Air Conditioning

Going back to 1906, an American bloke from North Carolina called Stuart W Carmer, was exploring ways of adding moisture in the surrounding air for his textile mill. Cramer used the term “Air Conditioning” as an analogue to the term “Water Conditioning”, which was, at the time, a well known process for making fabrics/ textiles easier to process. Mr Cramer combined the ability to adjust moisture to the ventilating units and adjust the air in his factories, adding the control to not only the temperature of the building to the moisture content too. Willis Carrier adopted the term and instantly incorporated it into the company name. Evaporative cooling is the term used for this function, the evaporation of water into the air to provide a cooling effect.

The very first Air Conditioners and refrigerators used toxic and flammable gasses, such as ammonia, Methyl Chloride and propane, which was very likely to end in fatal accidents if the air conditioning unit leaked. A man named Thomas Midgley Jr. was the creator of the first Chlorofluorocarbon gas otherwise known as Freon, this was founded in 1928. this gas known now as CFC gas is much safer for humans, unfortunately it was found to be very harmful to the ozone layer. CFC gas is to be phased out for the use in new equipment by 2010 and completely discontinued by 2020.

Bringing us right to the future, the majority of our air conditioning are now R-410A otherwise known as puron, this is a safer gas and does not contribute to the depletion of our ozone layer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.