| By :
Nick Messe
If you have ever had to live without air conditioning in hot weather, you know what a blessing it is to control your own personal climate and live in relative comfort. It would be nearly impossible to live in many of the hot places on earth without air conditioning. You may think that air conditioning is a modern convenience that was invented in the 20th century, but that is only partially true. People have been devising ways to cool their buildings for centuries with varying degrees of success. They tried water soaked mats draped across doorways and water-powered fans, but those methods were not very effective. In ancient Rome, water from aqueducts circulating through the walls of some homes. In medieval Persia, some buildings were cooled with cisterns and wind towers. Rainwater collected in the cisterns, and windows in the wind towers caught wind and directed it down into buildings by internal vanes. The vanes commonly directed the wind over the cisterns, and as the water evaporated, it cooled the buildings. Din Huan, in 2nd century China, invented a manually powered rotary fan with seven wheels over 9 feet in diameter, and in 747, a cool hall with water powered fan wheels was built in the imperial palace. After the invention of ventilators in medieval Egypt, many houses in Cairo used them for cooling during the middle ages. In 1758, Benjamin Franklin and chemistry professor, John Hadley, experimented with cooling an object using the principle of evaporation and discovered that they could lower the temperature of an object with the evaporation of highly unstable liquids like ether and alcohol. Then, in 1820, Michael Faraday, a British scientist and inventor, learned that ammonia could chill the air if it was compressed, liquefied and then evaporated. John Gorrie, a physician in Florida, made ice with compressor technology and used it provide cool air for the patients in his hospital, in 1842. However, he did not have the money to develop the ice-making machine and was unable to pursue his invention. 19th century advances in chemistry made the possibility of electric air conditioning a reality, and Willis Haviland Carrier invented the first large scale air conditioning in 1902. In its early days, air conditioning was used to make processing textiles easier and to improve the manufacturing process in printing plants by controlling the humidity and temperature in factories. The air-conditioned Missouri State Building at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 introduced the general population to the comfort of air conditioning, and by 1917, movie theaters were becoming comfort cooled. Engineers at Frigidaire developed a room cooler in 1929, and General Electric, York, Kelvinator, Frigidaire and other companies soon introduced home air conditioning. In this modern age, a home without some type of air conditioning is rare, and the newer air conditioning systems employ innovative technologies for improved energy efficiency and indoor air quality.
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