Makers past and present
The history of every brand, written wiki-style by all of us. Because in 1950s Spain cooling was an imported luxury — and from the sixties on, built here under American licence.
Admiral, the Chicago brand of televisions and refrigerators, features one of the most ahead‑of‑its‑time air‑conditioning ads in Spain. In the July 1966 issue of *Selecciones del Reader's Digest*, on a blue background, it proclaimed: “New Admiral air conditioner that cools and heats!”
Aermec was founded in 1961 by Giordano Riello, grandson of one of the brothers who in 1922 had created the Officine Fratelli Riello of Legnago, the house of burners. Giordano deliberately stepped away from the family business to devote himself to something that in Italy at the time barely existed: air conditioning.
Airlan is the story of a distributor that became a manufacturer. It was created in Bilbao in 1989 as the exclusive distributor for Spain of the Italian Aermec, the Verona-based manufacturer of chillers and fan coils, at the moment when the Spanish market was fully opening to European and Japanese equipment.
Airwell was born in 1947 in the Paris region, when Paul Wallet founded Air Conditionné Entreprise (ACE) with the ambition of bringing from the United States a product that did not yet exist in Europe: the air conditioner. In 1950 the company began mass‑producing its first window unit, aimed at the European and African…
Amana takes its name from the Amana Colonies in Iowa, seven villages founded by a German pietist community. There, in Middle Amana, George C. Foerstner founded the Electrical Equipment Company in 1934 with $3,500 to manufacture beverage coolers and cold rooms after the end of Prohibition; in 1936 he sold it to the…
Anglo-Spanish Electricity, S.A. (AEESA) is the Barcelona-based company that links three eras of cooling in Spain. It was founded in 1880 by the English engineer George St. Noble, and was later run by his sons, as an importer of “industrial electricity, domestic and industrial refrigeration, air conditioning, large…
The history of Argo begins in a foundry. In 1929 Luigi Filiberti, a foundry worker, created the Fonderie Luigi Filiberti in Cavaria with Premezzo, in the province of Varese, which at the end of the thirties became a joint-stock company.
Ariagel is one of those Italian air‑conditioning brands that can still be seen on façades and in living rooms throughout Italy, but whose corporate history is difficult to reconstruct. What is documented is that it was a company specialized in climate control, with wall‑mounted splits and portable units, and that it…
Junkers is the surname that in Spain is associated with the gas heater, and its history begins with an engineer better known for his airplanes. Hugo Junkers patented a calorimeter in 1892 and a liquid heater in 1894, and on July 2, 1895 founded Junkers & Co. in Dessau; in 1896 he presented the first wall‑mounted gas…
Willis Haviland Carrier (Angola, New York, 1876) graduated as an engineer from Cornell in 1901 and began working at Buffalo Forge. In the summer of 1902 he was tasked with solving a humidity problem at the Sackett‑Wilhelms printing house in Brooklyn, where the paper expanded and the color inks did not match: his…
Airtemp was born from a skyscraper. When Walter Chrysler raised the Chrysler Building in New York (1930), his company designed and built the building’s air‑conditioning system, and from that experience Airtemp Corporation emerged in 1934, a Chrysler subsidiary installed in Dayton (Ohio) in an old Maxwell factory.
The Compagnie Industrielle d'Applications Thermiques was founded in 1934 by Jean Falconnier, an engineer who graduated from the Lyon school, in Ars-sur-Moselle, based on a patent for a tube-and-fin heat exchanger. Facing the threat of war, it moved in 1939 to Culoz, a town in the Ain near the Rhône, which has since…
Ciatesa is proof that in 1980s Spain, when multinationals were buying out historic manufacturers, it was still possible to found an air‑conditioning factory from scratch… and in the Cordovan countryside. The Compañía Industrial de Aplicaciones Térmicas, S.A. was born in Montilla in 1986, created by a group of…
Clivet is the youngest of the major Italian cooling companies. It was founded by Bruno Bellò in 1989 in Feltre, at the foot of the Dolomites, to manufacture chillers and heat pumps with scroll compressors and high‑efficiency heat exchangers, a bet on energy savings that was then rare.
