page_title: Samuel Cleland Davidson
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Cleland Davidson / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: The River Lagan, Belfast (2). The western side 495197 of the Lagan has changed beyond recognition during the last 16 years 1050561. This (eastern) side has changed by the demolition of the old Sirocco Works and will change further, over the next ten (or so), as work progresses on the Sirocco Quays development 761581. The view is downstream from the Albert Bridge.
context_page_description: Sir Samuel Cleland Davidson, KBE was a British inventor and engineer. Through his career in the tea import business he invented and patented a number of industrial machines and developed the earliest air conditioning systems. He founded the Sirocco Works in Belfast in 1881.
context_section_description: In 1864 he left his job to work for his father, James Davidson who owned a flour mill close to the site of the later Sirocco works.  The Indian government had discovered wild tea growing in the Assam region and was determined to initiate a massive tea-growing operation there with the potential to generate huge wealth for the British Empire as it consolidated its hold on the economy of India.  The opportunity to have its own tea industry and become less dependent on importing the Empire's favourite drink from China was too important to ignore.  Initially the government paid for and organised clearing the forest and the planting and management of tea 'gardens', as the large plantations were called.  Once they were established they were sold to private investors to consolidate and expand, and develop a commercially viable industry.
  Samuel's father and uncle set up a business importing tea and bought a share in a tea estate in Cachar, 300 miles north-east of Calcutta in India.  Samuel's cousin James went to India to personally manage the estate and later invited 17-year-old Samuel and some other local young men to join him.
  Samuel Davidson quickly gained a reputation as a hard working, trustworthy and successful estate manager.  He applied his agricultural and engineering knowledge to significantly improve crop yields, and to begin mechanising every stage of the archaic and very labour-intensive processes involved in turning plucked tea leaves into a marketable product of consistent quality.  As a person who had not pursued higher education at home, Samuel's innovations mainly came about through persistent experimentation, and his greatest successes were sometimes counter-intuitive to the assumptions of engineers at the time.  Not knowing that what he was trying to achieve with centrifugal fans was considered impossible by more educated mechanical engineers turned out to be a great blessing.  When he later travelled to America to prove to sceptical patent authorities that his design actually worked he said "An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory." ('The Sirocco Story: Birth and growth of an industry' by Edward Maguire 1958)
  He sold the property in India in 1874 and returned to Ireland where he began to manufacture his patented tea machinery with Combe, Barbour and Coombe of Belfast. After a year of manufacturing the first versions of his tea machinery in Belfast, Samuel returned to India in 1878 and toured the major centres of tea production with a portable tea factory which he set up in each remote location to demonstrate to the planters what his products could achieve.  The orders started to flood in and his machines became the standard for the whole industry over the following years.  His expertise in every aspect of the industry was so respected that tea companies paid him to spend time in each area he took his factory to making assessments of the local estates and recommendations for how they could best raise their productivity. He also paid for the trip by selling hundreds if another invention of his – a simple wheeled hoe which the planters loved.  In 1881 he started his own manufacturing operation in Belfast.
  The success of his innovative use of stoves to move hot air led him to develop a convection heating system for use in human environments, and by the end of the 1880s his Sirocco stoves were in popular use in schools, church halls and workrooms. He developed his invention further with the introduction in 1898 of a forward-bladed centrifugal fan, which was significantly more powerful than conventional fan designs. This innovation, originally designed for drying tea, evolved into the first air conditioning system. The powerful force of moving hot air across a room with one of his centrifugal fans led one of Davidson's planter colleagues to remark that it reminded him of the Sirocco, the hot wind that blows across the North African desert, and Davidson adopted Sirocco as his brand name, applying it to his products and to the firm's Belfast factory, the Sirocco Engineering Works.
  Davidson & Co grew into one of the
caption: The Sirocco Works on the River Lagan, Belfast, during demolition in 2009
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