All of these building blocks were circulating through Gorrie’s mind, like molecules in a gas, bouncing off each other, forming new connections. In his spare time, he started to build a refrigeration machine. It would use energy from a pump to compress air. The compression heated the air. The machine then cooled down the compressed air by running it through pipes cooled with water. When the air expanded, it pulled heat from its environment, and just like the tetrahedral bonds of hydrogen dissolving into liquid water, that heat extraction cooled the surrounding air. It could even be used to create ice.
Amazingly, Gorrie’s machine worked. No longer dependent on ice shipped from a thousand miles away, Gorrie reduced his patients’ fevers with home-grown cold. He applied for a patent—correctly predicting a future where artificial cold, as he wrote, “might better serve mankind… . Fruits, vegetables, and meats will be preserved in transit by my refrigeration system and thereby enjoyed by all!”
And yet, despite his success as an inventor, Gorrie went nowhere as a businessman. Thanks to Tudor’s success, natural ice was abundant and cheap when the storms didn’t disrupt trade. To make things worse, Tudor himself launched a smear campaign about Gorrie’s invention—claiming the ice produced by his machine was infected with bacteria. It was a classic case of a dominant industry disparaging a much more powerful new technology, the way the first computers with graphic interfaces were dismissed by their rivals as “toys” and not “serious business machines.” John Gorrie died penniless, having failed to sell a single machine.
But the idea of artificial cold didn’t die with Gorrie. After thousands of years of neglect, suddenly the globe lit up with patents filed for some variation of artificial refrigeration. The idea was suddenly everywhere, not because people had stolen Gorrie’s idea, but because they’d independently hit upon the same basic architecture. The conceptual building blocks were finally in place, and so the idea of creating artificially cold air was suddenly “in the air.”
Those patents rippling across the planet are an example of one of the great curiosities in the history of innovation: what scholars now call “multiple invention.” Inventions and scientific discoveries tend to come in clusters, where a handful of geographically dispersed investigators stumble independently onto the very same discovery. The isolated genius coming up with an idea that no one else could even dream of is actually the exception, not the rule. Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years. In the early 1920s, two Columbia University scholars surveyed the history of invention in a wonderful paper called “Are Inventions Inevitable?” They found 148 instances of simultaneous invention, most of them occurring within the same decade. Hundreds more have since been discovered.
Refrigeration was no different: the knowledge of thermodynamics and the basic chemistry of air, combined with the economic fortunes being made in the ice trade, made artificial cold ripe for invention. One of those simultaneous inventors was the French engineer Ferdinand Carré, who independently designed a refrigeration machine that followed the same basic principles as Gorrie’s. He built prototypes for his refrigeration machine in Paris, but his idea would ultimately triumph because of events unfolding across the Atlantic: a different kind of ice famine in the American South. After the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Union blockaded the southern states to cripple the Confederate economy. The Union navy stopped the flow of ice more effectively than did the storms that churned up along the Gulf Stream. Having built up an economic and cultural dependence on the ice trade, the sweltering southern states suddenly found themselves in desperate need of artificial cold.
As the war raged, shipments of smuggled goods could sometimes make it through the blockade at night to land at beaches along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. But the smugglers weren’t just carrying cargoes of gunpowder or weapons. Sometimes they carried goods that were far more novel: ice-making machines, based on Carré’s design. These new devices used ammonia as a refrigerant and could churn out four hundred pounds of ice per hour. Carré’s machines were smuggled all the way from France to Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. A network of innovators tinkered with Carré’s machines, improving their efficiency. A handful of commercial ice plants opened, marking the debut on the main stage of industrialization. By 1870, the southern states made more artificial ice than anywhere else in the world.
In the decades after the Civil War, artificial refrigeration exploded, and the natural-ice trade began its slow decline into obsolescence. Refrigeration became a huge industry, measured not just by the cash that changed hands but also in the sheer size of the machines: steam-powered monster machines weighing hundreds of tons, maintained by a full-time army of engineers. At the turn of the twentieth century, New York’s Tribeca neighborhood—now home to some of the most expensive loft apartments in the world—was essentially a giant refrigerator, entire blocks of windowless buildings designed to chill the endless flood of produce from the nearby Washington food market.
Almost everything in the nineteenth-century story of cold was about making it bigger, more ambitious. But the next revolution in artificial cold would proceed in the exact opposite direction. Cold was about to get small: those block-long Tribeca refrigerators would soon shrink down to fit in every kitchen in America. But the smaller footprint of artificial cold would, ironically, end up triggering changes in human society that were so massive you could see them from space.