Consul was born on July 15, 1950 in Joinville, in the state of Santa Catarina, founded by Guilherme (Wilhelm) Holderegger and Rodolfo (Rudolf)
"Of course, Corberó". The slogan was as resounding as the company: in 1973 it had 2,500 employees and in 1976 it was producing up to 3,000 units a day from its factories in Esplugues de Llobregat and Castellbisbal.
Crolls is one of those brands that Spaniards of a certain age remember fondly for their washing machines (“a quality washing machine made in Reus,” summed up the Tarragona press), and yet it also manufactured air conditioning, and not just any kind. A full‑page advertisement published in magazines in 1969 proves it:…
Akira Yamada founded Osaka Kinzoku Kogyosho on October 25, 1924 to manufacture radiator tubes for aircraft. In 1933 the company began researching fluorinated refrigerants, in 1935 it produced Japan’s first fluorocarbon gas and in 1936‑1938 delivered the “Mifujirator”, the first Japanese refrigeration unit with that…
De'Longhi is the company that turned portable air conditioning into a mass-market appliance. Its origins are modest: a workshop opened by the family in Treviso in 1902 to manufacture parts and wood stoves, which became a corporation in 1950 and for decades worked as a component supplier for other heating manufacturers.
Edesa is the brand of Fabricación de Electrodomésticos, S.A. (Fabrelec), the Basauri factory founded in 1941 that was for decades, together with Frimotor, one of the two Basque poles of the white goods sector. Its official history talks about refrigerators, washing machines, stoves and water heaters; air conditioning…
Electra is the Israeli brand that, without almost anyone knowing, was behind several air‑conditioning brands sold in Spain. It started in 1945 as a small workshop repairing electrical appliances; in 1954 it began importing conditioners from the American Emerson Electric and in 1961 opened Israel’s first…
Electrolux is the Swedish appliance giant and, through its acquisitions, owner of two names closely linked to classic cooling: Frigidaire and Zanussi. The company was founded in 1919 from the merger of Elektromekaniska (founded in Stockholm in 1910 by Sven Carlstedt) with the lamp manufacturer Lux, orchestrated by…
Elgin is a Brazilian home appliances and electronics company founded in 1952 in Mogi das Cruzes, in the state of São Paulo, and known for generations of Brazilians for its sewing machines before diversifying. The Elgin Group, which presents itself as “proudly Brazilian” and with more than seventy years of history,…
Elyte is the fourth leg of the quartet that Julio Cano Lacunza, veteran of Atecyr, identifies as the national air‑conditioning manufacturers of the 1960s and 1970s: “Roca, Interclisa, Klimat, Elyte”. With those names the demand for equipment was met in a Spain that was discovering thermal comfort in bank offices,…
Emerson-Amcor is one of the most unexpected brands of Spanish air conditioning from the 60s: an Israeli device with an American name. Amcor, founded in Tel Aviv in the 1940s, manufactured under license from the New York‑based Emerson Radio & Phonograph refrigeration and conditioning units that it exported with the…
Esesa is the brand that brought to Spain, in 1970, a technology that thirty years later Fagor and Rotártica would present as a novelty: gas absorption air conditioning. Esesa Equipos y Servicios, S.A. presented itself as “distributor for Spain of the Arkla-Servel equipment, air conditioners by natural gas, city or…
Fagor is the cooperative. In October 1956 five young people from Mondragón, students of the professional school of priest José María Arizmendiarrieta, bought the Otalora workshop in Vitoria, which had authorization to manufacture household appliances, moved it to a pavilion in the San Andrés neighborhood and named it…
Fedders is the story of a body shop in Buffalo that became “the king of the window unit.” Theodore C. Fedders opened the workshop in 1896 to make milk cans and kerosene tanks; soon it specialized in automobile radiators for Pierce-Arrow or Thomas (the company claims that a Thomas Flyer with a Fedders radiator won the…
Ferroli is above all a boiler house, but with a relationship with Spain so old that it deserves its own entry. Dante Ferroli, son of a Friulian who worked with iron and copper, founded the company in 1955 in San Bonifacio (Verona), when the first steel sheet gas boiler for social housing in the Borgo Roma district of…
Friedrich is the “high‑end” window‑unit brand from the United States and one of the oldest companies in San Antonio (Texas). Ed Friedrich founded it in 1883 as a workshop for handcrafted furniture—including the famous pieces made with longhorn horns—billiard tables, store counters and fine cabinetry.
