Carrier to Syracuse

Mogul emperors four centuries ago in India hung wetted grass mats over the doors and windows on the windward side of their palaces. A slight breeze might then cool their throne rooms as much as 20DEG. In 1901, somewhat the same idea occurred to a young Buffalo engineer named Willis Carrier, now the 60-year-old chairman of Carrier Corp., only major U. S. company devoting itself exclusively to air conditioning. The rather obvious idea of the Mogul emperors has grown into an industry that is sometimes compared to aviation in its infancy, highly technological and full of financial promise.

Only trouble with the comparison is that air conditioning has been in its infancy for the last 30 years. In 1903, the same year that the Wright brothers were getting their airplane off the ground for the first time, Willis Carrier put the first airconditioning system in the plant of a Manhattan lithographer who found that on hot days the humidity wrinkled his paper. By 1906 Willis Carrier had devised an air conditioning system for use in cotton mills, which up to then had such a problem keeping humidity in their spinning rooms that they operated with windows open in the dead of winter. Five years later he worked out an engineering formula for atmosphere-moisture which made people begin calling him "the father of the airconditioning industry." And by 1915 he had enough capital to start Carrier Engineering Corp. in Newark, N. J.

But while aviation developed with frenzied rapidity under the hypodermic of War, Willis Carrier had to content himself with conditioning munitions factories so that bombs would not go off till they had been properly dropped on foreigners. By 1919 aviation was boisterously adolescent but air conditioning, though becoming essential for such industries as rayon, cinema film, chewing gum, chocolate candy, was still an infant.

In the 1920s signs began to appear on cinema theatres: "Twenty Degrees Cooler Inside. BRRH!" Cooling Manhattan's Rivoli Theatre in 1925 cost $65,000 but the Rivoli got that back in the first three months. Carrier systems went into the ape-house of the New York Zoological Park, into the White House and the Senate chamber, into the Secretariat in Delhi, India, into the world's deepest gold mine in South Africa. By 1929 Carrier Engineering Corp. was doing an $8,000,000 a year business and retaining $672,000 as profit. Formed in 1930 was the present Carrier Corp., a holding company. Then came Depression.

At one time people had the notion that air conditioning was to pull the U. S. out of Depression. There is some confusion among financial writers as to whether or not the Depression is yet over, but Willis Carrier has no doubts. After losing money from 1931 through 1935, Carrier Corp. last year made $507,000. This year Carrier's sales in the first six months were double those for that period of 1936. Last week Air Conditioning Manufacturers' Association announced that the entire industry's sales for the first nine months this year were $74,000,000 compared with $38,900,000 last year. Last July, after pondering his cramped quarters in five scattered plants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Willis Carrier decided to move. Last week it was announced that Carrier Corp. had just completed a remarkable migration to Syracuse, N. Y., there to settle appropriately enough in the abandoned plant of H. H. Franklin Manufacturing Co., longtime maker of air-cooled automobiles. When Franklin closed down in 1934 it left not only a plant once valued at $3,000,000 but also, as Carrier Corp. observed in a letter to stockholders fortnight ago, an "excellent quality of workmen available in Syracuse in generous quantities." The plant was taken over by the city for taxes. When Syracuse heard that Willis Carrier was thinking of moving, it told him if he would move into the old Franklin plant it would make him a good price. When Mr. Carrier said he was interested, they made him a very good price indeed--$1,000. What is more, the Syracuse Chamber of Commerce raised $250,000 to pay Mr. Carrier's moving expenses.

In the new plant, Carrier Corp. can triple its present output and still have plenty of elbow room. And if Salesman Willis Carrier is able to get his old plants off his hands--Carrier stockholders were urged to write in if they knew of anyone who was in the market--Carrier common stock may earn substantially more than the $1.43 per share earned for the first three quarters this year. Currently Carrier stock is selling at $29 a share, down from the year's high of $67.50. But Willis Carrier had more immediate things than the stockmarket to think of. First thing he did in his new quarters last week was to set about installing an air-conditioning system.

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