Industry History | Johnson Controls — The Electric Thermostat After the Whitewater Classroom
· 1885-5
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Industry History | Johnson Controls — The Electric Thermostat After the Whitewater Classroom
kevin
People treat Johnson Controls as a Cork listing that always ran building software from a glass campus.
The first book was a Milwaukee shop built around one classroom problem.
Warren S. Johnson taught at the State Normal School in Whitewater, Wisconsin. A janitor walked the rooms on the hour, read a thermometer, then went downstairs to shift furnace dampers.
On 24 July 1883 Johnson received a patent for an electric tele-thermoscope. A bimetal strip dipped into a mercury cup and closed a circuit that rang a basement bell, warm or cold, so the damper could be moved without interrupting the class.
He left teaching and moved to Milwaukee. William Plankinton, a packing heir and hotelier, put money behind the patents.
On 1 May 1885 they formed the Johnson Electric Service Company. The firm sold the thermostat as part of a building system, not as a household gadget.
In 1895 Johnson patented a pneumatic multi-zone control. Compressed air from a thermostat nozzle worked a pilot that opened steam valves or dampers room by room. The same logic later ran the New York Stock Exchange, the United States Capitol, West Point, and the Smithsonian.
The mechanism was a sensor that replaced a walking janitor, then air pressure that replaced a second walk to the basement. Milwaukee made the hardware. Whitewater supplied the complaint.
The standing pilgrimage site is downtown Milwaukee, where City Hall still marks the civic core Johnson entered in the 1880s. The first classroom was west of the city at Whitewater.
Photo: Milwaukee City Hall, Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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