The ACHR NEWS Centennial Anniversary

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A look at how the HVACR industry came together during the 1940s — highlighting the companies, technologies, and people who helped power a global effort that aided us in ultimately winning the war.  

“Use of the terms ‘heat pump’ and ‘reverse cycle’ to describe heating by refrigeration equipment is confusing to the public and lacks sales appeal,” said Claude W. Kniffin, air conditioning application engineer for Westinghouse Electric Elevator Co., during a talk before the 1945  Baltimore-Washington Section of the American Society of Refrigerating Engineers. 

The Midwest was the center of a dynamic U.S. refrigeration industry in the 1930s, but an expert industry journalist reported from around the world. 

The Hot-Kold was the result of a partnership between the refrigeration company Frigidaire and General Iron Works, which made furnaces. Unaffordable for most people during the Great Depression, it didn’t last long. 

Anecdotes from the era tell of paper that warped, ink that smudged and people who nearly passed out because of stifling heat at the Capitol. The arrival of central a/c changed all that. 

The architect and furniture designer Morris Sanders was ahead of his time, both in his Modernist style and in his belief in central air-conditioning. 

When Willis Carrier brought a centrifugal chiller to the Rivoli Theater in Times Square in 1925, he helped change how Americans spent their summers. 

By 1926, ammonia dominated industrial refrigeration. Natural refrigerants enabled the global cold chain and continued driving innovations needed to feed a growing world. 

 When GE’s Monitor Top was introduced in 1927, it was considered to be the first affordable refrigerator in the U.S. 

Celebrating 100 years, The ACHR NEWS looks back to its 1926 debut issue, which introduced electric refrigeration as an emerging technology that some viewed with suspicion