The following dramatization of the events of July 16-17, 1902 is based on historical fact. 

July 16, 2002

Syracuse, N.Y. --  No matter what field you work in, we've all experienced a sleepless night or two, either in anticipation of the next day's events, or just working out "a better way" to solve a problem. And we can be reasonably sure it was no different for Willis Carrier or his contemporaries. One hundred years ago tonight, the world was a much hotter, more uncomfortable place. Young Willis Carrier, a 25 year-old apprentice engineer employed by the Buffalo Forge Company, tossed and turned away the night of Wednesday, July 16, 1902. It wasn't just the hot and sticky air, or the rumble of a distant thunderstorm over Lake Erie that kept Carrier awake. The very next day he was to submit a plan to solve a problem experienced by one of Buffalo Forge's new customers, the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Co. of Brooklyn, New York. 

Willis pondered the problem again and again as he tried to sleep. Heat and humidity levels inside the printing plant would change daily, depending on the outdoor environment and the amount of heat generated by the presses themselves. As a result, the paper that Sackett-Wilhelms used for its color magazine printing process would expand or contract depending on the moisture content of the air. Colors that were aligned one day would badly misalign the next. Inks wouldn't dry properly. Quality suffered and deadlines were missed. The publishers of the popular humor magazine Judge, one of Sackett-Wilhelms' biggest clients, were not pleased and threatened to take their business elsewhere. 

Even at this early stage of his career, Willis was normally single-minded in his thought process. But he found himself thinking this night about his friend Irvine Lyle, whom he had met on his way to a job interview with Buffalo Forge just a year earlier. Willis, uncertain of his way that first morning, hopped a streetcar and asked another young man for directions. "Follow me," the man said, "I'm going there, too." That kind stranger turned out to be Lyle, a sales representative for Buffalo Forge. The two became friends. "Some friend," Willis mused to himself. "He stuck me with this problem, and now if I don’t solve it, my standing in the engineering department may well be ruined." It was Lyle, now the New York City sales rep, who brought the problem to Buffalo Forge's engineering department. He knew that Carrier, who had demonstrated a penchant for solving problems, was the man for the job. 

But Willis had a right to be concerned. It was only earlier in the year that the Wendts – Buffalo Forge's owners – allowed Carrier to start up an experimental industrial laboratory, which he operated concurrently with his 55-hour weekly schedule and for no increase in his $10-a-week salary. The Wendts had no tolerance for slackers. Once, as Willis sat at his desk, gazing at the ceiling while pondering a problem, Henry Wendt, the firm's operating manager, scolded him. "Young man, you can't stay around here if you don’t apply yourself." Never mind that what Willis was thinking about was worth more to Buffalo Forge than what could be done in three years of regular work. He had to work his way back into Henry Wendt's good graces, and blowing this project wasn't going to fit with the program. 

As if that wasn't enough, Willis couldn't afford to lose everything, not with his wedding to his college sweetheart, Claire Seymour, just weeks away. It seemed as though everything he had worked so hard for his whole life was hanging in the balance. He had delayed entering college for two years to help the family farm get through the depression of the mid-1890s. He even went back to high school, in Buffalo, thanks to his stepmother, whom his father had married when Willis was 15. The following spring, after competitive examinations, he won a state scholarship to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. The scholarship money paid his tuition for four years, and a second scholarship paid his room and board for the first two years, but he had to work odd jobs mowing lawns, tending furnaces, waiting tables, and as an agent for a boarding house, to pay for room and board the last two years. In his senior year, he and a fellow student made close to $1,000 each by forming a cooperative student laundry agency. It was the first of its kind. For a while, Willis thought he would enter the laundry business. But upon graduating from Cornell in 1901 with a degree in electrical engineering, he thought himself ready to work in the field and wanted to get a position with General Electric. "I might not be in this predicament now if I had followed my dream instead of that Irvine Lyle," Willis muttered to himself. 

