Heat (42 page)

The Rio Earth Summit is known by many names. Officially it was “The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), Rio de Janeiro.” The full text of the convention can be found in seven languages at http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/background/items/2853.php. Most of the nineteen thousand environmentalists who attended were there primarily to participate in the Global Forum, sometimes referred to as “the world’s fair of environmentalism,” which was set up in a downtown park in Rio de Janeiro well removed from the conference delegates and their official discussions.

John Tyndall’s paper was “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction: The Bakerian Lecture,”
London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science
, September 1861. The paper offers tremendous insight into the amount of research required to probe the workings of nature. It also includes a wonderful diagram of the apparatus that Tyndall used in these experiments. The paper can be found online at http://onramp.nsdl.org/eserv/onramp:1657/n3.Tyndall_1861corrected.pdf. Tyndall’s heat source, the cubical bucket, was a Leslie cube, developed by John Leslie, who used the cube to experiment with radiant heat in 1804. The cube has one side of highly polished metal, two sides of copper, and one side painted black. When filled with boiled water, most of the radiant heat is transmitted through the black side of the cube.

Aside from the information attributed to Tyndall’s 1861 paper, all the other quotes and thoughts attributed to Tyndall come from his aforementioned book
Heat: A Mode of Motion
(New York: D. Appleton, 1875).

John Slusher’s article “Wood Fuel for Heating” (University of Missouri Extension Service, March 1985) provides a table listing the British thermal unit (Btu) yield of various kinds of firewood per cord. A cord of red cedar burns to produce 18.9 million Btu. One gallon of gasoline yields about 115,000 Btu of heat when burned. Therefore burning one cord of red cedar produces the same amount of heat that would be produced by burning about 164 gallons of gasoline.

John McPhee’s essay “Firewood,” first published in the
New Yorker
in 1974 but reprinted in
Pieces of the Frame
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), provides an amazing account of the use of firewood in New York during the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Benjamin Franklin described his stove in “An Account of the New Invented Pennsylvanian Fire-Places,” a few-thousand-word essay with a seventy-word subtitle. Just below the subtitle, he wrote, “Printed and Sold by B. Franklin. 1744.” The essay is readily available online. The main competitor for the Franklin stove was the Rumford fireplace—essentially a modified standard brick fireplace, but innovative in its time because Rumford’s seemingly minor addition of a few bricks along the walls and at the base of the chimney improved the updraft, guiding smoke up the chimney and in so doing bringing more oxygen across the fire. Count Rumford, also known as Benjamin Thompson, was the same man whom Tyndall described boiling water with a cannon borer and who later married Lavoisier’s widow. With Sir Joseph Banks, Rumford founded the Royal Institution, which later employed Michael Faraday. And, importantly, he is credited with the invention of the coffee percolator.

Franklin wrote of turning down the opportunity to patent his stove in his autobiography, which he wrote, at least ostensibly, for his family.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
remains available. My copy is an electronic version originally published in 1909 by P. F. Collier and Son, New York. One can only imagine that Franklin, with thoughts of lightning and his famous kite, would be delighted to know that his book can now be read electronically. He would probably comment on the benefits of electronic publishing, not the least of which might be the savings in trees, which could better be used in his stoves. And, of course, he would scrap his presses and replace them with computers.

The burned chemistry textbook was Francis A. Carey’s
Organic Chemistry
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987). Carey did an excellent job with this textbook, but in the end it was still a textbook, and for that matter a very old textbook. Before burning the book, I found stuffed within its pages twenty sheets of unlined paper on which a younger version of myself had scrawled notes in the code of organic chemistry—formulas with arrows and triangles and lines representing bonds. I recognized my handwriting but understood none of it, a reality for which neither Carey nor the professors who tried to teach me organic chemistry can be blamed.

Henry David Thoreau’s remark regarding the ability of wood to warm twice comes from his book
Walden
, first published in 1854. In
Walden
, Thoreau wrote often of fire. Among other things, he wrote: “Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us—and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without.”

The details of Zoroaster’s life—including exactly when he lived—are lost.

Brenda Fowler’s
Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier
(University of Chicago Press, 2001) offers a detailed account of the Iceman’s discovery and exhumation. The body of the Iceman was mummified under the ice—that is, both frozen and dried out. He was probably in his mid-forties when he died. In life, he probably stood about five feet, five inches tall and probably weighed about 110 pounds. Gut contents suggest that he may have eaten bread just before he died, which means he had access to some form of baking. He carried two birch bark pouches, one of which included a flint and pyrite for striking sparks. The museum housing the Iceman is in Bolzano, Italy. The Iceman’s frozen carcass can be observed through a small window, and his tools and other belongings are displayed.

The recipes for Asháninka dishes come from the website “Cooking the Native Peoples of Brazil” (http://hubpages.com/hub/Cooking-the-native-peoples-of-Brazil), which itself references an apparently inaccessible book called
Encyclopedia of the Forest: The High Jurua; Practice and Knowledge of the People
.

