It's easy to look at your AC unit and take it for granted, at least as long as it's in working condition. If you ever think about its history, it can be tricky to picture any really interesting developments along the way. Surely, an AC unit was always meant to be something that regulates the temperature in your home, right?
Funny enough, that's not the case. In fact,
AC units got their start in a
very different way than you might expect. Their original purpose was to battle disease, and there was a stage during their development process when they were going to be powered by actual horses. Sadly, this doesn’t mean that past AC units came with a complimentary bronco. Still, there are plenty of interesting things to know about the first, weird AC contraption.
The Strange Beginning of Temperature Regulation
The guy who came up with modern cooling units was one
Dr. John Gorrie, who patented his version in 1851. Gorrie specifically meant his invention to regulate temperature in hospitals. According to his philosophy, cooler hospitals could control the spread of malaria and other diseases, and he was serious enough about his AC unit mission that his first version involved physically shipping ice from cooler areas to his native Florida.
Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be a bad long-term strategy. So he went back to the drawing board and created an ice maker that could be powered by steam, water, wind ... or horses. It wasn’t as handy as today’s systems, but the technology was good enough that the coil-based air-cooling process he came up with is still used in some refrigerators.
The reason you don’t have a John Gorrie AC unit with a little horse logo in your home right now is that the early bird doesn’t always get the worm when it comes to world-changing inventions. Gorrie’s pioneering work had plenty of potential, but his most prominent financial backer died before his invention could hit the manufacturing stage. Gorrie’s own death in 1855 threw a 50-year wrench in the development of AC units, and we all kept sweating during the hot seasons.
How AC Finally Made Its Way to Texas
It wasn’t until 1902 when someone picked up the slack after John Gorrie. That’s when Willis Carrier put his thinking hat on to figure out a major humidity problem in a Brooklyn publishing company. He solved the issue with the very first humidity controller, which he dubbed the
Apparatus for Treating Air. Realizing a good thing when he saw it, Carrier became one of the founders of Carrier Engineering Corporation.
It still took some time to get to the compact AC units of today, of course. When air conditioning was debuted to the public at St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904,
the system they used to cool the State of Missouri Building ran on ammonia instead of horses, and had the distinct disadvantage of weighing 30 tons. Still, the first general-purpose computer weighed the same, and chances are that the phone or laptop you’re reading this on is considerably lighter.
AC systems also got smaller and better over the years. After Henry Galson debuted a small and affordable version of the window AC unit in the 1940s, the technology made a quick jump from public places to homes.
Texas weather being what it is, the state was obviously watching the development of air conditioning with great interest. The first building in Texas to have air conditioning was likely the
First Presbyterian Church in Orange in 1912. Another prominent early adapter was the
Rice Hotel Coffee House in Houston, which got its ice-based temperature regulation system in 1922. Eventually, the arrival of small and reasonably priced systems completely changed the game, and the popularity of AC systems exploded in the 1950s.
It’s probably fair to say that we haven’t looked back since.