Friga-Bohn is the French name that Spanish technicians pronounced “friga-bon” and that appears, along with Frimetal, in the memory of air‑conditioning conversions of the 1970s. The brand, now part of the LFB group, manufactures air condensers, evaporators, air coolers, CO₂ gas coolers, monoblocks and split systems for…
Frigidaire is the name that in the United States eventually came to designate any refrigerator —and probably the origin of the word “fridge”—. It was founded in 1916 in Fort Wayne (Indiana) as Guardian Frigerator Company, when engineer Alfred Mellowes, with Nathaniel Wales, built one of the first autonomous electric…
Frimetal is the Madrid-based battery manufacturer that has been behind many Spanish installations without its name ever appearing in a consumer advertisement. It was founded in 1963 by Ramón Martínez “with the mission of offering solutions in heat exchangers, evaporators and condensers,” and it remains a family…
Frimotor, S.A.E. is the oldest Spanish air‑conditioning manufacturer featured in this encyclopedia, and until now it was only remembered for its refrigerators and a tragedy. The company, based in Erandio on the right bank of the Bilbao estuary, produced under Westinghouse license refrigerators, washing machines,…
The company we know in Spain as Fujitsu was founded in 1936 in Kawasaki as Yaou Shoten, a shop selling gramophones, records and musical instruments that in 1938 began manufacturing radio receivers. In 1946 it registered the brand “General”, in 1955 it was renamed Yaou Denki and in 1966 adopted the name General Ltd.…
Garza is a Spanish brand of electric heating that in the early ’70s ventured into domestic air conditioning and sold it with one of the most ingenious ads of the era. The company was known for its radiators: in collecting circles there is an advertisement for Garza electric radiators from 1967, a catalog of the…
General Electric entered the domestic cooling market with the 1927 "Monitor Top" refrigerator, of which it sold more than one million units by 1933, and almost simultaneously explored room air conditioning: between 1930 and 1931 engineer Frank Faust built 32 prototypes of a self‑contained "room cooler," an improvement…
Gibson, the Greenville (Michigan) brand that ended up in the White Consolidated group and later in Electrolux, was sold in Spain in the early 70s with an aggressive press campaign and a claim that today surprises: “in Spain there are more Gibson units installed than any other brand.” The 1971 advertisement, “You have…
If you have ever opened the cover of an 80s fan coil in a hotel or an office in Madrid, there is a good chance that the plate said Gould Aircoil. The company Gould Aircoil, S.A. was founded in 1965 and had its factory on the Extremadura road, kilometer 20,700, in Móstoles, where it manufactured air distributors and…
Hitachi was founded by engineer Namihei Odaira in 1910 in the city of the same name, in Ibaraki Prefecture. In air‑conditioning it boasts a series of firsts: in 1932 it developed its first 25‑ton centrifugal chiller and in 1952 it launched the EW‑50, Japan’s first room air‑conditioner, a window unit installed in a…
Hitecsa was born in 1982 in Vilanova i la Geltrú, on the Garraf coast, and is one of the few Spanish air‑conditioning manufacturers that entered the 21st century growing instead of being sold. Founded in the midst of transition, when Roca and Interclisa still dominated the national market, the company specialized in…
History yet to be written. As with any wiki, someone has to start.
