Carrier Context:
History

  Famous Carriers

Carrier entered Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. on a four-year scholarship, but he was forced to earn room and board money by mowing lawns, stoking furnaces, and, during his senior year, forming a co-op student laundry.

With a degree in mechanical engineering, he found a job at the Buffalo Forge Company in June, 1901 and began designing heating systems to dry lumber and coffee. Carrier realized the data available to him or any engineer wasn't sufficient to design soundly engineered systems.

He started his own research program to determine how much heat air would hold as it was blown across steam-heated pipes. For the first time, the company's engineers could accurately estimate how much heater surface area was needed to heat a given space. In one heating system alone, the tables Carrier developed saved the company $40,000 that had been spent previously in correcting poorly designed installations.


Carrier, barely a year out of college, was made head of the company's department of experimental engineering. It was here that he solved his first problem in temperature and humidity control for the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn.

Even though he was still 13 years away from forming his own air conditioning company, Carrier exhibited the kind of focused reliance on hard data, combined with a lively vision and imagination, that would power an industry.

He was a dreamer, but he based his dreams on reality. "I fish only for edible fish, and hunt only for edible game even in the laboratory."

( top of page | back)