TIL The first air conditioner was created not for cooling a room but to prevent humidity causing swelling pages and blurry prints in a printing press
TIL The first air conditioner was created not for cooling a room but to prevent humidity causing swelling pages and blurry prints in a printing press
The invention was once received with chilly skepticism but has become a fixture of American life
At the turn of the 20th century, humidity threatened the reputation of Brooklyn’s Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographic and Publishing Company’s high-quality color printing. After two summers of extreme heat disrupted business and caused swelling pages and blurry prints, the printing company found that a nascent cooling industry could offer help.
Willis Carrier, a 25-year-old experimental engineer, created a primitive cooling system to reduce humidity around the printer. He used an industrial fan to blow air over steam coils filled with cold water; the excess humidity would then condense on the coils and produce cooled air.
Well, talk about a cool solution to a pressing problem! 😉
7Very cool article! (Har) Tx for posting.
Little bit of a goofy mistake in it about a supposed 1939 St. Louis World Fair. NYC was 1939. St. Louis was 1904.
7It turns out cooling and reheating air is the best way to reduce humidity.
6For context, “the turn of the 20th century” is ambiguous. In your case it means the beginning, but it could also be correctly understood as the year 1999.
Better to say “at the beginning of the 20th century” to avoid confusion.
-19“Turn of the century” always means the beginning of the century
18“Turn of the 19th century” has been used for the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th.
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I'll make sure to tell the Smithsonian 😃, it was just a copy/paste from their site for people who don't want to click the link. But doesn't "the TURN of the 20th century" imply that it's the start of, not the end of the century... like 1999 is near the turn of the 21st century, which occurred in 2000.
11Yes, it very much so does imply the start of the century
7It used to mean the end of the 19th, start of the 20th, but it evolved. No need to be snarky, I’m not fighting museums here.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_of_the_century which has additional sources. Unfortunately most sources aren’t clear either (both Cambridge and Webster dictionaries state that it’s when a century ends and another begins, without more info if the century is specified).
I’m just trying to help disambiguate.
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