Warm News at Carrier

Outside Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel last week, the temperature was a frigid 26DEG, but in the grand ballroom the atmosphere of Carrier Corp.'s 50th anniversary stockholders' meeting was glowingly warm. President William Bynum, 62, announced that sales in fiscal 1964 jumped 9%, to $325 million. Directors recently voted a 20% dividend raise, and shareholders happily approved a three-for-two stock split.

All this is fiscal proof of a weather change in the $2.4 billion-a-year air-conditioning industry, whose major producers include Trane, York, Fedders, Worthington and Westinghouse as well as Carrier. No longer is it a business that seems important only in July and August. Syracuse-based Carrier, biggest company in the business, is flourishing year-round--and so are most of its competitors. Already in the cold first quarter of 1965, said Bynum, his company's new orders are up 22%, and profits, which were $11 million last year, are up 58%.

Humidity Down. Part of the sales and production stretch-out is due to the fact that U.S. air-conditioning companies have stepped up exports to $150 million yearly, sell cooling equipment to such reverse-season continents as Australia and Latin America. But the most important factor is the broadening of air conditioning in the U.S. Says Bynum: "Air conditioning is now a year-round business of climate control. It is no longer just seasonal cooling."

In Houston last week, four huge Carrier motors that will climatize the city's new Astrodome-enclosed sports stadium were test-run in preparation for next month's baseball season opener. The equipment will keep temperatures under the dome in the moderate 70s, and will also clear away cigarette and cigar smoke so that outfielders can see a baseball 550 ft. away. The air conditioners will operate continuously; if the motors were turned off between games, so much humidity would collect under the dome that rain would fall indoors.

Production Up. Since it was founded by the late Dr. Willis H. Carrier, the inventor who first successfully united cooling with humidity control, Carrier Corp. has air-conditioned the Navy's atomic submarines, the complex of buildings at New York's Kennedy Airport, even a South American anthill imported for research purposes by the University of Chicago. Its most difficult job was jet aircraft; with the aid of watchmakers, Carrier built a 300-lb. miniaturized system that does the work of equipment normally weighing 5,000 Ibs. Carrier's largest assignment is the Albany South mall, now building, in which a complex of 19 New York state-government buildings will be climatized by five 4,500-ton motors in the world's largest air-conditioning plant. On an order from the British government, the company will air condition a new 20-story headquarters for Scotland Yard.

Carrier's greatest sales, however, will continue to come from ordinary installations. Five years ago, one new house in nine was fully air conditioned; today the ratio is one in four, and U.S. home air-conditioning sales this year will reach a record $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, $1.15 billion worth of commercial air conditioning will be installed. Studies show that factory output rises with air conditioning; one-third of all industrial plants built in the last five years have been air conditioned. Since air conditioners now cool, heat, control humidity, eliminate dust and reduce noise, even 50% of the school buildings erected in Alaska last year were air conditioned.

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