to make:
“Every Day a Good Day.”