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Willis Carrier

1876–1950 · 74 years Tier III

The farm boy who learned to engineer humidity itself

Portrait of Willis Carrier — 100th Anniversary Press Kit - Carrier Corp — 1915 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Willis Carrier grew up on a farm outside Angola, New York, the son of Duane Carrier and Elizabeth Haviland, and lost his mother when he was eleven. He worked his way through Cornell on a math scholarship and odd jobs, graduating in 1901 with a degree in mechanical engineering, and took a job as a research engineer at Buffalo Forge, a maker of fans and heating equipment, for ten dollars a week. The company gave him a corner of its testing department and let him chase a problem nobody had solved commercially: how to control not just the temperature of air but the moisture in it. He was twenty-five, unmarried, and had never designed a system anyone had paid to install.

In 1902 a Brooklyn printing plant hired Buffalo Forge because humid summer air was swelling its paper between color passes and ruining the registration. Carrier's fix, delivered that July, controlled temperature, humidity, circulation and cleanliness together, and by 1911 he had reduced the design to a mathematical formula, the psychrometric chart, that let engineers calculate a system instead of guessing. He patented an automatic humidity control in 1914 and, when Buffalo Forge shut down research during the First World War, pooled 32,600 dollars with six colleagues in 1915 to start his own firm, Carrier Engineering Corporation. Movie palaces and department stores bought in through the 1920s; a domed pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair sold the idea to ordinary households. Postwar suburbs finished the job "carrier" had started as a brand name.

The man who made indoor air controllable buried three wives. Edith Seymour, whom he married in 1902 the same year as his famous patent drawing, died in 1912. He married Jennie Tifft Martin the next year and adopted her two sons; she died in 1939. He married a third time, to Elizabeth Wise, in 1941, nine years before his own death, and asked to be buried beside all three women at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo. The 1929 crash nearly finished what grief had not: Carrier Engineering's finances collapsed with the market, and in 1930 he had to fold his independent company into a merger with two rivals just to survive, trading the freedom of running his own firm for the Carrier Corporation that carried only his name.

Carrier died at Cornell's medical center on October 7, 1950, and the company built on his patents outgrew him fast: Carrier Corporation moved to Syracuse in 1937 and became one of the region's largest employers, then a global brand present in offices, hospitals and homes on every inhabited continent. The honors accumulated posthumously rather than during his life. The National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 1985, thirty-five years after he died, and the Buffalo museum where he trained followed in 2008. Air conditioning itself reshaped where Americans chose to live, making year-round settlement of the hot South and Southwest practical in a way it had not been before a Brooklyn printer's humidity problem crossed his desk.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Willis Carrier's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Sackett-Wilhelms air conditioning system invention
First modern system to control humidity alongside temperature 1902
Apparatus for Treating Air (US Patent 808,897) patent
The first spray-type air conditioning equipment 1906
Rational Psychrometric Formulae discovery
The math behind precise air-conditioning design, later called the Magna Carta of Psychrometrics 1911
Carrier Engineering Corporation company
Founded with six colleagues on 32,600 dollars in pooled savings 1915
Carrier Corporation company
Formed by merger after the 1929 crash; still bears his name 1930

Life in brief

with age at each point

November 26, 1876 aged 0 Born in Angola, New York
1888 aged ~12 His mother dies
1901 aged ~25 Graduates Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering
July 17, 1902 aged 25 Submits drawings for the first modern air conditioning system
January 2, 1906 aged 29 Granted a patent for the first spray-type air conditioning apparatus
June 26, 1915 aged 38 Co-founds Carrier Engineering Corporation
1930 aged ~54 Carrier Engineering merges to form Carrier Corporation after the crash
1939 aged ~63 His pavilion at the New York World's Fair introduces air conditioning to the public
October 7, 1950 aged 73 Dies at Cornell's medical center