Summer, objectively speaking, is a bad time. very bad In response to the heat, the Northern Hemisphere sinks into a long slumber which, on the other hand, gives us a perfect excuse to escape the urgent and look back at what matters.
Therefore, they are good dates for remembering the greats and claiming their achievements and achievements. And if there are some heroes, some true and undeservedly forgotten heroes, they are those who fought against physics, chemistry and discouragement. air conditioning. He goes for them.
The Egyptians already used systems to reduce heat. Moistened mats or rugs were used to reduce the temperature and dryness of the room.
The first rotating fan appears to be Chinese which we assume is a natural evolution of their taste for fans. The Romans, in addition to consuming snow (which was highly criticized by Seneca), began to design complex networks of aqueducts, canals, and domestic pipes to circulate water through the villas and thus reduce the temperature. This concept was also developed by the Arabs.
in Alhambra In Granada, there are also staircases with constant water running down the walls. Other systems tried to apply the famous Bottizzo’s logic to buildings. A good example of this can also be found in Granada, at CSIC’s School of Arab Studies, where you can still see the holes where containers filled with water were left to cool the walls and insulate the rooms from the heat.
Throughout history we can find different and very original forms of what we can call “primitive air conditioners”. Typically, they used a combination of thick walls, rocks, water and wind currents to make the long, sweltering summer days more bearable. But if we want to talk about the true origin of air conditioning, we have to go back as early as 1758.
The most modern air
For the Egyptians, as we have seen, knew that the evaporation of a liquid produced a cooling effect. But in 1758, when Benjamin Franklin was meeting with the English chemist John Hadley, they realized that the evaporation of alcohol and other volatile liquids could make matter very cold. In 1820, Faraday He observed the same effect when working with ammonia.
In 1834, inventor Jacob Perkins patented the first vapor compression refrigeration machine, the principle on which current refrigeration circuits are based. Years later, Dr. John Gorey, realizing that cold was good for some tropical diseases, patented an ice-making machine in Florida in 1851.
But the key year was 1902. In Brooklyn, strong changes in temperature and humidity inhibit the natural behavior of paper and make the color printing process very complicated. In desperation, the Sackett-Wilhelms printing press was placed in the hands of Buffalo Forge, the company that employed a very young Willis Carrier. Carrier, after much work, developed the ‘Air Treating Apparatus’, the first air conditioning system in history.
This invention revolutionized the industry. After all, the art of the southern United States. Its case Chronicle MillA cotton mill in North Carolina. Absence of moisture creates excess static electricity and causes the cotton fibers to deteriorate. The carrier’s system solved the problem and expanded very quickly.
In 1922, the company Carrier formed to develop his ideas introduced the ‘centrifugal refrigeration machine’, the first system to safely condition large spaces. This system was much safer because it didn’t use a traditional ammonia compressor, and it made everything much more reliable and efficient. Hudson’s, a former department store in Detroit, debuted the system in 1924 (and became the first store with air conditioning). The first theater was the Rivoli in New York, a year later.
The first domestic appliances appeared in 1928. But the Great Depression kept the idea from spreading. These devices did not reach homes until after World War II, and in 1965 only 10% of North American homes had such devices. In Europe, implementation was much slower. Best of all, because the continent’s temperatures are not as extreme as those found in many parts of the United States.
That is changing fast. Currently it is about 20% of European households, with extremes such as the United Kingdom (about 5%) or Germany (3%). The summer of 2026 put that model to the test: Germany reached a record at the end of June 41.7°C. According to consulting firm NIQ, in the first half of the year, there were about 387,100 portable air conditioners sold, up 130% from the previous year. In Spain, the Momo system of the Carlos III Health Institute estimated that 5,232 people had died from heat through the end of August, the highest number since the series began in 2015.
Cooling also consumes energy. In 2016 there were 1.6 billion devices in the world, consuming about 10% of all electricity on the planet. The International Energy Agency estimates that will be 5.6 billion in 2050. The European Union, for its part, has already set an expiration date for fluorinated refrigerant gases, and among the alternatives, ammonia is reappearing, more than a century later.
Meanwhile, ventilators based on Nikola Tesla’s electric motor have conquered the world and our hearts. They are still there, but today is the time to recognize the efforts and ingenuity of all those who have worked to improve the world, even making it better.
Picture MC Lee, Delaney Van, Reza Madani
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