International de Climatización, S.A. —Interclisa for the whole world— was for three decades the great Madrid-based air‑conditioning manufacturer and, together with Roca, the brand that a Spaniard of the 70s and 80s associated with “putting on air”. Julio Cano Lacunza, in his industry chronicle for Atecyr, cites Roca,…
Johnson has nothing to do with Johnson Controls or Johnson & Johnson: it is the Spanish air‑conditioning brand with a red lowercase logo that for decades was sold in neighborhood appliance stores and large retailers, and that shouted from TV “Pon Johnson en tu vida”. Its corporate history is one of the most tangled…
In Spain, Kelvinator was not an import: it was a factory. Constructora de Aparatos de Refrigeración, S.A. (CARSA), controlled by the Olazábal family—a Basque business group with origins in food in Mexico—raised a plant in Getafe in 1959 to manufacture under license from the Detroit brand “the American refrigerator of…
Klimat is one of the ghost brands of Spanish air conditioning. Its name survives thanks to a single phrase, but from a reputable source: Julio Cano Lacunza, industrial engineer with more than fifty years in the sector and board member of Atecyr, who cites it in his chronicle of the 60s and 70s as one of the four…
Lennox was founded in 1895 in Marshalltown (Iowa), when inventors Ezra Smith and Ernest Bryant brought their idea of a riveted steel coal boiler to the mechanical workshop of Dave Lennox (1855-1947); Lennox kept the patent in exchange for building the prototype and from there came the first riveted steel boiler, sold…
GoldStar (Geumseong) was founded in 1958 by Koo In-hwoi as the electronics branch of the Lucky chemical group, and in the sixties it introduced Korea’s firsts: the radio, the fan, the refrigerator (1965) and the black‑and‑white television (1966). In 1968 it manufactured Korea’s first air conditioner, the GA‑111 window…
Mepamsa is today synonymous with extractor hoods, but for two decades it also manufactured air conditioning, and veteran technicians remember it among the “now dead” brands that were dismantled throughout Spain. The company was founded in 1955 in Noáin, near Pamplona, as Metálicas de Pamplona, S.A., “dedicated to the…
Mitsubishi Electric was founded in 1921 as a spin‑off from the Mitsubishi shipyard in Kobe, where electric equipment for ships had been manufactured since 1905. Its history in air‑conditioning begins in 1954, when it opened the Shizuoka plant to produce room units and compact units under the names “Windair” and…
Olimpia Splendid was born in 1956 in Gualtieri, in the plain of Reggio Emilia, when Elviro Marchesi began manufacturing inexpensive stoves and wood and coal ranges in a craft workshop. In the sixties the company already had an industrial scale and was a reference in heating appliances; the oil crisis of the seventies…
Otedisa is the last Madrid-based manufacturer of fan coils and, for many installers, “what’s left of Gould.” The company, Otedisa Aire Acondicionado, S.L., has its factory in the Alparrache industrial estate of Navalcarnero, half an hour from Madrid, and presents itself as a specialist in fan coils “with a human team…
Konosuke Matsushita founded the company in Osaka in 1918 that for decades sold its appliances under the brand «National» in Japan and, since the sixties, «Panasonic». In March 1958 the Kadoma appliance division began producing a cooling device and in May put it on sale as «Home Cooler»: it was the first mass‑market…
Philco started in 1892 as Helios Electric Company, a manufacturer of arc lamps in Philadelphia; in 1906 it became known as Philadelphia Storage Battery Company for its batteries for electric vehicles, and in 1919 it adopted the Philco brand. It entered the radio market in 1928 and by the late 1930s it was already…
Polar Air is one of the orphan brands of the Spanish air‑conditioning boom. Its name belongs to the category of “distribution brands” that proliferated between the late ’90s and the first decade of the 2000s: names registered by an importer or a chain, with equipment manufactured in Asia by an OEM and sold at a…
RC Group, founded in 1963 in Pavia as RC Condizionatori, is the Italian specialist in precision cooling: that same year it installed one of the first computer room air conditioners manufactured in Italy, in a large bank of the country. From its factory in Valle Salimbene, on the outskirts of Pavia, it built a…
The Rheem brothers — Richard and Donald, sons of a former president of Standard Oil of California — started in 1925 in Emeryville (California) manufacturing galvanized steel drums, and on January 22, 1930 they incorporated Rheem Manufacturing Company. With the purchase of boiler and tank factories they entered the…
Riello is the great heating dynasty of Veneto: the Officine Fratelli Riello were founded in 1922 in Legnago (Verona), by Pilade Riello and his brothers to manufacture burners, and from that same family Giordano Riello would emerge in 1961, founder of Aermec. The parent company grew with diesel and gas burners,…
Roca is, for any Spaniard, the brand of the washbasin. But the Roca Radiators Company, founded in Gavà in 1917 manufacturing cast‑iron radiators, was also for half a century one of the two major national air‑conditioning manufacturers.
