The man who saves your life every summer

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Frederic Tudor set sail in 1806 for Martinique with an extraordinary cargo. His company had extracted ice from the frozen rivers of Massachusetts during the winter and the American merchant intended to sell it in the Caribbean. However, he forgot a fundamental detail: in Martinique they were not familiar with the concept of refrigeration. The inhabitants of the island had never drank a cold beer or eaten an ice cream ball. For them, less prone to wonder than the inhabitants of Macondo, those blocks had no value, since their function was dispensable. In conclusion: Tudor's ice eventually melted and the business literally escaped like water in his hands.

The failure of the Ice King in Boston could have been among the biggest pifias in history, had it not been because the merchant later made a fortune exporting tons of his primitive cubes to India. But if the case of Tudor is remembered more than 200 years later, it is mainly because his mission, the one that pushed him again and again to sail thousands of kilometers with a perishable product like few others, the one that led him to evangelize with the cold as If he were a conqueror of polo, it was the same one that at the beginning of the 20th century inspired one of the most decisive characters in the functioning of the industrial society: Willis Havilland Carrier. The man who saves his life every summer.

What doesn't sound like anything? Do not worry. You are not the only one. Carrier is the father of air conditioning and, paradoxically, almost a stranger.

Go outside and take the test. First take a minute to count how many teams that allow homes to be habitable in the worst heat waves you see in your neighborhood windows. Then randomly ask passersby who pass by who is the architect of that domestic miracle. It is very likely that only a few of them identify the individual whom Time magazine considered in 1998 as one of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century. Unlike the Einstein, Bell, Tesla or Hawking, Carrier is a faceless genius.

This engineer invented in Brooklyn at age 25 a printer that regulated the temperature

Born in a small town in the state of New York in 1876, he inherited from his mother the hobby of messing around watches, sewing machines and other devices. His interest in the cacharrería and his ability with mathematics took him to the university, where he graduated in Electrical Engineering. He found his first job ($ 10 a week) at a company that manufactured air extraction devices and heating systems to dry wood and coffee.

With 25 years he responded to one of the great challenges of Humanity: the control of the interior environment. He did it by designing for a Brooklyn printer a system that allowed to regulate heat and humidity by means of cooled tubes. A sketch allows you to get an idea of ​​the dimensions of the hulk, which occupied an entire room , like the first computers. Carrier patented his "air treatment apparatus" in 1906; Five years later he presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers what remains the basis of all calculations of the air conditioning industry: an apparent gibberish of equations known as the basic basic psychometric rational formula.

With World War I and his company's decision to eliminate the air conditioning department, Carrier decided to start his own company with six other engineers. He contributed $ 32,600 and the first year he already received 40 orders . His research to control the temperature attracted the textile industry in the southern United States. And then to many others from different sectors: tobacco, cinema, medicine, weapons ... Thus, air conditioning was for two decades a privilege of factories, not people.

Artificial cold was only a mass consumption good after World War II, with its introduction in department stores, movie theaters, hospitals, offices, airports, hotels and private homes. All this as part of the strategy drawn by Carrier since he patented the first system to condition the air in large spaces: the centrifugal cooling machine.

"It laid the foundations for the study of ambient air, mixing dry air and water vapor, determining the importance of moisture in human comfort and food preservation," explains Pedro Vicente Quiles, executive vice president of the technical committee of Atecyr (Spanish Technical Association of Air Conditioning and Refrigeration). Today, indoor services such as laboratory research, surgical interventions in hospitals , cooling of internet servers and even the design of space programs depend on this indoor air conditioning.

Faced with these uses, it is important to see how the first home air conditioner - located in Carrier's offices in Newark - could be confused at first glance with an Alfonsino-style dresser. And also how it has dwarfed decade by decade to become an invisible and silent presence in millions of homes around the world. It could be said that in Spanish cities it threatens the fan, the botijo ​​and the fresh chair as the main remedy against heat, robbing street life of some of its folkloric charm and transforming the urban landscape at the same time.

28% of the houses in Spain already have a refrigeration team , notes the most recent report of the Institute for Diversification and Energy Saving (IDEA), an agency under the Ministry for Ecological Transition. In 53% of cases, said cooling comes from an air conditioner. According to another study that the Idealista real estate portal published last summer, and that took as a reference the nearly one million homes for sale and rent that were offered on its canals, Seville is the city with the largest park of heated floors (69.5 %), followed by Córdoba (56.4%), Barcelona (55.2%), Palma de Mallorca (54.1%), Jaén (53.9%), Valencia (51.8%) and Madrid (49 , 8%). On the contrary, the cities that to a lesser extent resorted to refrigeration are Oviedo and Vitoria (0.5%), Burgos (0.7%), Santander and Lugo (0.8%).

"Spain and Italy are the European countries with the highest consumption of air conditioning," says Quiles. "In homes, air conditioning is increasingly demanded for reasons of comfort and, in the case of our elders, for health reasons. People have the feeling that every day they will need it more. We can say that 30 years ago heating and air conditioning were considered necessary. At present, air conditioning is considered equally necessary in the tertiary sector and is increasingly installed in the residential sector. "

In Córdoba, the City Council is studying the proposal endorsed by 2,000 signatures to give Carrier the name of a street

Almost a year ago, in the most bizarre August of the last six decades and with its city above 40 degrees for several days, there were those who remembered Carrier. "That in Córdoba not even a simple square has been dedicated to him ... It is incredible," joked local influencer Rafalcor on Facebook with a printed message about a portrait of the pioneer. The next day, a follower contacted him to drive a collection of signatures on Change.org. Its objective: that the City Council put the name of the American to a street , "taking advantage of the next renown process on the part of our street map on the occasion of the application of the Law of Historical Memory (and taking into account the neutrality of this great inventor in the Spanish Civil War and the absence of controversy for this reason) ".

Rafalcor now admits that the campaign had a "comic" claim, but that its dissemination on social networks and its leap to the media made it reach the Municipal Planning Department backed by almost 2,000 signatures . "The government team at that time supported the idea and recognized that it could be studied, seeing social acceptance," adds the influencer, who gives a varnish of reality to the tourist postcard of his city: «Not everything here is white houses and alleyways Even in traditional Cordovan courtyards and with its intelligent architecture, an inhuman warmth is passed. "

Carrier died in 1950, when his invention - which today is the image of a multinational listed on the Stock Exchange - began to become popular on a scale that he probably never imagined. He could not see, therefore, the true impact of that invention that initially cooled with the equivalent effect of 50,000 kilos of melted ice a day. Nor could he face the criticism of the environmental movement, which maintains that air conditioners consume a large amount of electrical energy, which translates into higher carbon dioxide emissions and the worsening of global warming.

Rafalcor defines Carrier as "a superhero without a cape" and as the type that "in Córdoba has saved more lives than penicillin . " It may be that a roundabout, an avenue or a statue on horseback inside the peninsula is little to recognize the merit. A recent investigation by the ETH University in Zurich guarantees that Madrid will be as hot as Marrakech in 2050. Welcome to Carrierland.

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