It's too hot in here to get anything done

Took off my coat, then my vest. Still sweating through my collar, and it isn't even noon. — Bookkeeper, 1899

Air conditioning wasn't invented for people. It was invented for paper. A Brooklyn plant that printed a humor magazine couldn't keep its colors lined up, because the damp air swelled the paper between runs. In 1902 Willis Carrier, 25 years old, built a machine that pulled the water out of the air, with the cooling power of 108,000 pounds of ice a day. The people in the building got cooler too. Nobody had asked about them.

Still bugs us: the office thermostat. One person is freezing, the one next to them is sweating, and they share a wall.

The full file

Carrier wasn't the first to try. In 1842 a Florida doctor, John Gorrie, built a machine to cool the air for his yellow-fever patients, and in 1851 he got the first American patent for mechanical refrigeration, for making ice. He never made any money from it.

Carrier was working for the Buffalo Forge Company when he took the Brooklyn job. He patented the design as "Apparatus for Treating Air" in 1906, and in 1915 he and five other engineers started their own company.

The arguing never stopped. A 2015 study found office temperature standards were built around the metabolism of an average man, about 40 years old and 155 pounds, which may run up to 35% high for women, and the women in the tests liked it almost 5°F warmer. Other building scientists say the real trouble is who sets the thermostat. Either way, somebody's cold.

Relates to No. 00450.