Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (11 page)

We know of no want of mankind more urgent than a cheap means of producing an abundance of artificial cold. To warm countries it would afford benefits as countless in number as those that arise in cold climates from the finding of illimitable supplies of fuel. The discovery and invention which our correspondent proposes to apply to this object are calculated, if true, to alter and extend the face of civilization, and we trust that a measure which promises to be attended with such results will not be suffered to be neglected, or fall into oblivion.

Thus wrote the editor of the
Commercial Advertiser,
in an 1844 editorial response to a series of eleven articles by someone named Jenner. No one would have proffered that opinion earlier in the century, before the use of natural ice had spread to the middle class; the growing use of natural ice stirred into being the wish for a way to produce ice whenever and wherever a need or a yen for it arose. In this instance, invention—in the form of facilitating the natural-ice industry—was surely the mother of the new necessity to manufacture ice to meet the heightened, "urgent" demand.

The Jenner name was a pseudonym. The articles in the
Commercial Advertiser,
and the prospective ice-producing machine, were the products of Dr. John Gorrie, the leading physician of Apalachicola, Florida. Born in Charleston in 1803 of either Spanish or Scotch-Irish extraction, he studied at a medical college in western New York, and after an internship elsewhere, he settled in Apalachicola in 1833. He quickly became the port's leading physician, its postmaster, a member of its governing council, and, in 1837, its "intendant," or mayor. After two years as intendant, he retired from public office to devote himself exclusively to medicine and science. Evidently at the urging of Senator John C. Calhoun, who was concerned about a naval hospital in Apalachicola that cared for sailors ill with malaria and yellow fever, Gorrie accepted a contract to supervise this hospital.
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In the early 1840s he conceived a project to cool the hospital's air, believing this would help cure feverish patients and possibly even prevent malarial diseases from spreading. He planned to artificially produce ice to cool the hospital, by a process he would describe in his patent application as drawing on the "well-known law of nature," that compressing air produces heat and expanding air produces cold, the latter effect being "particularly marked when [air] is liberated from compression."

What Gorrie referred to as a well-known law of nature was hardly understood beyond a handful of scientists, and no one else had picked up on its commercial potential, or attempted to make ice on the grand scale necessary to cool entire rooms. The notion so intrigued Gorrie that by 1844 he entirely abandoned his medical practice to pursue it. Yet his ideas were considered so outlandish and heretical (in that they might contravene God's plan of the world's hot and cold regions) that Gorrie felt impelled to write those eleven articles under the alias.

The editor of the
Commercial Advertiser
praised the unknown author in his editorial, but he also lightly chastised him for not yet fulfilling the "moral obligation" to go beyond theory and make a useful device. What the editor seemed not to know was that Gorrie was already using a device to cool two special hospital rooms and his own home. His first device suspended a basin with ice from the ceiling of a room and blew over it fresh air carried down the chimney by a pipe. In 1849, after Gorrie had worked for five more years to perfect a working model of an ice-making machine, he first applied for American and British patents.

The summer of 1850 arrived early to New England, prematurely melting the ice on the ponds and rivers, so there was less ice to ship south. Apalachicola was without ice, an abominable inconvenience for the guests of the Mansion House, then the largest hotel in Florida. When one cotton buyer wished for ice for his wine at dinner, another buyer, a Monsieur Rosan of Paris, bet him a bucket of champagne that not only could he furnish the ice, he could make it right in the dining room. Rosan had been working with Gorrie, who took the occasion of this wager to make the first public demonstration of the machine. News of Gorrie's accomplishment reached New York City, where the
Globe
commented, "There is a Dr. Gorrie, a crank down in Apalachicola, Florida, that thinks he can make ice by his machine as good as God Almighty."

