Cold (25 page)

None of this happened in a vacuum. The Inuit of the far north had been using ice cellars for thousands of years to preserve
meat through the short Arctic summer. The Chinese had cut and stored winter ice since at least 1000 b.c. By about 500 b.c.,
the Egyptians were making ice in earthenware pots left out on cold nights. Ice, harvested in winter and stored in ice cellars
or pits, had been used since at least Roman times to cool wine. In 755, Khalif Madhi used snow to refrigerate items that he
carried across the desert. Giambattista della Porta made ice sculptures and served iced drinks in sixteenth-century Florence.
By Tudor’s time, every temperate zone town or village in the United States had at least one icehouse to store frozen pond
water through the summer. In 1803, three years before Tudor sailed for Martinique with his load of ice, a man named Thomas
Moore patented an icebox, a tight sheet-metal affair surrounding a cedar tub lined with rabbit fur and filled with pond ice.
Moore called his icebox a refrigerator. He used it to transport butter to Washington, D.C. Where others were selling soggy
gobs of butter in the swampy heat, he could sell attractive chunks of solid chilled butter for top dollar. He wrote
An Essay on the Most Eligible Construction of Ice-Houses; also, A Description of the Newly Invented Machine Called the Refrigerator
.

Three decades later, another inventor, Jacob Perkins, made the first practical device that we would think of as a refrigerator
today. Different models were developed and marketed, but they all used the same principle. A liquid running through tubes
was allowed to vaporize inside of an insulated box, and in vaporizing it absorbed heat. The hot vapor was recompressed outside
the box, turning the vapor back into liquid and dumping the heat of compression away from the box’s innards. The liquid was
then pumped through the tubes back into the insulated box, where it vaporized again. In effect, the heat was pumped from the
confines of the insulated box. In the early years, ammonia was used as the refrigerant, turning from liquid to gas and gas
to liquid and back again in an endless cycle of compression and vaporization. Methyl chloride, sulfur dioxide, and carbon
dioxide were also used. All of these were dangerous. As late as the 1920s, homeowners were killed by methyl chloride leaks.
In 1928, General Motors asked a man named Thomas Midgley to find a better refrigerant, something nontoxic, nonflammable, and
stable. It took Midgley and his team three days to come up with Freon, which is still used today in refrigerators built before
the mid-1990s. Though slow to dominate the market, the refrigerator eventually killed the ice trade. And it was this principle
— the vaporization of liquids to remove heat — that allowed very rapid but dangerous progress in the scientific exploration
of absolute zero.

It is February eighth and just below freezing in London. Fat, wet snowflakes fall lazily along the train tracks. Passengers
are soaked from the knees down, dark trousers and skirt hems sticking to skinny legs, but the train is well heated. School
has been canceled, and kids play in the open spaces between rows of small brick homes. There are few sleds but many snowballs.
In a soccer field, a boy defends a pathetic snow fort, its walls melting around him, more slush than snow. Where he has harvested
snow for the walls, a moat of still-green grass surrounds the fort. The boy is inexplicably shirtless, with shadows of his
ribs showing on pale English skin.

The trains are running even later than usual. “I couldn’t even get me car up the drive,” a woman tells me.

Later, I walk through patches of sidewalk slush from Waterloo station to Westminster Abbey. Here, on a summer day in 1620,
cold was an issue of some importance. This was two centuries before Frederic Tudor’s ice trade and Thomas Moore’s fur-lined
icebox and Jacob Perkins’s refrigerator. King James I — fifty-four years old, barrel-chested but somewhat bent over with rickets,
a child of the Little Ice Age — did not do well in the heat. He overdressed, in part because he was a slave to fashion but
in part to repel the knives of would-be assassins. Beneath his royal clothes, he tended to sweat. His skin itched. It is said
that he became overheated when exposed to the sun.

When gray-bearded Cornelis Drebbel told King James that he could cool the interior of Westminster Abbey, the king listened.
Drebbel, a Dutchman, was part scientist, part alchemist, part showman, part con man. He bragged of being able to change his
appearance from one second to the next, of summoning ghosts, and of having created a perpetual motion machine. In Holland,
he was known as the
pochans
or
grote ezel,
the braggart or big donkey, and he had been imprisoned in Prague for a combination of bad politics and bad debt. Now he lived
through the largesse of King James. In exchange, on this day he would cool the interior of Westminster Abbey, the length of
a football field with ten stories of open space between ceiling and floor.

The summer heat would have warmed the abbey’s stone blocks. Even during the day, candles and perhaps lanterns would have burned
inside, lighting the shadows and further heating the interior. This would not be an easy space to cool. But even an incremental
cooling would impress an audience unaccustomed to air-conditioning. And although the room was tall, its air was still, and
Drebbel would have known that the cold air — his cold air — would tend to stay low, near the floor.

There would be those who would see a change in the temperature as an act of magic, of sorcery, a summoning of winter in the
middle of summer. Drebbel would do little to discourage such impressions. This was a time when cold was believed to come from
a single source, called a
primum frigidum
. Aristotle himself believed that the
primum frigidum
was simply water, and in Drebbel’s time Aristotle and the other ancient thinkers were still considered authoritative. Drebbel
worked a hundred years before Fahrenheit and forty-five years before Robert Boyle’s extensive work on cold, heat, and pressure.
This was a time when controlled experiments and open communication about those experiments were not expected, when curiosity
was by no means a virtue, when Francis Bacon was still formulating and promoting what would come to be called the scientific
method. Neither the scientists nor their audiences were interested in sharing knowledge. The interest was in entertaining
and being entertained, in amazing and being amazed.

