Carrier, Willis Haviland, 1876–1950, American engineer who played a key role in inventing air conditioning, heat pump is a reversible device that does mechanical work to extract heat from a cooler place and deliver heat to a warmer place. The heat delivered to the warmer place is, approximately, the sum of the original heat and the work done.
..... Click the link for more information. b. Angola, N.Y., grad. Cornell Univ. (M.E. 1901). Working for the Buffalo Forge Co. (1901–14), he developed (1902) a dehumidifier and discovered that circulating air over cold pipes not only removed water from the air but cooled it. He soon refined his concept, and his company set up (1907) a subsidiary to exploit his ideas. In a 1911 paper Carrier outlined the scientific underpinnings of air conditioning and explained its main design features. In 1915 he and several fellow workers founded the Carrier Corp., and he served as its president (1915–30) and chairman (1930–48). Often called the father of air conditioner, Carrier eventually held more than 80 related patents, and his company became one of the industry's major manufacturers.

Bibliography

See biography by M. Ingels (1949, repr. 1972).

Carrier, Willis Haviland

(born Nov. 26, 1876, Angola, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 7, 1950, New York, N.Y.) U.S. inventor and industrialist. Carrier designed the first system to control temperature and humidity in 1902. His “Rational Psychrometric Formulae,” introduced in 1911, initiated scientific air-conditioning design. In 1915 he cofounded the Carrier Engineering Company, which became the world's largest manufacturer of air-conditioning equipment. Carrier was purchased by United Technologies Corporation in 1979.