Meanwhile, the British granted Gorrie a patent in 1850, which was reported in a laudatory article about his process in a British publication—spurring German technologist William Siemens to order one of the machines and to design a similar but slightly improved process. Gorrie received his American patent in 1851, but none of these events resulted in his attracting the financial backing necessary to manufacture a large machine that could produce commercial quantities of ice. He therefore went to New Orleans to find backers. Bankers there refused him, citing the ready availability of natural ice transported by ship from the Northeast. Next, he sold a half interest in his invention to a Boston investor, in exchange for expected cash; but the man died shortly after signing the deal, and Gorrie returned home to Apalachicola without the money. Finally, after publishing
Dr. John Gorrie's Apparatus for the Artificial Production of Ice in Tropical Climates
in 1854, he contracted an illness and died the next year, with his commercial machine not yet produced.

Gorrie had an American rival for primacy in the artificial production of ice. Alexander Catlin Twining, the son of a Yale official, studied for the ministry before becoming enamored of mathematics and switching to West Point, where he studied civil engineering and astronomy. Observing a spectacular meteor shower in 1833, he formulated a theory of the cosmic origin of meteors that countervailed the then-current assumption that meteors lived and died within the earth's atmosphere. After a stint of railroad engineering, Twining accepted the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at Middlebury College in Vermont. He became interested in producing ice after doing some experiments in the 1840s, with a process that centered on condensing ether vapor, and by 1849 he had resigned his chair to develop a commercial ice-producing machine. With investors, he had a plant constructed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1853; he detailed his process in his 1857 booklet,
The Manufacture of Ice on a Commercial Scale.
Had Twining established his plant in, say, Atlanta, he might have enjoyed commercial success, but by placing it in a northern city that had access to ice from the Great Lakes, he virtually ensured that natural-ice marketers would purposely lower their prices to prevent his ice from replacing theirs. Like Gorrie, Twining died a bitter man, his ice-producing dreams never fully realized.

Gorrie and Twining were shortly eclipsed by the French entrepreneur Ferdinand Carré. Twenty years after Faraday's ammonia-absorption experiments, Carré adapted them to make an "absorption" refrigeration machine. It began the procedure by applying heat and pressure to
aqua ammonia,
which separated the ammonia gas from the water. The gas then passed into a condenser of pipes containing cold water; in this cooler environment, a second application of pressure liquefied the ammonia gas. The liquefied gas then flowed into the actual refrigerating chamber, also known as the evaporating chamber because this was where the liquid ammonia was forced to evaporate—to become a gas again, and to expand as it did so, absorbing heat and producing the "cold effect" that turned water in an adjoining chamber into ice. After the gas had done all of this, it was reabsorbed into the first batch of water, becoming, once again,
aqua ammonia.

A Marseilles brewery installed Carrés prototype machine in 1859, and in 1860 he won patents in France and in the United States. Then came his big break—the onset of the Civil War in the United States. Because the Gorrie process had languished after its inventor died, and because Twining was a Northerner whose machinery was not welcome in the South, the Civil War provided an opportunity for Carré. Several of his machines were shipped past Union blockades into Southern ports and set up to produce ice, where the Northeast natural-ice traders were no longer supplying ice. Southerners used Carré-process ice principally in hospitals but occasionally to provide ice-cooled delicacies that permitted some households to maintain the illusion that the war had not affected their lifestyles.

The wartime success of the Carré plants proved the efficacy of artificial icemaking and set the stage for the spread of ice-based refrigeration throughout the world. But to achieve further mastery of the cold would require more precise understanding of its basic processes—and the search for them had been under way, by a group of unlikely scientists, for some time.

