Willis Carrier Invented Air Conditioning in 1902. The Company Came to Syracuse in 1937.

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By Sarah Chen, Staff Reporter

The story most of Syracuse tells about air conditioning is a little wrong, and the true version is more interesting. On July 17, 1902, a 25-year-old engineer named Willis Haviland Carrier signed a set of mechanical drawings inside the Buffalo Forge Company offices in Buffalo, New York. Those drawings became the world’s first modern air conditioning system. He was not yet in Syracuse. He would not arrive for another 35 years.

What happened next is the part Central New York can fairly claim. In 1937, Carrier Corporation moved its headquarters and consolidated four factories into a single Syracuse plant at 300 South Geddes Street, the former H.H. Franklin Manufacturing complex on the Near West Side. By the late 1970s, the company employed more than 7,000 people in the area and had become the largest air conditioning company on Earth. Today, Carrier Global Corporation is a publicly traded business based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, with roughly 47,000 employees and $21.7 billion in 2025 revenue. A piece of the company is still here. So is most of what Syracuse forgot to remember.

The engineer in the corner office

Carrier was born November 26, 1876, on a dairy farm in Angola, New York, a crossroads town on the Lake Erie shore about 25 miles southwest of Buffalo. He was an only child. His father was Duane Williams Carrier and his mother was Elizabeth Haviland Carrier. He went to Angola Academy, then Buffalo’s Central High School, then earned a four-year scholarship to Cornell University. He graduated from Cornell in 1901 with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Right out of school, he took a $10-a-week job at the Buffalo Forge Company. Buffalo Forge made industrial fans, blowers, and heating equipment. Carrier’s first assignments were drawings for systems that dried lumber and coffee. He was promoted to director of experimental engineering inside a year.

The customer that changed his life was on the other side of the state. The Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company ran a print shop in Brooklyn. Their problem was humid summer air. Color magazine printing in 1902 required running the same sheet of paper through the press up to four times, once for each ink. When Brooklyn humidity climbed, the paper grew and shrank between passes, and the colors went out of register. Sackett-Wilhelms wanted Buffalo Forge to engineer a fix. The job landed on Carrier’s desk.

What he actually invented

The drawing Carrier signed on July 17, 1902, did something nobody had done before. It set out a way to push air through a chilled coil so that water vapor in the air would condense onto the coil and drain off. Drier air came out. By controlling the temperature of the coil, you could control the dew point, and through dew point you could control humidity at any temperature you wanted. The Sackett-Wilhelms target was 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 55 percent humidity in winter, 80 degrees and 55 percent humidity in summer.

That last bit is the breakthrough. People had tried to cool buildings before. They had blown air across blocks of ice. They had vented warm air upward. Nobody had built a machine that deliberately removed moisture from the air at a target dew point. Carrier did, and the system worked. The Brooklyn print shop got its color register back.

Carrier filed for a U.S. patent on the design on September 16, 1904. Patent No. 808,897, titled “Apparatus for Treating Air,” was granted on January 2, 1906. The inventor was listed as Willis H. Carrier of Buffalo, New York. The assignee was the Buffalo Forge Company. The patent describes a fine mist of liquid sprayed into an air stream that then flows through a series of vertical baffle plates, with the resulting mixture removing both contaminants and moisture from the air. The drawings filed with that patent are now archived at the U.S. National Archives.

The company before Syracuse

By 1908, Buffalo Forge had created an in-house Carrier Air Conditioner Company of America to sell the new technology. But Buffalo Forge cooled on the idea during the recession that began with World War I, and on June 26, 1915, Carrier and six fellow engineers, including J. Irvine Lyle, Edward T. Murphy, L. Logan Lewis, Ernest T. Lyle, Frank Sanna, and Alfred E. Stacey Jr., pooled $32,600 and incorporated Carrier Engineering Corporation as an independent company. The first offices were in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Buffalo.

Two more milestones inside the next decade decided how big the company would get. In 1917, Carrier hired Margaret Ingels, the first woman to receive a mechanical engineering degree in the United States and the country’s first woman air-conditioning engineer. Ingels would go on to develop the “effective temperature” scale that combines humidity and air movement into a single comfort metric. And on May 22, 1922, in front of about 300 people invited to a sheet metal shop in Newark, New Jersey, Carrier first publicly demonstrated the centrifugal chiller, a low-pressure refrigeration machine that for the first time made it practical to cool large public buildings.

Two years after that demonstration, in 1924, Carrier sold that same prototype centrifugal chiller to the Onondaga Pottery Company of Syracuse for use in its lithography plant. It was the company’s first piece of cooling equipment ever installed in Central New York. The machine kept running until about 1957. Carrier later bought the prototype back. It now sits in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington.

