In one of his more meteorological moments, science-fiction author Robert Heinlein cheekily explained the difference between climate and weather: "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." Air-conditioning is what humans use to make sure that what we expect and what we get resemble each other. There were certainly other ways of trying to outsmart the weather before air-conditioning came along, at the dawn of the 20th century. During a third-century summer, the eccentric Roman Emperor Elagabalus sent 1,000 slaves to the mountains to fetch snow for his gardens. And fans — be they electric gadgets or palm leaves wielded by servants — have helped create their share of faux wind. But it was AC that truly signified the onset of man-made weather by both cooling air and controlling humidity. The first system was designed in 1902 by inventor Willis Carrier (the Edison of air-conditioning) as a solution to keep muggy air in a printing plant from wrinkling magazine pages.

He successfully used coils to both cool and remove moisture from the air, and would eventually establish the first mass manufacturing plant for air conditioners. While the first home unit, proportional in size to early computers, was installed in 1914, air conditioners remained too bulky, noisy and full of chemicals to become widespread for several more decades. Advances in technology eventually yielded the more convenient window air conditioner in the late 1930s, though it remained out of reach for most. The general public — those not privy to the few luxurious hotels and cars that used cooling systems early on — often first encountered air-conditioning in movie theaters, which started to widely use the technology in the 1930s. Before the window unit's heyday, Carrier produced a system for theaters that cost between $10,000 and $50,000. It was one of the few things proprietors sprung for during the Great Depression, and theaters were one of the rare places where the hoi polloi could enjoy chilly, artificial air.

In the beginning, as with all new things, air-conditioning was regarded as a luxury, especially for tightfisted bosses who viewed such worker comfort as contradictory to the sweat they were paying for. ac unit roofSo in the 1940s and '50s, the air-conditioning industry gave its product a different spin. window ac unit ratingsKeeping employees cool was simply a matter of productivity, and there were numbers to prove it. air conditioning units for automotiveAccording to Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America, tests of federal employees showed that typists increased their output by 24% when transferred from a regular office to a cooled one. By 1957, the AC's early reputation for making workers lazy had been successfully inverted; Cooper writes of another study showing that, by then, almost 90% of companies cited air-conditioning as the most important factor in office efficiency.

America remained at the forefront of AC adoption. In 1947, British scholar S.F. Markham wrote, "The greatest contribution to civilization in this century may well be air-conditioning — and America leads the way." By the time 1980 rolled around, the U.S. — which then housed only 5% of the world's population — was consuming more air-conditioning than all other countries combined. Essayists lamented people's reliance on the electricity-devouring invention. "It is thus no exaggeration to say that Americans have taken to mechanical cooling avidly and greedily," remarked former TIME writer Frank Trippett in 1979. "Many have become all but addicted." Over the years, air-conditioning has been credited with the survival of institutions and industries: the heat-sensitive world of computer networks; the U.S. federal government, which often had to shut down in swampy Washington, D.C., before the embrace of man-made coolness; But even the cool bliss of AC has raised the temperature of some critics.

Environmentalists who are concerned about global warming have long called for cutting back on AC use. "It's just one of those technologies that tends to create the need and desire for even more of it," said Stan Cox, author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), in a recent interview. Cox, discussing early July's Northeastern heat wave, conceded that the invention still has a clearly proven public-health benefit. Regardless, record-breaking temperatures might not provide the best inspiration for people to embrace the weather au naturel.See, that’s what the app is perfect for. Door Switches Carrier Window and Wall Air Conditioning unit Control Door. Carrier Window and Wall Air Conditioning unit Control Door. Discount Shipping Our volume UPS discounts are passed-on directly to you for the lowest possible shipping rates. Carrier XQB183D Window and Wall Air Conditioning unit Control Door Panel Is Used In 72 Air Conditioning Models:

Replaces Part Numbers: CAR32706011Prefer to order by phone?Our parts Experts are happy to help!Contact Us Monday to Friday 10am - 6:30pm ESTContact our Parts ExpertsGIVE YOUR WORK PLACE THE RIGHT ATMOSPHERE WITH CARRIER WRAC Download brochure 107KB Download high resolution image Download Service Manual 1740KB Window/Wall Room air conditioners, with cooling capacities ranging between 2.20 kW ~ 5.50 kW. Automatic airflow for even air distribution Easy access filter for faster, more efficient cleaning 5 in 1 filtration system 2 years part and labour warranty Should air-conditioning go global, or be rationed away? July 17, 1902: It was another scorcher in New York. The week before, seven deaths tied to the heat had been reported. The city’s public baths were jammed with people desperately trying to cool down. The newspapers, following President Theodore Roosevelt’s vacation on Long Island, said he had been out horseback riding when a thunderstorm rolled in.

