The idea that led to air-conditioning:

July 17 1902: It was another scorcher in New York city.  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.  

However, something was to happen that involved the second floor of a Brooklyn printing plant - something that changed everything.

What happened was air-conditioning.  Sort of.....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: controlling humidity.  It was world changing.   

The second floor of that Brooklyn printing plant had just been completed.  It was built for a company that printed humour magazine Judge, which carried fanciful illustrations.  The printing company had to run each page of the magazine through the press once for each colour on the page.  Sometimes one colour was printed one day and another colour the next.  The problem was that paper would absorb mositure from the sticky Brooklyn air and expand by a fraction of an inch, enough so that colours would not line up properly.  And even worse, 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 mailboxes no matter what.

The junior engineer who tackled the problem was Willis Carrier.  The solution he devised involved fans, ducts, heaters and perforated pipes.  The equipment, installed later that summer of 1902, controlled the humidity on the second floor of that short building at Metropolitan Avenue and Morgan Avenue.  The building 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.

Carrier was not happy with the pipes, so a couple of years later he had a brainstorm that made the system work far better - instead of blowing air across metal pipes which can frost, he decided to blow it through water.

Air-conditioning has come a long way since Wills Carrier's first blueprint in that summer heat wave of 1902.  Air-conditioning, in the broad sense, had a profound effect on the way people lived and worked.  It allowed industry to operate in ways it could never have operated before, in places it could never operate before.  It has even affected the internet, because air-conditioning minimized dust, making possible so-called clean rooms for computer manufacturers and electronics companies.

Today we have close control air-conditioning units to maintain constant room temperatures and humidity in server rooms across the world.  Computers generate vast amounts of heat, and the use of air-conditioning is essential to keep these rooms at a constant temperature.

At Reliant Engineering Ltd, we can cater for all your server room needs. We have over 30 years combined experience in this business.  And, although we may never have a heat wave like New York in the summer of 1902, our use of air-conditioning in this country is required more and more to ensure our server rooms and businesses run as effectively as possible.