How the machine actually worked

Strip away a century of refinement and Carrier’s 1902 design has four parts. A blower pulls room air through a filter. The filtered air passes over a coil filled with chilled water. Moisture in the air condenses on the cold coil and drips off. Dry, cooler air is pushed back into the room.

The math under it was Carrier’s bigger gift to engineering. In 1911, he stood up at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers annual meeting and read a paper titled “Rational Psychrometric Formulae.” The paper laid out the relationships between dry-bulb temperature, wet-bulb temperature, dew point, and relative humidity in clean equation form. Every air conditioner, every dehumidifier, every commercial chiller, and every HVAC engineer’s load calculation made since 1911 traces back to those formulas. The Lemelson-MIT Program writes that Carrier’s psychrometric work “forms the scientific basis of all work done in the industry he created.”

Why Syracuse

By the mid-1930s, Carrier Engineering had outgrown its Newark factory and three smaller New Jersey and Pennsylvania plants. The Great Depression had also bankrupted the H.H. Franklin Manufacturing Company in Syracuse, which left a 1.5-million-square-foot industrial complex sitting empty at 300 South Geddes Street, on the city’s near west side.

Syracuse made Carrier an offer the city’s chamber of commerce later called a “civic contribution.” The city sold Carrier the entire former Franklin plant for $1,000. The chamber of commerce raised $250,000 to cover the cost of moving the company’s manufacturing to Syracuse. The city also waived $589,000 in back taxes attached to the property. On July 4, 1937, Carrier Corporation took ownership. By the end of the year, the plant employed more than 1,100 workers.

Willis Carrier ran the company as chairman from Syracuse through World War II. He died on October 7, 1950, at Cornell Medical Center in New York City, of heart disease. He was 73 years old. He is buried in Section 15 of Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, alongside all three of his wives.

The peak years

The company kept growing after Carrier’s death. By 1947, Carrier had outgrown the Geddes Street complex and broke ground on a $6 million plant on Thompson Road in DeWitt. A traffic circle built in front of the new plant in the 1950s was named Carrier Circle, and it still carries that name on New York State highway signs at the intersection of Thompson Road and NY 298 in East Syracuse, two miles north of I-690 and three miles east of the JMA Wireless Dome.

The post-war air conditioning boom was something close to a rocket trajectory. Carrier won the contract for the Sears Tower in Chicago. The company helped pioneer the cooling of American shopping malls and mass-produced housing. By the late 1970s, more than 7,000 people in Syracuse worked for Carrier in research, development, manufacturing, and administration, making it the largest manufacturer in Central New York.

In 1979, the company was acquired by United Technologies Corporation. A year later, Carrier Corporation gave Syracuse University $2.75 million toward the construction of a new domed stadium. The deal, signed in 1979 and announced before the building opened, was one of the first naming-rights agreements in American college sports. The Carrier Dome opened on September 20, 1980. The naming rights were marketed at the time as being “in perpetuity.” They were not. In May 2022, Syracuse University ended the 42-year naming agreement and rebranded the building as the JMA Wireless Dome under a 10-year deal with a Syracuse-based networking equipment company.

What is left in CNY

Manufacturing in Syracuse ended in 2004. The previous fall, Carrier announced it would close its East Syracuse air conditioning and refrigeration plant and move production to facilities in Singapore, China, and Stone Mountain, Georgia. The closing eliminated about 1,200 jobs. At its peak, the East Syracuse complex had employed roughly 6,200 people. In 2011, the majority of the manufacturing buildings on the Syracuse campus were demolished at a cost of nearly $14 million. The original Carrier Geddes Street plant had been knocked down in 1975. Fowler High School now stands on the site.

What did not leave is the engineering. Carrier’s DeWitt campus, at 6304 Carrier Parkway in East Syracuse, remained the company’s primary engineering and design center after manufacturing left. As of 2016, the campus employed roughly 1,300 people in research and development, with additional staff in the customer care call center for Carrier-branded residential products. Carrier also donated 22 acres of land to the Town of DeWitt for a public sports complex called Carrier Park, which sits adjacent to the engineering campus on Thompson Road.

The company today

On April 3, 2020, Carrier Global Corporation was spun off from United Technologies as an independent, publicly traded business. The same day, UTC merged with Raytheon to form what is now RTX Corporation. Carrier trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CARR. Its global headquarters is at 13995 Pasteur Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in a 224,000-square-foot building that the company says was the first commercial property in Florida to earn the WELL Platinum certification for healthy indoor environments.

For the full year 2024, Carrier reported $22.49 billion in revenue, an 18.6 percent increase over 2023, in part because of the January 2024 acquisition of the German HVAC maker Viessmann Climate Solutions. For 2025, the company reported $21.7 billion in revenue, $2.17 billion in operating income, and roughly 47,000 employees worldwide. The CEO is Dave Gitlin.