T
HE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS
a hectic and confused time in science, and research into the nature and uses of cold suffered from science's inadequacies. Some of the confusion stemmed from societies having to deal with the upheavals of the French and American revolutions; scientists also had to struggle against a deeply entrenched, mechanistic conception of the world that had solidified 150 years earlier. It had been articulated by Robert Boyle and his generation, for instance in Boyle's characterization of the universe as "nothing but ... a machine whose workings are in principle understandable by human reason...[like] a rare clock ... where all things are so skillfully contrived, that the engine being once set a-moving, all things proceed according to the Artificer's first design." In that clockwork universe, light was considered an invisible substance composed of corpuscles, and chemicals were attracted to or repulsed by one another because of natural affinities and molecular forces, one of them being the "subtle fluid" called caloric, believed responsible for heat and cold by combining with other substances in unfathomable ways. These mistaken notions had to be overcome before scientists could make progress in basic understandings of how the universe actually works.

But in the years around 1800, science had not yet entirely disentangled itself from either magic or philosophy. Audiences filled popular lecture halls to see and hear chemists, partly because they provided spectacular demonstrations and explosions, and partly in the hope that chemistry would confirm or refute the philosophic doctrine of materialism, which insisted that man had no immortal soul, and matter was just matter. Coleridge attended such lectures. Goethe wrote a novel using a chemistry-based metaphor,
Elective Affinities.

Physicists, who considered chemists no more than apothecaries, disdained the study of heat and cold as belonging to chemistry, since heat was believed to be a product of chemical reactions connected to oxygen burning. Chemists believed that oxygen burning and the theory of caloric had explained everything necessary to know about heat. With both physicists and chemists unwilling to investigate the phenomena further, heat and cold became the least desirable field of inquiry for scientists just at the very moment when heat, in the form of steam engines, was revolutionizing the labors of humanity.

It was the genius of an engineer, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, to unite the study of steam engines and the study of the fundamental physics of heat and, in the process, to lead the way to understanding what cold is and how it is produced. His single published work,
Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire),
a study of an ideal steam engine published in 1824, would eventually be praised as among the most original works ever written in the physical sciences, with a core of abstraction comparable to the best of Galileo. It would greatly influence the study of what came to be called thermodynamics, and in the twentieth century it would form the basis for constructing apparatus to reach within a few billionths of a degree of absolute zero. But during Carnot's lifetime, the book was virtually ignored.

In the 1870s, when Hippolyte Carnot found some old notes of his long-dead brother and convinced the Académie des Sciences to print them, he began his accompanying biographical sketch of his brother by writing that "the existence of Sadi Carnot was not marked by any notable events." But he also provided tantalizing descriptions of a man of "extreme sensibility, extreme energy ... sometimes reserved, sometimes savage," who studied such diverse things as boxing, music, crime, and botany. Among the maxims that Hippolyte extracted from Sadi's notebooks was this mordant gem: "It is surely sometimes necessary to abandon your reason; but how do you go about retrieving it when you have need of it?"

One school of scientific biography contends that a scientist's accomplishments can only be understood by reference to his times; another school, by reference to his personality. In the case of Sadi Carnot, both his era and his personality were deeply influenced by his father. A mathematician, engineer, and soldier, Lazare Carnot published in 1783 an essay that discussed the dynamics of machines in terms of the "work" they did, rather than in terms of forces, à la Newton. Crossing into politics, by 1793 Lazare had risen to share with Robespierre and others of the Committee for Public Safety the responsibility of establishing fourteen armies for the revolution, as well as for condemning people to the guillotine. Exiled for opposing a coup, he came back to power with Napoleon in 1799, lost his positions in 1807, was recalled to service in 1814, and after Waterloo was once again exiled.

A founder of the École Polytechnique, Lazare helped arrange for the acceptance there of his eldest son, Sadi, as a pupil-cadet in 1812, at the age of sixteen. Sadi won a first prize in artillery, and after taking part with classmates in the siege of Paris, he transferred to the École du Génie, the school for artillery and engineering, where he wrote a paper on an astronomical instrument and toiled on fortifications through the remainder of the last Napoleonic War. Denied promotion in the army, he was seldom employed in the specialty for which he had trained. "Fatigued with the life of the garrison," as Hippolyte put it, Sadi transferred to the general staff in Paris in 1818, then retired at half pay into "voluntary obscurity."