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:
“All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)