What Syracuse remembers, and what it forgets

Drive a Carrier Corporation engineer down Geddes Street today and they will not see the plant. Drive past the Carrier Dome and the name on the building does not say Carrier anymore. Stop into the Onondaga Historical Association on Montgomery Street downtown and you will get the full story from Bob Searing, the curator of history, who has spoken to Syracuse-area press at length about Willis Carrier’s footprint in the city.

The institutional memory is in the smaller things. There is still a Carrier Circle. There is still a Carrier Park. The DeWitt engineering campus still designs HVAC equipment. Syracuse University’s Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems operates a research lab named the Willis H. Carrier Total Indoor Environmental Quality Lab, named in his honor. And in the early 2000s, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted Carrier in 1985, and Time magazine, which named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century in 1998 in its Builders & Titans issue, both made the connection explicit. The man who made modern indoor climate possible was a Western New Yorker. The company he built spent its peak decades in Central New York.

The original 1922 centrifugal chiller, the prototype that ran for 33 years inside the Onondaga Pottery plant in Syracuse before being repurchased and donated to the Smithsonian, is the most physically literal piece of Syracuse’s claim. A piece of CNY industrial history is sitting in a Washington museum case. The 1902 patent drawing that started everything is in the federal archive system, where the National Archives publishes a high-resolution scan of it for educational use.

Willis Carrier signed those drawings on a July afternoon in Buffalo. The boy from Angola who taught school during the Panic of 1893 to scrape up tuition money would one day have a stadium named for his company in a city he had not yet seen, a traffic circle named for his factory, a public park named for his last name, and a research lab at a university 175 miles east of where he grew up that still teaches engineering students the formulas he invented in 1911. The drawings live in the Library of Congress and the National Archives. The Smithsonian has the chiller. Syracuse, for almost 90 years, has had everything else.

FAQ

Did Willis Carrier invent air conditioning in Syracuse?

No. He invented the first modern air conditioning system in Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, while working as a research engineer at the Buffalo Forge Company. Carrier Corporation later moved its headquarters to Syracuse in 1937.

Where is the original 1902 patent drawing?

The drawings filed with U.S. Patent No. 808,897, titled “Apparatus for Treating Air,” are archived at the U.S. National Archives. The National Archives publishes the patent drawing on its DocsTeach education site for public use.

Where is Carrier Corporation headquartered today?

Carrier Global Corporation is headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, at 13995 Pasteur Boulevard. It became an independent publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker CARR on April 3, 2020, after being spun off from United Technologies.

Why was the Carrier Dome renamed?

In May 2022, Syracuse University and Carrier Corporation ended their 42-year naming-rights agreement. Syracuse University signed a 10-year deal with JMA Wireless, a Syracuse-based networking equipment company, and renamed the stadium the JMA Wireless Dome.

How many people did Carrier employ in Syracuse at peak?

By the late 1970s, Carrier employed more than 7,000 people in the Syracuse area in research, manufacturing, and administration. Manufacturing operations ended in Syracuse in 2004. The DeWitt engineering campus still operates today as Carrier’s primary engineering and design center.

Further reporting

The full text of U.S. Patent 808,897, “Apparatus for Treating Air,” shows Carrier’s design as a three-part system: a spray mechanism for atomized liquid, a separator with sinuous baffle plates whose oblique faces capture impurities, and optional heating or cooling coils. The invention’s elegance was its dual-function plates: front portions wetted contact surfaces while rear projecting flanges separated moisture from the airstream. Carrier described the construction as “exceedingly simple and inexpensive,” achievable in sheet metal. The patent was assigned to Buffalo Forge Company; Carrier himself collected no direct royalty.

Carrier Global Corporation reported $22.486 billion in revenue for full-year 2024, an 18.65 percent jump over 2023, lifted by the January 2, 2024 acquisition of Germany’s Viessmann Climate Solutions for roughly $13 billion. Revenue for the twelve months ending December 31, 2025 came in at $21.747 billion, a 3.29 percent year-over-year decline; Q1 2025 organic sales grew 2 percent to $5.2 billion with adjusted EPS of $0.65, up 27 percent.

Carrier holds approximately 11,000 active patents and pending patent applications worldwide, a portfolio descended from Carrier’s original Patent 808,897.

“The combination with Viessmann Climate Solutions creates the most comprehensive and differentiated suite of sustainable climate technologies and services in the industry today,” Carrier Chairman and CEO David Gitlin said when the deal closed January 2, 2024. After Viessmann’s German subsidies were suspended that summer, Gitlin told industry press he had not made the deal “based on what he thought would happen in Q1 of 2024,” and remained confident the strategic fit would pay off long-term.

Carrier brought Max Viessmann onto its board as part of the acquisition, formalizing the founding family’s ongoing role in the combined company.