Willis Haviland Carrier did pretty well for a boy who had to slice a peck of apples into halves, quarters and eighths to grasp the notion of fractions.
Raised on a farm near the snowy eastern shore of Lake Erie in Angola, New York, the young Carrier grew up as an only child in an extended family of adults including his grandparents and great aunt. Some described him as a solitary youth who entertained himself playing games of his own invention.
In his adult years, legends grew around him as a problem-solving genius who sometimes noodled solutions for a year or two. Perhaps that skill was an outgrowth of his difficulty with fractions.
"My mother told me to bring up a pan of apples from the cellar," Carrier said. "She had me cut them into halves, quarters and eighths and add and subtract the parts. Fractions took on a new meaning and I felt as if no problems would be too hard for me - I'd simply break them down to something simple and they would be easy to solve."
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."
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