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IN THE WINTER OF 1916, an eccentric naturalist and entrepreneur moved his young family up to the remote tundra of Labrador. He had spent several winters there on his own, starting a fur company breeding foxes and occasionally shipping animals and reports back to the U.S. Biological Survey. Five weeks after the birth of his son, his wife and child joined him. Labrador was, to say the least, not an ideal place for a newborn. The climate was unforgiving, with temperatures regularly hitting 30 degrees below Fahrenheit, and the region was entirely bereft of modern medical facilities. The food, too, left a great deal to be desired. The bleak climate in Labrador meant that everything you ate during the winter was either frozen or preserved: other than the fish, there were no sources of fresh food. A typical meal would be what locals called “brewis”: salted cod and hard tack, which is rock solid bread, boiled up and garnished with “scrunchions,” which were small, fried chunks of salted pork fat. Any meat or produce that had been frozen would be mushy and tasteless when thawed out.
But the naturalist was an adventurous eater, fascinated with the cuisines of different cultures. (In his journals, he recorded eating everything from rattlesnake to skunk.) And so he took up ice fishing with some of the local Inuits, carving holes in frozen lakes and casting a line for trout. With air temperatures so far below zero, a fish pulled out of the lake would freeze solid in a matter of seconds.
Advertisement for General Electric fridge and freezer, 1949
Unwittingly, the young naturalist had stumbled across a powerful scientific experiment as he sat down to eat with his family in Labrador. When they thawed out the frozen trout from the ice-fishing expeditions, they discovered it tasted far fresher than the usual grub. The difference was so striking that he became obsessed with trying to figure out why the frozen trout retained its flavor so much more effectively. And so Clarence Birdseye began an investigation that would ultimately put his name on packages of frozen peas and fish sticks in supermarkets around the world.
At first, Birdseye had assumed the trout had preserved its freshness simply because it had been caught more recently, but the more he studied the phenomenon, he began to think there was some other factor at work. For starters, ice-fished trout would retain its flavor for months, unlike other frozen fish. He began experimenting with frozen vegetables and discovered that produce frozen in the depths of winter somehow tasted bette
r than produce frozen in late fall or early spring. He analyzed the food under a microscope and noticed a striking difference in the ice crystals that formed during the freezing process: the frozen produce that had lost its flavor had significantly larger crystals that seemed to be breaking down the molecular structure of the food itself.
Eventually, Birdseye hit upon a coherent explanation for the dramatic difference in taste: It was all about the speed of the freezing process. A slow freeze allowed the hydrogen bonds of ice to form larger crystalline shapes. But a freeze that happened in seconds—“flash freezing,” as we now call it—generated much smaller crystals that did less damage to the food itself. The Inuit fishermen hadn’t thought about it in terms of crystals and molecules, but they had been savoring the benefits of flash freezing for centuries by pulling live fish out of the water into shockingly cold air.
Clarence Birdseye in Labrador, Canada, 1912
As his experiments continued, an idea began to form in Birdseye’s mind: with artificial refrigeration becoming increasingly commonplace, the market for frozen food could be immense, assuming you could solve the quality problem. Like Tudor before him, Birdseye began taking notes on his experiments with cold. And like Tudor, the idea would linger in his mind for a decade before it turned into something commercially viable. It was not a sudden epiphany or lightbulb moment, but something much more leisurely, an idea taking shape piece by piece over time. It was what I like to call a “slow hunch”—the anti-“lightbulb moment,” the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.
The first inspiration for Birdseye had been the very pinnacle of freshness: a trout pulled out of a frozen lake. But the second would be the exact opposite: a commercial fishing ship’s hull filled with rotting cod. After his Labrador adventure, Birdseye returned to his original home in New York and took a job with the Fisheries Association, where he saw firsthand the appalling conditions that characterized the commercial fishing business. “The inefficiency and lack of sanitation in the distribution of whole fresh fish so disgusted me,” Birdseye would later write, “that I set out to develop a method that would permit the removal of inedible waste from perishable foods at production points, packaging them in compact and convenient containers, and distributing them to the housewife with their intrinsic freshness intact.”
Clarence Birdseye is experimenting on chopped carrots to determine the effects of the various stirring speeds and air velocities on the food.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the frozen-food business was considered to be the very bottom of the barrel. You could buy frozen fish or produce, but it was widely assumed to be inedible. (In fact, frozen food was so appalling that it was banned at New York State prisons for being below the culinary standards of the convicts.) One key problem was that the food was being frozen at relatively high temperatures, often just a few degrees below freezing. Yet scientific advances over the preceding decades had made it possible to artificially produce temperatures that were positively Labradorian. By the early 1920s, Birdseye had developed a flash-freezing process using stacked cartons of fish frozen at minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Inspired by the new industrial model of Henry Ford’s Model T factory, he created a “double-belt freezer” that ran the freezing process along a more efficient production line. He formed a company called General Seafood using these new production techniques. Birdseye found that just about anything he froze with this method—fruit, meat, vegetables—would be remarkably fresh after thawing.
Frozen food was still more than a decade away from becoming a staple of the American diet. (It required a critical mass of freezers—in supermarkets and home kitchens—that wouldn’t fully come into being until the postwar years.) But Birdseye’s experiments were so promising that in 1929, just months before the Black Friday crash, General Seafood was acquired by the Postum Cereal Company, which promptly changed its name to General Foods. Birdseye’s adventures in ice fishing had made him a multimillionaire. His name endures on packages of frozen fish filets to this day.
Birdseye’s frozen-food breakthrough took shape as a slow hunch, but it also emerged as a kind of collision between several very different geographic and intellectual spaces. To imagine a world of flash-frozen food, Birdseye needed to experience the challenges of feeding a family in an arctic climate surrounded by brutal cold; he needed to spend time with the Inuit fishermen; he needed to inspect the foul containers of cod-fishing trawlers in New York harbors; he needed the scientific knowledge of how to produce temperatures well below freezing; he needed the industrial knowledge of how to build a production line. Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.
Worker clad in overalls surveys boxes of Birds Eye frozen foods as they move along a conveyor. Undated photograph, circa 1922–1950.
In our age of locally sourced, artisanal food production, the frozen “TV dinners” that arose in the decades after Birdseye’s discovery have fallen out of favor. But in its original incarnation, frozen food had a positive impact on health, introducing more nutrition into the diets of Americans. Flash-frozen food extended the reach of the food network in both time and space: produce harvested in summer could be consumed months later; fish caught in the North Atlantic could be eaten in Denver or Dallas. It was better to eat frozen peas in January than it was to wait five months for fresh ones.
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BY THE 1950S, Americans had adopted a lifestyle that was profoundly shaped by artificial cold, buying frozen dinners purchased in the refrigerated aisles of the local supermarket, and stacking them up in the deep freeze of their new Frigidaires, featuring the latest in ice-making technology. Behind the scenes, the entire economy of cold was supported by a vast fleet of refrigerated trucks, transporting Birds Eye frozen peas (and their many imitations) around the country.
In that iconic 1950s American household, the most novel cold-producing device was not storing fish filets for dinner or making ice for the martinis. It was cooling down (and dehumidifying) the entire house. The first “apparatus for treating air” had been dreamed up by a young engineer named Willis Carrier in 1902. The story of Carrier’s invention is a classic in the annals of accidental discovery. As a twenty-five-year-old engineer, Carrier had been hired by a printing company in Brooklyn to devise a scheme that would help them keep the ink from smearing in the humid summer months. Carrier’s invention not only removed the humidity from the printing room; it also chilled the air. Carrier noticed that everyone suddenly wanted to have lunch next to the printing presses, and he began to design contraptions that would be deliberately built to regulate the humidity and temperature in an interior space. Within a few years, Carrier had formed a company—still one of the largest air-conditioning manufacturers in the world—that focused on industrial uses for the technology. But Carrier was convinced that air-conditioning should also belong to the masses.
A Carrier Corporation experimental lab test of their new $700, six-room capacity, central air-conditioning unit that diffuses cool air at floor level; smoke making cool air visible has risen to the three-foot-high level in this living room, 1945.
His first great test came over Memorial Day weekend of 1925, when Carrier debuted an experimental AC system in Paramount Pictures’ new flagship Manhattan movie theater, the Rivoli. Theaters had long been oppressive places to visit during the summer months. (In fact, a number of Manhattan playhouses had experimented with ice-based cooling during the nineteenth century, with predictably moist results.) Before AC, the whole idea of a summer blockbuster would have seemed preposterous: the last place you’d want to be on a warm day was a room filled with a thousand other perspiring bodies. And so Carrier had persuaded Adolph Zukor, the legendary chief of Paramount, that there was money to be made by investing in central air for his theaters.
Zukor himself showed up for the Memorial Day weekend test, sitting inconspicuously in the balcony seats. Carrier and his team had some technical difficulties getting the AC up and running; the room was filled with hand fans waving furiously before the picture started. Carrier later recalled the scene in his memoirs:
It takes time to pull down the temperature in a quickly filled theater on a hot day, and a still longer time for a packed house. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the fans dropped into laps as the effects of the air conditioning system became evident. Only a few chronic fanners persisted, but soon they, too, ceased fanning… . We then went into the lobby and waited for Mr. Zukor to come downstairs. When he saw us, he did not wait for us to ask his opinion. He said tersely, “Yes, the people are going to like it.”
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BETWEEN 1925 AND 1950, most Americans experienced air-conditioning only in large commercial spaces such as movie theaters, department stores, hotels, or office buildings. Carrier knew that AC was headed for the domestic sphere, but the machines were simply too large and expensive for a middle-class home. The Carrier Corporation did offer a glimpse of this future in its 1939 World’s Fair attraction, “The Igloo of Tomorrow.” In a bizarre structure that looked something like a five-story helping of soft-serve vanilla ice cream, Carrier showcased the wonders of domestic air-conditioning, accompanied by a squadron of Rockettes-style “snow bunnies.”
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World Page 6