Samsung Electronics, founded in 1969 in Suwon, launched its first air conditioner in May 1974, a window unit that followed the first frost‑free refrigerator from Korea presented three months earlier. In 1975 it started production of room units and, according to the official chronology of the climate control division,…
Sanyo was founded in 1947 by Toshio Iue, brother‑in‑law of Konosuke Matsushita, in a warehouse that Matsushita did not use, to manufacture bicycle dynamos. The name means “three oceans,” the ambition to sell in the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian.
To understand Coldspot and Kenmore one must explain what Sears, Roebuck and Co. was: the great catalog department store of the United States. Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck published their first watch catalog in 1888, in 1893 expanded to general merchandise, and by 1895 the “wish book” already exceeded 500 pages and…
Tokuji Hayakawa opened his metalworking workshop in Tokyo on September 15, 1912, and in 1915 invented the “Ever‑Sharp” mechanical pencil that gave the company its name. In 1924 it was established in Osaka as Hayakawa Metal Works, in 1935 it became Hayakawa Electric, and in 1970 it was renamed Sharp Corporation.
Springer is the historic brand of Brazilian air conditioning. Founded in 1934 in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, it is credited with having launched “the first air conditioner in Latin America,” and for decades its name was synonymous with the window unit in homes of the south and southeast of the…
Stiebel Eltron is the German hot water company and, since the seventies, one of the European pioneers of the heat pump. Dr. Theodor Stiebel founded it on May 5, 1924 in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg with 20,000 marks borrowed from his uncles and a patent: the first immersion coil heater, which he presented at the…
Tadiran is the other great Israeli air‑conditioning brand, an eternal rival of Electra in its market. It was founded in 1962 from the merger of two battery manufacturers, Tadir and Ran, and became a conglomerate with interests in electronics, telecommunications, batteries, defense electronics and home appliances:…
Technibel was for decades the other great French air‑conditioning brand alongside Airwell and CIAT. Founded in 1958 and based in Reyrieux, in the Ain department, about twenty kilometres north of Lyon, it specialized in air‑conditioners, aerothermal units, chilled‑water groups and, later, air‑to‑air and air‑to‑water…
TECO Electric & Machinery (Dongyuan) was founded in Taipei on June 12, 1956 to manufacture industrial electric motors, in a Taiwan that was beginning to industrialize and needed reliable components. In 1970 it diversified into home appliances, starting precisely with air conditioning, and in 1972 opened the Tamsui…
History yet to be written. As with any wiki, someone has to start.
Termoven is a Madrid-based manufacturer of industrial air-conditioning that has never appeared on television yet is located within half of Madrid. The company was founded on June 1, 1979, in the midst of the transition and at a time when the first generation of Spanish manufacturers (Interclisa, Roca, Klimat, Elyte)…
Toshiba was formed in 1939 with the merger of Shibaura Seisakusho (1875) and Tokyo Denki (1890), and its first domestic cooling appliance is the “Shibaura Room Cooler” of 1935. The Fuji factory in Shizuoka, opened in 1943, would be the cradle of its two major contributions.
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…
Westinghouse Electric, founded by George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh in 1886 and an eternal rival of General Electric, was one of the first major electric companies to experiment with home comfort. Its appliance division was created in 1917 when it bought the Copeman Electric Stove Company and moved it to Mansfield…
Whirlpool is the silent giant of the American window unit: the factory of many appliances that bore another name. Louis and Emory Upton founded Upton Machine Company on November 11, 1911 in Michigan to make electric roller washers; in 1916 Sears began selling them under its own brand and that partnership marked a…
Winner is not a Spanish brand nor an orphan brand: it is the name under which LG Electronics sells its entry-level wall‑split range in Spain, and it is worth clarifying this because in second‑hand ads it sometimes appears as if it were an independent manufacturer. In stores and sector distributors the series is…
York was born in 1874 in York (Pennsylvania), when a group of local entrepreneurs —including S. Morgan Smith, who would later make a fortune with hydraulic turbines— founded York Manufacturing Company. The company made everything until 1885 when it built its first ice machine for a client in Mississippi; in 1897 it…