Frances Burton’s
Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009) describes interactions between various primates and humans. “The acquisition of fire,” she writes, “was the engine that propelled the incredibly fast evolution of humans.” She sees the control of fire not as a by-product of human evolution but as “a, or maybe the, major contributor to the manifold changes that made us human.”

Richard Wrangham’s
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2009) outlines the theory that cooking led to rapid human evolution. While Frances Burton believes that control of fire—which included cooking as one of its many aspects—accelerated human evolution, Wrangham believes that cooking was the primary advantage offered by the control of fire. To Wrangham himself, the theory is so obvious, in retrospect, that he seems a bit embarrassed to present it as a novel idea. “What is extraordinary about this simple claim,” he writes, “is that it is new.” Burton cites several of Wrangham’s articles in her book
Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution
(see previous note) but seems to see cooking as only part of the formula, focusing more broadly on the many advantages offered by the control of fire.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s
The Physiology of Taste
, first published in 1825, remains available from various sources, including as a Penguin Classic. He is credited with the saying “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” The foreword in the Penguin edition calls his work “a brilliant treatise on the pleasures of eating and the culmination of his long and loving association with food.”

The journalist who interviewed Hérve This was Patricia Gadsby, and her beautifully written article “Cooking for Eggheads” is based on that interview. The article includes her description of This spotting a 64-degree egg sold as a 65-degree egg, but in the text I have converted the temperatures to the Fahrenheit scale. The article was first published in
Discover
and later republished in
The Best American Science Writing
, ed. Gina Kolata (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). Hérve This’s critique of microwaved beef comes from his book
Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Another interesting book by This is
Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

The word “cretin,” applied to people of low intelligence, originally meant that they were “still human” or “still Christian” and should be treated as such.

Thomas Briscoe’s story is based on a statement by Circuit Judge Bazelon and a statement by Circuit Judge Bastian in relation to Petition for Leave to Appeal in Forma Pauperis, 248 F.2d 640,
Thomas E. Briscoe, Petitioner, v. United States of America, Respondent
, misc. no. 855, United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit, September 20, 1957. Briscoe’s case is not resolved in the court records that I obtained.

About 80 percent of children outgrow bed-wetting by age five, but bed-wetting persists in a small percentage of children into their teenage years. I do not know of any statistics supporting Freud’s belief in a relationship between bed-wetting and pyromania.

Rosa Briscoe’s case is described in 742 F.2d 842, 16 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 424,
United States of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Rosa Briscoe, Defendant-Appellant
, no. 84-4010, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, September 12, 1984. The store that Rosa had burned sold boots. The various defendants involved with the case took boots off the shelves on their way out of the gas-filled store.

Anyone who feels an urge to put a match in a microwave oven should suppress that urge. It is, in fact, potentially dangerous. While my own oven survived, others have not. YouTube and other sources illustrate what happens without the need to ruin your own oven.

The story of Percy Spencer’s invention of the microwave oven is available through many sources. Among them is Don Murray, “Percy Spencer and His Itch to Know,”
Reader’s Digest
, August 1958. “Percy Spencer,” the article begins, “was the nosiest man I have ever known.” The author then relates a story of Spencer’s interest in his (the author’s) shoes. Spencer convinced the author to remove one shoe so that he could better examine the stitching. I have not come across any accounts of Spencer experimenting with lit matches exposed to microwave radiation, but it seems like the sort of thing Spencer would have relished. Although he had little formal education, before he retired he was described as “highly technical.”

The urge to repeat the experiment of cooking a whole egg (in its shell) in a microwave oven should be suppressed, just as the urge to microwave a lit match should be suppressed. It is possible for the egg to damage the oven. In addition, it ruins the egg. While this may be just the sort of thing that Spencer himself enjoyed doing, the manufacturers of microwave ovens discourage it. As an aside, I also tried a lemon and an apple in the microwave. In both cases, they burst without exploding—a thin slit in the skin opened to release juice and steam. An apple, cooked this way, is too hot to eat in the middle but still cool near the skin.

Frederick Boyle’s book was
Adventures among the Dyaks of Borneo
(London: Hurst and Blackett, 1865).

Obviously the manufacturers of disposable lighters would not condone the practice of tossing their product into a campfire. Clearly, burning a disposable lighter is a dangerous and stupid activity.

Peat mining was so important to the area around the Groote Peel that many of the villages end in the syllable
veen,
meaning “peat.” There are, for example, Griendtsveen (where Kortooms is buried) and Helenaveen. The villages were probably founded by peat miners.

Toon Kortooms is among Holland’s most successful writers. His novel
Beekman and Beekman
, a sort of latter-day Dutch
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
, is said to have sold two million copies.

The Drents Museum in Assen, Holland, houses several mummified bog people, including Yde Girl, the Weerdinge Men, and the Emmer-Erfscheidenveen Man. Each is interesting in its own way. For example, the Weerdinge Men—two men, side by side and arm in arm, headless—were first believed to be a man and woman, perhaps man and wife. The museum also houses what is believed to be the world’s oldest canoe, the canoe of Pesse, thought to be ten thousand years old. It is so well preserved that charring remains visible, presumably from the original construction, when a combination of fire and stone tools would have been used to carve out the canoe. Yde is pronounced “Ida.”