HVAC Timeline 291

Chapter 19

HVAC Timeline

quick look at the history of heating, ventilating and air condi-

A tioning in the holistic view… a timeline of purposeful change in

the conditioning of ambient air for the industry focused on crea-
ture comfort and better process function.

1000s
Roman, Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians use man-powered fans.
Indians use rope fans. Romans use a hypocaust (a central heating
system with underground furnace and tile flues to distribute the
heat) floor panel with radiant heating for rooms and baths for the
rich. Others sit in “great halls” where the high society, not hoi
polloi, sit close to a central fire with one’s status in the group
determining how close they sit from the heat.

1400s
Chimneys allow families to have private rooms. Leonardo da
Vinci designs a water driven fan to ventilate a suite of rooms.

1500s
Georguis Agricola publishes treatise on ventilating machines
for mines in De Re Metallica, which describes and depicts various
fans and fan blades used to direct fresh air into a shaft. Agricola
wrote “I have hired illustrators to delineate their forms, lest de-
scriptions which are to be conveyed by words should either not
be understood by men of our own times, or should cause diffi-
culty to posterity.” The illustrations are so many and so compli-
cated that they delayed the final year of publication. Ideas for

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chimneys with a fireplace come from Europe to the Americas with

the Pilgrims.

1600s
Large quantities of fuel is consumed. Coal comes into greater
use as supplies of wood decrease. Galileo Galilei invents a ther-
mometer but the temperature varies with change in atmospheric
pressure—you can get one on eBay. Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of
Tuscany, develops a thermometer that is independent of air pres-
sure. Sir Christopher Wren uses a gravity exhaust ventilating sys-
tem for the House of Parliament.

1700s
China, Germany, Sweden, Russia use stoves made of brick,
earthenware, or tile. Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit’s thermometer
uses mercury in a glass tube with a graded scale. The name “ven-
tilator” describes the man who turns the crank to power a cen-
trifugal fan invented for ships. Benjamin Franklin credited with
greatly improving the stove—as luck would have it—the Franklin
stove. First steam heating system is developed. Joseph Black, En-
glish chemist and physicist becomes known for his theory of la-
tent heat, only quantitatively verified in 1761. Black notes that
different objects, with the same mass, need different amounts of
heat to accomplish the same increase in temperature. He finds
that different substances require different amounts of heat to raise
their temperature 1°C. He is the first modern chemist to identify
that air is composed of more than one gas and first to make a clear
distinction between temperature and heat. His work leads to the
basis of the theory of specific heat. He discovers that melting ice
absorbs heat without a change in temperature. James Watt invents
the steam engine. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, the “Father of Mod-
ern Chemistry” generates temperatures up to 1750°F (950°C) by
focusing sunlight through hollow glass lenses and tubes filled
with white wine. Jacques Charles discovers that when a gas is
cooled below 0°C its volume will decrease by 1/273. He postu-
lates that the gas will shrink to nothing at –273°C. The Cockle