This year the International Institute of Refrigeration celebrates its centenary and the final celebration of this significant date for this international scientific and professional institution will take place at the end of the year, within the 39th Congress on Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning in Belgrade, which will be held 100 years after the representatives of many countries of the world met in order to establish this institution.

The celebration of the Institute’s foundation will be an opportunity to remind that the Kingdom of Serbia contributed to its establishment and actively participated in all the meetings that preceded the foundation of the Institute. Similar activities were also present in other European countries, but it was noted that Serbia was among the first three countries where a government commission for refrigeration was formed in 1908.

At the first world congress on refrigeration and later, on foundation meetings during 1908, a member of the Serbian delegation was Đorđe Stanojević, a physicist and the then Chancellor of the Belgrade University. This respectable professor, who contributed to the advancement of several scientific and engineering branches in Serbia, left the written trail in the form of the book titled „Refrigeration Industry“, which was published only a few months after the foundation of the Institute, on 25th January 1909. In this book professor Stanojević said that in his lectures on „heat and cold phenomena“ he would discuss „ scientific and theoretical results and conclusions presented and made at the congress“ that preceded the foundation of the Institute and took place in September 1908. In 1908 refrigeration engineering was introduced to the university curriculum in Serbia.

Let us remind that “Heating and Ventilation of Buildings” as an academic course was already introduced in the Technical College by the decree of 6th January 1897. It means that the academic course on heating and ventilation was introduced 111 years ago.

The third field, air-conditioning, as a separate subject of study and scientific research, was introduced into the lectures 35 years ago, whereby HVAC&R was complete as an engineering field within the university curriculum of mechanical engineers.

We hope that the new curricula, which are being introduced according to Bologna Declaration, will not compromise this exemplary development of HVAC&R and implementation of the activity programmes of the Society for HVAC&R, which, as a part of the Serbian Union of Mechanical and Electrical Engineers and Technicians and the Serbian Union of Engineers, marks one more jubilee – 140 years since the foundation of engineering organizations in Serbia.