What do air conditioners mean to us today?
The Indian subcontinent suffers through a tropical climate, where most part of the year is hot and humid and air conditioners are the only medium of maintaining your cool. The scorching heat drives people indoors to their air-conditioned rooms and makes us wonder, what it was like to live in a time when the electricity had not been discovered and the air conditioner not yet invented.
So what did our ancestors do?
As evidenced by our evolutionary process, human beings are an adaptive species and can change or devise means to adjust to the change. Civilisations have been using natural ways to claim respite from the heat since the prehistoric times. Earlier they would hide in the dark caves to keep away from the sun. The more advanced civilizations such as Romans and Egyptians resorted to circulating water through the aqueducts to keep the indoors cool.
The Chinese, however, were the first to invent a manually powered rotary fan to replace the hand fans used earlier. Even the building architecture played a major role in lowering the temperature of the room. The houses in middle eastern cities were designed to capture blowing wind and circulate it through the structure to keep it cool.
Who invented Air Conditioners?
The ancient air conditioning techniques used evaporative cooling, i.e. cooling of air due to the evaporation of water. Early in the 19th century, however, curious minds such as Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday conducted experiments to enhance the cooling techniques.
They discovered that using liquefied ammonia proved more effective and could chill the air faster. Based on these concepts, a Florida physician invented ice making machines to artificially produce ice and cool the building for his patients suffering from yellow fever.
Finally in 1902, while working on an assignment for Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company a young engineer Willis Carrier designed the first electrical air conditioner. His invention was a success from the start because it did not just cool the air but also controlled humidity in the environment. This greatly reduced the damage to the printing paper at the plant and improved the ink alignment. Even though the objective of his invention was industrially inclined (not for the personal comfort of the people) the demand for his machine raised dramatically all over the US.
However, the first commercially produced air conditioners were still big and expensive and could only be used in public buildings. In 1922 Rivoli theatre in New York became the first place of excursion to acquire air conditioning. People started flocking to the movie theatres to escape the heat and bask in the new technology.
Next, the air conditioners hit retail stores and offices where they were used to increase the productivity of their workers, but the units were still not affordable by residences. Many people would chill their underclothes in the icebox before wearing them and rely on electric fans to keep them cool. By the early 21st century, however, the advancement in technology had considerably reduced the size and cost of manufacturing Air conditioner for residential use and many homes could be seen installing a personal Air conditioning unit.
Air conditioners as we know them today:
Gone are the days when an Air Conditioning unit weighed a ton and cost a million. Today there are numerous companies that manufacture and provide air conditioners for residential use. Companies such as Voltas, Bluestar, Hitachi, Haier etc. produce AC units that are compact, but can cool entire houses efficiently.
Now there are options to choose between Window AC which can be mounted on a window, Split AC which can be mounted on a wall or central air conditioning which can cool an entire building with separate ducts for the fan. Read more about the differences between Window AC and Split AC.
You can check out more options on Arzooo.com and demand your price to save extra money.
Timeline of Air Conditioning: