You don’t know how far you can go until you go too far. This was something my father said often when I was younger, most likely linked to some action I committed that was based on a poor decision. As children growing up, you learn to test boundaries, and you learn quickly that failure can teach the most memorable and tactile lessons. We learn to walk by standing up and falling. We learn about hot stoves by burning our hands. Life is full of lessons that are learned by trial and error. And yet as we get older, the actual art of failure is less and less encouraged by parents, teachers, professors, and business owners. As an adult, the stakes of failure are higher. Suddenly, failure goes from a bump on the head to life and death consequences — physically, mentally, or financially. And yet history is filled with those who dared to fail, especially within the HVAC industry.
Civilizations and societies since ancient time have played one way or another in the arena of heating and cooling spaces, either due to necessity or due to the pursuit of comfort. Dr. John Gorrie, a Florida physician in the 1840s, was one of the first people reported to experiment with the concept of cooling spaces. His goal was to temper the severe Florida heat for his patients by using ice, which was created by a compressor that was powered by a horse, water, and wind-driven sails. While Gorrie’s invention was a success, it wasn’t completely practical. It was not until 1902 that engineer Willis Carrier took up the mantle in the evolution of HVAC — not for the purpose of conditioning a house or business, but in the pursuit of solving the humidity problem that was causing magazine pages to wrinkle at Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Co. in Brooklyn, New York.