Trane 🇺🇸

James Trane, a Norwegian immigrant, opened a plumbing business in La Crosse (Wisconsin) in 1885 and designed a low‑pressure steam heating system. With his son Reuben, a mechanical engineer from the University of Wisconsin, he founded The Trane Company in 1913; Reuben’s convector radiator (1923) was the first major success and in 1931 the firm introduced its first air‑conditioning unit.

The milestone that made it a worldwide reference came in 1938 with the Turbovac, the first hermetically sealed centrifugal chiller with direct drive and multiple stages, the predecessor of the current CenTraVac. Trane was never a brand of window units: its domain is chillers, roof‑top units and, in residential, split systems, a business it reinforced in 1982 by purchasing General Electric’s central air‑conditioning division with its red Climatuff compressors and aluminum coils.

In 1984 it was absorbed by American Standard, which on November 28, 2007 was renamed Trane Inc., and on June 5, 2008 was bought by Ingersoll Rand for about 10.100 billion dollars. In 2020 the parent company was renamed Trane Technologies, one of the major HVAC players with more than one hundred factories in almost thirty countries.

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