Flash forward nearly four centuries. A verger shows a group of tourists around the abbey. I tag along asking questions. The
verger is olive-skinned, wearing a black robe, his voice musical and his words and sentences made by combining clearly clipped
syllables. He uses the word “chaps” in reference to long-dead royalty and even saints. He waves a flag to guide us through
the abbey. He tells us that his title, verger, comes from the Latin for staff or rod. A verge is used by the verger to prod
common worshippers away, allowing free passage for God’s more important servants, for royalty and clergy and other favored
mortals. He is animated, like a nervous little bird trying to stay warm, surrounded by the acid-worn stone figures of kings
and queens and writers and artists and scientists. He shows us the verge that he uses, a brass baton, more symbolic than effective,
the character of the stick perhaps reflecting the character of the man’s position.

King James, no longer in need of air-conditioning, lies buried under the floor, the spot marked by a memorial tile. Laurence
Olivier’s ashes reside here, too. Chaucer, or the body of someone believed to have been Chaucer, rests here, along with Dickens.
Shakespeare did not want to be buried here but is honored by a stone figure. Close to Shakespeare’s memorial, a wall tile
mentions Mary Shelley. There is a tile, too, for Lord Kelvin, whose temperature scale went to absolute zero. And here is one
for Faraday, a man who showed that melting ice absorbed heat — that the change from solid to liquid, and by extension from
liquid to gas, absorbed heat in a way that could not be explained by the temperature change alone. Mix a pound of boiling
water with a pound of water just above the freezing point, and you get two pounds of water at about 120 degrees. But mix a
pound of boiling water with a pound of ice, and you get two pounds of water at something like 50 degrees. The change in state
from ice to water — the breaking up of the molecular rows and columns that give ice its structure — accounts for seventy degrees
of temperature change.

Viewed from above, Westminster Abbey has the shape of a cross. Drebbel likely emptied his bag of tricks in and around the
Abbey’s sacrarium, near the top of the cross. The walls and ceilings at that time would have been stained with soot and candle
grease. Against these walls, Drebbel would have laid out casks or troughs. He had access to snow and ice stored in pits beneath
nearby estates. He could find reasonably cool water just outside, in the Thames. And, importantly, he had potassium nitrate,
also called saltpeter or niter. Drebbel knew, possibly from work first published in 1558 by Giambattista della Porta under
the title
Natural Magick
, that mixing snow with niter resulted in sudden cooling. He was too secretive to leave written records, but Francis Bacon,
who was not present that day in 1620, heard of the events. Bacon wrote that in “the late experiment of artificial freezing,
salt is discovered to have great powers of condensing,” and that “nitre (or rather its spirit) is very cold, and hence nitre
or salt when added to snow or ice intensifies the cold of the latter, the nitre by adding to its own cold, but the salt by
supplying activity to the cold of the snow.” In short, niter mixed with ice yields an endothermic reaction. More commonly
experienced exothermic reactions — such as the burning of wood or coal or gunpowder — generate heat, but endothermic reactions
— such as the mixing of niter and ice — absorb heat.

King James and his entourage would have marched into the abbey, their gowns damp with sweat. They would have chilled quickly.
Drebbel very probably added certain theatrical effects. The royal personage was entertained. His entourage was entertained.
Some in the king’s company may have feared this unseasonable cold. The king, who himself had once authored a book on witchcraft
titled
Daemonologie
, likely exchanged clever comments with those standing nearby. And then they left.

The verger has never heard of Drebbel. Westminster Abbey remains today without air-conditioning. “It gets quite hot in the
summer,” the verger tells me. “Quite hot indeed. The stone walls themselves get hot, you see, so it doesn’t cool off much
in the evening.” Outside, the sun hangs low in the overcast sky. Here in the city, most of the snow is gone, but the sidewalks
remain slushy. London is dreary and cold, King James I is long dead, and the Dutchman Cornelis Drebbel is all but forgotten.

Seventeen years before Daniel Fahrenheit came up with his temperature scale, at a time when neither molecular motion nor the
atomic notion of matter were well understood, Guillaume Amontons reasoned that cold must bottom out. His reasoning was based
on thoughts about changes in pressure and volume, then known to be affected by temperature. As it grew colder, pressure and
volume decreased. Taken far enough, pressure and volume would have to reach into negative values, but negative pressure and
negative volume made no sense, so temperature, he believed, must have a bottom limit, an absolute zero. His thoughts made
others realize that they lived in a very warm world, a world that hovered around the freezing point of water but that could
be much colder. William Thomson, who would be knighted and known to posterity as Lord Kelvin, developed the Kelvin scale in
1848. The Kelvin scale used the same increments promoted by Anders Celsius, but it started with zero as the coldest possible
temperature and put the freezing of water at a balmy 273 K.

Two centuries after Drebbel, before Kelvin developed his scale, scientists were reaching for this zero, turning their creative
and intellectual talents toward what became at times an ugly competition for extreme cold. They took risks. They used chemicals
that could burn one’s skin and worked at temperatures that would crack both glass and metal. Things exploded. It was not uncommon
for scientists to task their assistants with the hands-on work of the more dangerous experiments. Michael Faraday was the
first to liquefy chlorine gas, in 1823, at a temperature of 130 degrees below zero. That same year, in the course of a single
month, he was on the receiving end of three laboratory explosions, each of them causing minor eye injuries. Charles Saint-Ange
Thilorier, the first to freeze carbon dioxide into dry ice, ran an experiment that resulted in an assistant losing both legs.
In 1886, James Dewar’s laboratory went up. Dewar himself, who had invented the vacuum bottle that was originally used in the
laboratory and only later adapted for drinks, was nearly killed.