Carrier Context:
History
Carrier that night experienced what the U.S. Patent Office calls "a flash of genius." He stepped aboard the train with the beginnings of a basic understanding of the relationship between temperature, humidity and dew point. That flash fathered Carrier's "Rational Psychrometric Formulae," a paper presented December 3, 1911 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
It became, and still is, the cornerstone of all fundamental calculations in the air conditioning industry. Understanding Carrier's formulae allows engineers to precisely control both the temperature and humidity of the indoor air that surrounds us daily. The formulae, and the graceful lines they trace on the psychrometric table, have been translated into most of the world's languages, printed in thousands of textbooks and engineers' handbooks.
And they began with a man contemplating fog.
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