Willis Carrier

Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876 – October 7, 1950) was an American engineer, best known for inventing modern air conditioning by inventing the first electrical air conditioning unit in 1902. In 1915, he founded Carrier Corporation, a company specializing in the manufacture and distribution of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (now abbreviated "HVAC") systems.

Willis Haviland Carrier was born on November 26, 1876, in Angola, New York, the son of Duane Williams Carrier (1836–1908) and Elizabeth R. Haviland (1845–1888). He graduated from Angola Academy in 1894 and from the Buffalo High School in 1897.

He studied at Cornell University, starting in 1897 and graduating in 1901 with a Master of Engineering degree.

After graduating, Carrier joined the Buffalo Forge Company as a research engineer.

In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to an air quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, New York, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognized as the world's first modern air conditioning system. It was so humid in summer that the paper grew and shrank, which resulted in poor quality images, because the color printing process involved running the same piece of paper up to four times, each with a different color ink.

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 A/C must perform four basic functions:

After several more years of refinement and field testing, on January 2, 1906, Carrier was granted U.S. patent 808,897 for an Apparatus for Treating Air, the world's first spray-type air conditioning equipment. It was designed to humidify or dehumidify air, heating water for the first function and cooling it for the second.

In 1906 Carrier discovered that "constant dew-point depression provided practically constant relative humidity," which later became known among air conditioning engineers as the "law of constant dew-point depression." On this discovery he based the design of an automatic control system, for which he filed a patent claim on May 17, 1907. U.S. patent 1,085,971 was issued on February 3, 1914.

In 1930, Carrier started Toyo Carrier in Japan and Korea. The Carrier Corporation pioneered the design and manufacture of refrigeration machines to cool large spaces. By increasing industrial production in the summer months, air conditioning revolutionized American life. The company became a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation in 1980, and remained so until 2020, when it was spun off again as an independent publicly traded company. The Carrier Corporation remains a world leader in commercial and residential HVAC and refrigeration. In 2018, the Carrier Corporation had sales of $18.6 billion and employed 53,000 people.

The Willis H. Carrier Total Indoor Environmental Quality Lab at the Syracuse University's Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems is named in his honor. The lab was established in 2010 with a donation from the Carrier Corp.

Carrier met Edith Claire Seymour at Cornell and they married on August 29, 1902. Edith Claire Seymour died in 1912. He married Jennie Tifft Martin on April 16, 1913. She died in 1939. He married Elizabeth Marsh Wise of Terre Haute, Indiana on February 7, 1941. Carrier and all three of his wives are buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York. Carrier fathered one child, Howard Carter Willis. He also adopted another two children from Jennie Martin, Vernon Gardner Carrier (1903–1985) and Earl Gardner Carrier (1905–1983).

Carrier was a Presbyterian. He lived in Syracuse. He died on October 7, 1950, at Cornell Medical Center. He was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo.

For his contributions to science and industry, Willis Carrier was awarded an engineering degree by Lehigh University in 1935 and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Alfred University in 1942. He received the ASME Medal in 1934. Carrier was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal and elected an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1942. He was inducted posthumously in the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1985) and the Buffalo Science Museum Hall of Fame (2008).