“The man who manufactured weather.”

"The heat wave of 1901 was brutal across the eastern United States, setting some records that persist to this day. One of these occurred in St. Louis were, according to a recent retrospective in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 'For nearly seven weeks, temperatures were above 90 on all but three days. It was 100 or hotter on 15 days, including a terrible four-day run of at least 106.”
    "At a time when the electric ceiling fan was a new invention, there was little hope for relief. To mitigate the suffering, the Post-Dispatch raised funds from its readers to distribute ice to the poor from refrigeration plants at the city’s breweries. Still, hundreds died in St. Louis. It is estimated that 9,500 people died of the heat across the country. Crops withered, and factories closed to prevent workers from collapsing.
    "There is a lot of talk about the summer of 2023 being unusually hot due to global warming, though it is also thanks to the naturally recurring 'El Niño' weather pattern. But as the heat wave of 1901 indicates, dangerously hot summers are an old problem, particularly in the American South. And one man gave us the solution, making civilized life in the summer possible: Willis Carrier, the inventor of modern air-conditioning...
    
"He patented his device in 1906 and made continual improvements to its mechanical operation.
    "But he went beyond that, developing a whole sub-science to support his discoveries. In 1911, he presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers his paper, 'Rational Psychrometric Formulae,' which described the relationships of temperature, humidity, relative humidity and dew-point that provide the theoretical basis for air-conditioning. 'Psychrometrics' comes from the Ancient Greek word for 'cold': 'psuchron.' You could call it the science of comfort.
    "In 1915, Carrier partnered with a group of young engineers to found the Carrier Engineering Corporation devoted to manufacturing and improving air-conditioning systems.
    "Carrier’s achievement made him, as I put it, 'the man who manufactured weather'."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'The Man Who Manufactured Weather'