The first electrical air conditioner was invented by Willis Haviland Carrier in the year 1902, just a year after his graduation from Cornell University with a Masters in Engineering.

While working as an employee for Buffalo Forge Company, Carrier designed this machine for the owner of a printing plant who was having trouble printing because of fluctuations in heat and humidity.

The apparatus designed by Carrier helped maintain a stable climatic condition within the plant fixing the owner’s printing woes.

Carrier patented his design of an air conditioner in 1906. He went on to patent many more designs related to air conditioning and gained the title of ‘father of air conditioning’. The term air conditioning, however, was not a brainchild of Willis Carrier. In fact, it was used by a textile engineer, Stuart Cramer, in his patent claim.

Later on, Carrier revealed his psychometric formulae to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). These formulae are used even today in calculations for the air conditioning industry.

Willis Carrier says that he got the idea of an air conditioner while waiting for a train. It was foggy, and he was thinking about the problems of temperature and humidity. By the time the train reached the station, Carrier had a clear understanding of the relationship between temperature, humidity and dew point.

The invention of the air conditioner was just the beginning of a series of achievements for Carrier. In 1915, he established the Carrier Engineering Corporation, a company dedicated to improving the quality of air conditioning. The company, which started with a base capital of $35,000, posted sales of $5 billion in 1995.

Carrier began designing air conditioning systems for industries, and these industries flourished with the new ability to control the environment through their various manufacturing processes. This led to a subsequent increase in the quality of the goods they produced.

In 1924, Carrier changed his focus towards air conditioning for people. After installing an air conditioner in a J.L. Hudson department store in Detroit, and observing the sudden influx of customers, the demand for smaller air conditioning units by stores and movie theatres boomed. He obliged.
In 1928, Carrier launched the first residential air conditioning unit, called the ‘Weathermaker’.

Like electricity, the internet too wasn’t invented by a single person. It is the cumulative result of the concepts and ideas of many different people and organizations, and has come a long way from what it was at the time of its conception.

The idea of an internet was first thought of by the US Department of Defense in 1957 when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) needed to share their research and technology. Initially this was done by joining their networks using phones.

In 1966, Larry Roberts of MIT designed the ARPANET, which consisted of computers linked over long distances. In 1969, ARPANET opened its networks to other universities and UCLA and Standard were among the first to be a part of their network nodes. By 1973, it extended its network over a large number of universities in the US and had also established a node in London, UK.

During the 1970s the internet underwent several major changes. The very concept of internet was revolutionized by the introduction of packet switching technology, which allowed for faster transmission of data at a considerably lower cost. In addition to that, the development of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) changed the way data was being transmitted over the internet. This decade also saw the birth of USENET and the UNIX operating system, and in 1976, the Queen of England sent the first e-mail.

In 1982, the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) was developed, and is marked as one of the most significant milestones in the history of the internet. Symbolics.com was the first domain name to be registered in the year 1985, and the first virus was reported in 1988.

In the year 1990, Tim Berners Lee, a scientist at CERN, gave birth to the concept of hypertext, i.e., a method by which documents could be linked to each other over networks. This led to the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW).

In the 90s, applications called browsers were developed to help surf the Web in a convenient way. And with that the internet was born.

No one invented electricity. Rather, it was discovered. Even so, its discovery cannot be attributed to any one individual in history, but as a culmination of the research of various scholars spanning many eras.

The first mention of electrical use was in the year 600 B.C. in Greece. A man named Thales of Miletus discovered that rubbing fur would make certain objects attract each other. On further experimentation, Thales was able to generate sparks using amber.

In 1600 A.D., an Italian physicist Giralamo Cardano studied the basic properties of electrical power and magnetism. His theories were elucidated by his colleague, William Gilbert, who wrote about various substances and their electric properties in his “De magnete, magneticisique corporibus”.

Gilbert went on to coin the term ‘electricity’ from the Greek word meaning amber. He was also the first to use the terms magnetic pole, electric force and attraction.

Later in the same century a German scientist, Otto von Guericke invented the electrostatic generator, a machine that produced static electricity. Experiments conducted with this device and a few similar ones that followed led to a number of conclusions, like the existence of charge in both negative and positive forms, which greatly contributed to the study of electricity.

In 1747, Benjamin Franklin, following his famous experiment with the kite, concluded that electricity “flows” and has a fluid-like property that is composed of particles. He also invented the lightning rod and proved that lightning was electricity. It was also discovered that static electricity could be converted into current.

These conclusions and the subsequent contributions of scientific greats like Alessandro Volta, Andre Ampere and Georg Ohm led to inventions like the capacitor, the anode and cathode, and the battery.

This was followed by a series of inventions, discoveries and hypotheses related to the theory of electricity. People who made a great impact on the electrical theory during this time were Thomas Alva Edison, George Westinghouse, Samuel Morse, Nikolas Tesla and Alexander Bell.

Their inventions like the light bulb, electric motor, telegraph and the telephone changed civilization in ways unimaginable.

As you can see, no one individual can be credited for the discovery of electricity. It was the combined efforts of all these great thinkers and scientists that helped man discover and manage this very important natural resource.