From Fog to Greatness
It's a nuisance to fisherman and sailors.
Poet Carl Sandburg said fog "comes on little cat feet."
But to Willis Carrier, fog was the stuff of greatness.
The story is told of the 25-year-old Carrier pacing late at night on a fog-bound train platform in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1902. As often was the case, the young engineer was turning a paperless problem over and over in his head; worrying it like a pup with a knotted rag.
Carrier that night experienced what the U.S. Patent Office calls "a flash of genius." He took aboard the train with him 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.
<< Back
|
|