It was so hot, he did not mind getting soaked. What the newspapers did not report was that something had happened involving the second floor of a Brooklyn printing plant — something that changed everything. What happened was air-conditioning. July 17 was the date on the blueprints for newfangled equipment to temper the air. A junior engineer from a furnace company figured out a solution so simple that it had eluded everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to the naval engineers ordered to cool the White House when President James A. Garfield was dying: controlling humidity. “If you could keep humidity at a balanced rate,” said Marsha E. Ackermann, the author of “Cool Comfort: America’s Romance With Air-Conditioning” (Smithsonian Books, 2002), “it would not seem so sweltering and things would not be dripping all over.” It was a world-changing innovation. “Air-conditioning, in the broad sense, had a profound effect on the way people lived and worked,” said Bernard A. Nagengast, an engineering consultant who specializes in the history of air-conditioning and heating.

“It allowed industry to operate in ways it couldn’t operate before, in places it couldn’t operate before.” It all but redefined Florida and Houston and the rest of the Sun Belt. “And Singapore, sometimes called the air-conditioned nation,” said Eric B. Schultz, a former Carrier Corporation executive and author of a recently published company history. And, Mr. Schultz said, the Internet, because air-conditioning minimized dust, making possible the so-called clean rooms for computer manufacturers and electronics companies. In time there would be window-mounted air-conditioners to drip on people on the sidewalk below (or fall out and cause injuries). And there would be brownouts in the summer as air-conditioners put a strain on power plants. But in 1902, there was a printing plant, and a problem. The plant, on Metropolitan Avenue in East Williamsburg, had just been completed, Mr. Nagengast said. It was built for a company that printed the humor magazine Judge, which carried fanciful illustrations.

The printing company had to run each page of the magazine through the press once for each color on the page. Sometimes one color was printed one day, and another color the next. The problem was that paper would absorb moisture from the sticky Brooklyn air and expand by a fraction of an inch, enough so that the colors would not line up properly. Worse, he said, “the ink refused to dry fast enough.” And the printer could not wait. There was a schedule. There were subscribers who expected the next issue to land in their mail boxes, no matter what. “They were doing an issue a week,” Mr. Nagengast said. The junior engineer who tackled the problem was Willis Carrier, who went on to start Carrier Corporation. The solution he devised involved fans, ducts, heaters and perforated pipes. Mr. Schultz said the equipment, installed later in the summer of 1902, controlled the humidity on the second floor of a short building at Metropolitan Avenue and Morgan Avenue. That structure backs up to a taller building that the printing company, Sackett & Wilhelms, also used.

Carrier’s plan was to force air across pipes filled with cool water from a well between the two buildings, but in 1903, he added a refrigerating machine to cool the pipes faster. American Heritage magazine called Carrier “a Johnny Icicle planting the seeds of climate control all across America.” A paper mill in 1906, a pharmaceutical plant in 1907, a movie-processing plant in 1908, a tobacco warehouse in 1909, a candy manufacturer in 1909, a bakery in 1911. As at the printing plant, humidity had made hot-weather work unpleasant if not impossible. “Carrier was not happy with the pipes,” Mr. Schultz said, and a couple of years later he had a brainstorm that Mr. Schultz called “one of Carrier’s essential genius insights,” a system that worked far better. “This is all leveraging off the work done at Sackett & Wilhelms,” Mr. Schultz said. “This allows him to say the principle is right. It allows him to say, ‘Instead of blowing across metal pipes which can frost, I can blow it through water,’ and that becomes the principle that they use at the Rivoli” — a movie theater on Broadway that was air-conditioned in 1925 — and “at Madison Square Garden.”