Willis Haviland Carrier was an mechanical engineer and pioneer in air conditioning.
Background
Willis Haviland Carrier was born on November 26, 1876 on a farm near Angola in western New York, United States; the only child of Duane Williams Carrier and Elizabeth (Haviland) Carrier. His mother, who died when her son was eleven, was descended from Quakers who migrated to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. His father traced his lineage to Thomas Carrier, who settled in Andover, Massachussets, about 1663. Willis presumably grew up as a Presbyterian, his affiliation of later years.
Education
Reared on the family farm, Willis early showed considerable mechanical aptitude. He attended district school, graduated from Angola Academy in 1894, and after two years of teaching school entered Central High School in nearby Buffalo in order to meet college entrance requirements. In the following spring he won a state scholarship to Cornell University. He graduated from Cornell in 1901 as a mechanical engineer.
Career
Carrier took a job with the Buffalo Forge Company, a manufacturer of blowers, exhausters, and heaters. Convinced by his first assignments that existing data were insufficient to permit the design of soundly based heating and ventilating systems, he began to derive such data for himself. In July 1902 the company recognized the value of this work by putting Carrier in charge of a new department of experimental engineering. Carrier's career took more definite shape that same year when Buffalo Forge contracted to control humidity in the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company plant in Brooklyn, N. Y. The objective was to hold the dimensions of paper constant so that colors would register properly in the printing process.
Carrier designed a system which maintained a level of 55 degrees relative humidity throughout the year at a temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit in winter and 80 degrees in summer. He achieved humidification in winter by introducing low-pressure steam from the plant boilers into the airstream through perforated pipes. He accomplished dehumidification in summer by passing the air over two sets of coils, one cooled with water from an artesian well, the other refrigerated by an ammonia-compression machine. Carrier next developed more flexible and efficient temperature and humidity controls. In 1904 he invented a central-station spray apparatus (Patent 808, 897) in which a very fine mist of water, heated for humidification and cooled for dehumidification, served the function of the pipes and coils. In 1906 he developed dew point control, a method of regulating relative humidity by altering at the apparatus the temperature at which moisture begins to condense. Concurrently, he undertook research to improve the design of air distribution systems. By the end of 1907 Carrier systems had been installed in several cotton mills, a worsted mill, two silk mills, a shoe factory, and a pharmaceutical plant. Late in 1907 the Buffalo Forge Company established a wholly owned subsidiary, the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America, to engineer and market complete systems. The term "air conditioning" was first used by Stuart W. Cramer, a Charlotte, N. C. , mill owner and operator, but Carrier quickly adopted it, defining air conditioning as control of air humidity, temperature, purity, and circulation. Carrier spent six busy and fruitful years, serving as both vice-president of the new subsidiary and chief engineer and director of research for the parent firm. Carrier equipment was installed in industry after industry: tobacco, rayon, rubber, paper, pharmaceuticals, and food processing. Meanwhile, he continued his scientific and technical investigations. A milestone was reached in 1911 when he presented a paper on "Rational Psychrometric Formulae" at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in which he questioned generally accepted humidity measuring data, which were based on empirical formulas he found both incorrect and limited in range. The new formulas he proposed, based on accurate recent measurements, became the theoretical standard of the industry.
Carrier's handbook on air movement and distribution, Fan Engineering, appeared in 1914. In 1914 Buffalo Forge decided to limit itself to manufacturing and to withdraw from the business of engineering and installing air conditioning systems. Carrier and a handful of colleagues thereupon formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation (1915), with Carrier as president. Though started on a shoestring, the company prospered; by 1929 it had two plants in Newark, N. J. , and a third in Allentown, Pa. Basic to its success was Carrier's development of a radical new refrigerating machine, the centrifugal compressor. Since it used safe, nontoxic refrigerants and could serve large installations cheaply, it opened the way for systems whose objective was human comfort. Carrier air-conditioned the J. L. Hudson department store in Detroit in 1924, the House and Senate chambers in the national Capitol in 1928-1929, and, by 1930, more than 300 theatres. In 1930 the Carrier Engineering Corporation merged with two manufacturing firms, the Brunswick-Kroeschell Company, and the York Heating and Ventilating Corporation, to become the Carrier Corporation, with Carrier as chairman of the board. The coming of the depression of the 1930's forced Carrier to fight for business survival. He brought in financial expertise, cut costs, and centralized operations in Syracuse, N. Y. Taking a characteristically long and confident view, he insisted on continued investment in research and development. He turned to the problem of air-conditioning high-rise buildings, where space could not be sacrificed to bulky ducts. This led to his 1939 invention of a system in which conditioned air from a central station was piped through small steel conduits at high velocity to individual rooms. Here the air, released through nozzles, induced a secondary circulation over supplemental heating or cooling coils, as the season required. The air conditioning industry revived in the late 1930's, demonstrated its practical utility during the war, and flourished in the postwar years, when the time was ripe for a vast expansion into home installations. A heart ailment forced Carrier into retirement in 1948, and two years later he suffered a fatal heart attack in New York City. He was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo. At the time of his death air conditioning had come of age.
Achievements
He was best known for inventing modern air conditioning. More than eighty patents in the air conditioning industry were introduced by him. He was the president of the Carrier Engineering Corporation and chairman of the board of the Carrier Corporation.
He invented a central-station spray apparatus, a system in which conditioned air from a central station was piped through small steel conduits at high velocity to individual rooms, developed dew point control and the centrifugal compressor.
For his contributions to science and industry, Willis Carrier was awarded an engineering degree by Lehigh University in 1935 and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Alfred (NY) University in 1942; Carrier was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1942; and was inducted posthumously in the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1985) and the Buffalo Science Museum Hall of Fame (2008).
In 1930, Carrier started Toyo Carrier and Samsung Applications in Japan and Korea. South Korea is now the largest producer for air conditioning in the world. The Carrier Corporation pioneered the design and manufacture of refrigeration machines to cool large spaces. By increasing industrial production in the summer months, air conditioning revolutionized American life. The introduction of residential air conditioning in the 1920s helped start the great migration to the Sunbelt. The company became a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation in 1980. The Carrier Corporation remains a world leader in commercial and residential HVAC and refrigeration. In 2007, the Carrier Corporation had sales of more than $15 billion and employed some 45, 000 people.
(Modern Air Conditioning, Heating and Ventilating hardcove...)
Personality
He was almost six feet tall, with powerful shoulders and impressive bearing.
Connections
Carrier married Edith Claire Seymour, a classmate at Cornell, on August 10, 1902. She died in 1912, and on April 23, 1913, he married Jennie Tifft Martin of Angola, N. Y. , who died in 1939. His third marriage, in 1941, was to Elizabeth Marsh Wise. Carrier had no children of his own but adopted two sons, Vernon and Earl.
