The first real air-conditioning system, pictured above, was installed in the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithograph & Publishing Co. in Brooklyn, N.Y. The device was the brainchild of Willis Haviland Carrier, a Cornell-trained engineer who later founded the Carrier Air-Conditioning Co.
When Dr. John Gorrie started experimenting with a mechanical device to chill the air for his malaria patients at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Apalachicola, Fla., neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen the end result of what he had begun. When he applied for his first patent in 1851 for a steam-driven, ice-making machine, Gorrie certainly did not envisage a revolution in heating and cooling technology that would eventually reshape the settlement patterns for Florida and much of the world.
Derided in the press by critics who saw his invention as a direct challenge to the powers of God, Gorrie was undeterred. Soon, virtually every town of any size in America had an ice plant which produced tons of ice daily. No longer was it necessary to cut large blocks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds in the dead of winter and store it in heavily insulated “ice houses” until it was eventually used up. For the first time, ice was plentiful.
Read the entire article in the Summer 2009 issue
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