First tried to air-condition in Persia thousands of years ago. Cooling of air in Persian devices took place according to the principle of water cooling at evaporation. Typical air conditioner of those days was a special mine that captured the wind blowing, where porous vessels with water were placed or water from the spring was flowing. After cooling and saturation with moisture in the mine, the air came to the room. Effective for hot and dry climate, such conditioner would be useless in conditions of high relative humidity.
In India, the attempt to resist the hot summer climate has led practically to the creation of the eternal engine. Having installed a frame wrapped in a coconut palm tree - tatty - instead of an entrance door into the room, the Indians placed a tank above it, which was slowly filled with water due to the capillary effect of tatty. When the water level reached a certain value, the container was tilted over, watering the door and returning to its original state. This process was repeated many times.
In the 19th century, British inventor Michael Faraday discovered that the compression and liquefaction of a certain gas-cooled the air. But his ideas were largely theoretical.
The point of reference in the history of air conditioning is considered to be the year 1815 when the Frenchman Jean Chabannes received a British patent for "the method of air conditioning and temperature regulation in homes and other buildings...
The electric method of air conditioning was invented by Willis Carrier around 1902. He also developed the first air conditioning system for a printing house in Brooklyn. In the summer, during the printing process, constant changes in temperature and humidity did not allow us to achieve high-quality color rendering.
Carrier developed a machine that cooled the air to a constant temperature and dried it to 55%. He called it an "air handling unit". In 1915, he and six other engineering colleagues founded their own company, Garner Engineering Co. Today, Carrier company is one of the leading manufacturers of air conditioners and owns 12% of the world's AC production.
The term air conditioning itself was first proposed in 1906 by Stewart Kramer, who linked this concept to the receipt of air conditioning goods.
Later, expensive air-conditioning systems were applied to improve labor productivity in the workplace. Then the scope of air-conditioning application was extended to improve comfort in homes and cars.
The first air conditioners and refrigerators used toxic gases, such as ammonia and methyl chloride, which were far from safe to live when they leaked out. In the 1930s, for safety reasons, General Electric produced an air conditioner with a compressor and condensing unit outside the building. It was the first split-system.
The first car air conditioner had a cooling capacity of 370 watts, was created by C & C Kelvinator Co in 1930 and installed on the Cadillac.
Thomas Midgley Jr. was the first to suggest the use of difluoro-fluoro chloromethane as a refrigerant, later called freon in 1928. This refrigerant proved to be much safer for humans, but not for the ozone layer of the atmosphere.
Freon is a trademark of DuPont for all CFCs, HCFCs or HFC refrigerants, each with a number that indicates the molecular composition (R-11, R-12, R-22, R-134). The most commonly used mix of HCFC, or R-22, is planned to be abandoned in the production of new devices by 2010, and completely rid of it by 2020. R-11 and R-12 are no longer manufactured, the only way to buy them is to clean the gas in old air conditioners. Nowadays, R-410A, a refrigerant that is safe for the Earth's ozone layer, non-flammable, non-toxic and highly energy-saving, is gaining popularity.
Successes in cybernetics and microelectronics did not shy away from the process of air-conditioning either - in 1978 the first microprocessor-controlled air-conditioner was released. In the 1980s, Toshiba developed a new way of controlling the compressor by changing the compressor's power supply frequency, which was later called an inverter. Inverter control of power supply allows reducing power consumption of the air conditioner by 30%.
The year 1982 was the year when VRF systems combining the advantages of split systems and central air conditioning systems were invented. Appearance of the innovation allowed the consumer to flexibly regulate the modes of cooling and heating in different rooms of one building.
In the '90s, humanity, increasingly concerned with environmental protection, decided to phase out refrigerants that pose a threat to the ozone layer.In Europe, their production should have stopped completely in 2014.