Then Willis remembered his dear mother, Elizabeth Haviland Carrier, who passed away when he was only eleven. How he wished she were here with him now. "She could solve any mechanical problem," he thought. He had always believed that he inherited his mechanical talents from her. She once fixed an alarm clock by herself, and alarm clocks were not common then. When he was nine, and struggling to understand fractions, she sent him to the cellar – not as punishment – but to retrieve a pan of apples. "What does she want with apples, when I need help with fractions?" Willis chuckled to himself as he recalled the incident. She had the boy cut the apples into halves, quarters and eighths. "I hope she's making one of her fantastic apple pies," he thought as he cut the apples into pieces. Though he couldn't recall what became of the apples, Willis remembered this moment as the most important thing that ever happened to him. As she instructed him to add and subtract the parts, fractions took on meaning, and Willis felt as if he had made a great discovery. He was quite proud of himself. From then on, no problem would be too hard to solve, no task insurmountable. Willis developed a knack for breaking problems down to something simple and making them easier to solve. 

After his mother died, his Aunt Abbey moved in to help care for Willis and his father, Duane. Once, Willis accidentally upset a bucket of sour cream hanging in the well. "What a mess," he could laugh now. He thought sure he would be reprimanded for his carelessness. Instead, he and his father cleaned out the well and removed the pump. Aunt Abbey made another indelible impression on him by explaining how the pump worked and stating that the atmosphere exerts a pressure of about 15 pounds per square inch. That was the first time Willis had ever heard of atmospheric pressure, and he would never forget the lesson. 

When he was about 14, it became obvious that Willis wasn't like the other schoolboys. He recalled how his classmates looked at him askance as he worked out geometry problems in a pile of snow. As a high school student, he played baseball, ice-skated, swam in Lake Erie and boxed almost every day, but he always left ahead of the other boys to help his father manage the family farm. Up at five o'clock every morning, he, his father and a hired man would milk the 24 cows, then Willis would deliver the milk to a railway milk stop by wagon, or if the snow was too deep, by bobsled. He would then return home and walk a mile across fields to school. His high school graduation essay, written in 1894, was titled, "Circumstances the Mold; Man the Molder." His thesis was that a man with power of will could make himself anything he wished no matter what the circumstances. He wasn't about to let these circumstances get the best of him. And as his thoughts drifted back to Sackett-Wilhelms, he remembered his mother's advice, "Figure out things for yourself." The memories took the edge off his present uneasiness, and steeled his resolve. 

He went over how he had arrived at his solution. Armed with little more than some old U.S. Weather Bureau charts – the only reliable data on psychrometrics in existence at the time – the plans and specifications of the lithographing plant and his ever-present slide rule, Willis began tests on dehumidifying the air. He had worked with fans, heaters and temperature control, but never had a reason to consider the control of the relative humidity of air. He acted as was his custom, quickly grasping the basic factors involved, reducing them to their simplest terms, and planning some tests. Willis's idea for dehumidifying air and holding its moisture content constant was to convert the apparatus with which he had tested heaters and, in place of steam, circulate cold water through the heating coils. He used the Weather Bureau tables to select the dew-point temperature at which the air had the right amount of moisture for the printing process. He then balanced the temperature of the coil surface and the rate of the airflow to pull the air temperature down to the selected dew-point temperature. When he completed the tests, he knew the amount of coils, their temperatures, and the necessary air velocities to give the printers the kind and volume of air specified. But would this stabilize the temperature and humidity in the printing plant itself? There was only one way to find out, and now Carrier was suffering through an agonizingly long night as he waited to submit his design. 

Finally, the sun peaked through the curtains of the room he was renting. He bounded out of bed, got dressed and rushed off to work, forgetting to eat breakfast. He believed in his design, and he was going to present it as the best solution and let destiny take its course.  
 
On July 17, 1902, Willis Carrier completed his drawings and submitted them for what became recognized as the world's first modern air conditioning system. The 1902 installation marked the birth of air conditioning because of the addition of humidity control, which led to the recognition by authorities in the field that air conditioning must perform four basic functions: 1.) control temperature; 2.) control humidity; 3.) control air circulation and ventilation; and, 4.) cleanse the air. 

Happy 100th Birthday, Air Conditioning!