Mitsubishi Electric 🇯🇵

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 “Unitair”. In 1966 it developed its first split system (separate indoor and outdoor units) and in 1967 it launched the mural “Kirigamine”, named after the Nagano plateau where it is always cool; its catalogue siblings were called “Karuizawa” (window), “Kamikochi” and “Shiga” (floor), all mountain locales in the same province. In 1968 the Kirigamine introduced the world’s first tangential (line‑flow) fan, the elongated roller that today is used in almost all wall‑mounted splits. The other names disappeared; Kirigamine remains in the catalogue and the city of Suwa even presented the company with a certificate of appreciation for giving worldwide fame to its region.

In 1978 “Mr. Slim” appears, the semi‑industrial range of slim units for businesses that would later give its name, outside Japan, to almost any split of the brand. In 1984 the Kirigamine inverter with wireless remote and the “City Multi” variable‑flow refrigerant system arrive, followed in 1991 by the City Multi R2, the first two‑pipe heat‑recovery VRF.

The famous “I FEEL” control has a verifiable date: the European patent EP 0 326 431, “Control device for an air conditioner,” was filed by Mitsubishi Denki on January 27, 1989 with a Japanese priority date of January 27, 1988. It describes a remote with two buttons, “too hot” and “too cold”: the user does not set a temperature, only says whether it is hot or cold and the unit chooses the mode, corrects the setting with each press and even adjusts the fan according to how often it is corrected. Those “Too Warm / Too Cool” buttons appeared on the remote controls of Mitsubishi splits in the late eighties and early nineties, and the name was reused in 2000 for the “I Feel Kirigamine” with multiple sensors. Along the way the brand introduced the industry’s first presence sensor, “Panorama Eye” (1993), the predecessor of the current “Move Eye”.

In Spain the presence began in 1978 with MELCO Ibérica, S.A., in Madrid, dedicated to railway material for RENFE and the Barcelona Metro. The air conditioning was sold by a distributor, MABEL, S.A., whose shares MELCO Ibérica bought in 1991; in 1994 the subsidiary started direct sales of climate control, opened Valencia in 1995 and Seville in 1996, the year it became the Spanish branch of Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. That same 1994 the European air‑conditioning factory started in Livingston (Scotland), which since 2009 also produces heat pumps and today is the European business centre. In 2024 the brand presented domestic units with refrigerants R290 and R454B.

Pending verification

The exact year of commercialization of the first I FEEL remote (the patent is from January 1988; the specific commercial launch in Japan and Europe has not been found documented). A commercial source places the domestic Mr. Slim in 1982; the official website only documents the commercial Mr. Slim from 1978.

History machine-translated from Spanish. Can you improve it? Write to us.