5 Surprising Things You Never Knew About Your Air Conditioners
While you may think that air conditioners are one of the modern appliances, the history of air conditioners dates back to as far as ancient Egypt when people used to hang wet reeds on their windows. The wet reeds served to cool the air that passed through the window, helping drop the temperature of the room.
Since then, the world has seen air conditioners in several new but interesting forms and types. Now, the air conditioner sits in one corner of the room and helps you lead a life full of convenience and comfort, but what really is the story behind our favorite invention? Let’s find out in a series of short facts.
Cooling Buildings with Ice Slabs
Yes, it is really true. For quite some time, people used to ‘harvest’ large ice slabs from different water bodies during winter. These ice slabs were then used to cool huge constructions. It might sound weird now but journals from the 1800s have repeatedly talked about how the ‘harvest’ from the rivers might not be enough to spend all the hot summer months in ease.
Apparatus for Treating Air
If you’ve ever wondered and blessed the man who invented the first air conditioner, we have his name for you. Willis Carrier was the first person who patented the initial design of the first air conditioner. It was the first time that the air conditioner was envisioned as a spray-type machine in 1902. The very first air conditioner was then called ‘An Apparatus for Treating Air.’
The Original Name
From an ‘Apparatus for Treating Air’ to an ‘Air Conditioner’, that is one whole journey. The first person who helped establish the name air conditioner was Stuart Cramer. Stuart was an engineer and has more than sixty patents to his good name. During one of his studies, he realized that regulating the level of humidity in textile industries could help drastically improve the value of the products.
He installed a system that controlled the humidity and the temperature in the said industry and called it an ‘air conditioner’ because he believed that the device helped condition the air to the most optimum condition, especially for the production.
The Measure of Capacity
Are you one of the people who thought that ‘tonn’ referred to the weight of the air conditioner? Well, it doesn’t. The tonnage is the measure of the cooling of the air conditioner which is evaluated in the amount of cooling it produces to help cool a room of a certain square feet area. To be specific, the ton refers to the amount of heat the air conditioner can eliminate from a room. For example, when we look at the BTU’s, we know that a 1-ton air conditioner unit provides 12000 BTU’s in one hour. In other words, a 1-ton air conditioner helps take away 12000 BTU’s of heat from a room in one hour.
Summers in Old Britain
There are some sources that tell about how ice during the colder season was stored in deep pits by the people in old Britain. These pits were a part of their houses and the ice in the pits was layered with sawdust and hay to keep the ice from melting. The ice was then gathered during the summers and used to keep the temperature of the house optimum.