Through his career in the tea import business he invented and patented a number of industrial machines and developed the earliest air conditioning systems.

[1] As a teenager he gained experience as an apprentice to a surveyor in Belfast, and visited his uncle John Davidson's flax mill in Drumaness, probably the first in Ulster to be equipped with power machinery.

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.

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.

('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.

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.

Samuel was always aware of the diverse applications of the technology he invented and newspapers of the late 1800s and early 1900s featured adverts for Sirocco products ranging from lawn tennis net poles to ventillation machinery for mining operations.

He invented and marketed a sparkling tea drink, and was close friends with John Dunlop as they were both experimenting with the vulcanisation of rubber, another imperial cash crop with huge potential for the British economy.Samuel was a very effective strategist – he could think ahead, see the big picture and take bold steps to change the circumstances for his businesses if necessary.

It was still very expensive in the late Victorian era and he realised that if the Indian tea estates and his machinery were to make a profit in the long term the retail price would have to come down significantly and become affordable for the whole population.

When anti-Catholic gangsters demanded that he sack his Catholic employees Samuel refused and posted armed guards at the works to protect them until the threats subsided.

[5][6] Samuel Cleland Davidson became a Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1888, and in 1921 he was knighted by King George V although too ill to make the journey to London for the ceremonials.