History
The heat pump was described by Lord Kelvin in 1853 and developed by Peter Ritter von Rittinger in 1855. After experimenting with a freezer, Robert C. Webber built the first direct exchange ground-source heat pump in the late 1940s. The first successful commercial project was installed in the Commonwealth Building (Portland, Oregon) in 1946, and has been designated a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by ASME. The technology became popular in Sweden in the 1970s, and has been growing slowly in worldwide acceptance since then. Open loop systems dominated the market until the development of polybutylene pipe in 1979 made closed loop systems economically viable. As of 2004, there are over a million units installed worldwide providing 12 GW of thermal capacity. Each year, about 80,000 units are installed in the US (geothermal energy is used in all 50 US states today, with great potential for near-term market growth and savings) and 27,000 in Sweden.
Read more about this topic: Geothermal Drilling
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe my ardour for invention springs from his loins. I can’t say that the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”
—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)