This story was initially printed in our Sept/Oct 2023 concern as “Chilly Consolation” Click on right here to subscribe to learn extra tales like this one.
One 12 months earlier than the U.S. Civil Struggle ended, an embargo had introduced the southern ice commerce to a halt, inflicting the area’s cooks, bartenders, nurses and medical doctors to lose entry to the northern ice they’d come to depend on for preserving meals, making drinks and therapeutic our bodies. With out ice, the South was struggling.
What they didn’t know was that 20 years earlier than the warfare started, a comparatively unknown physician residing within the port city of Apalachicola, Florida, had discovered a approach to carry ice to the South that didn’t rely on shipments from the North. In opposition to all typical scientific considering of the day, the physician, John Gorrie, had found how you can make ice himself. His ice-making machine would finally change how People use and consider ice. It made ice doable throughout ice famines — winters that weren’t chilly sufficient to successfully freeze lakes and rivers — and even in sizzling summers. A direct line may be drawn between Gorrie’s mechanical ice and air-conditioning, trendy refrigeration and state-of-the artwork medical remedies equivalent to therapeutic hypothermia and cryosurgery, which makes use of ice crystals to freeze tumors.
None of that mattered to Gorrie although, who died a laughingstock on the comparatively younger age of 51.
A collection of Nineteenth-century newspaper illustrations, entitled “The Nice Yellow Fever Scourge — Incidents Of Its Horrors In The Most Deadly District Of The Southern States,” depicts unhappy scenes together with this one in Memphis, Tennessee. (Credit score: Bettmann through Getty Photos)
Curing outbreaks
Gorrie’s childhood and teenage years aren’t effectively documented, however information present that when he turned 20, he took an apprentice place at an apothecary in Charleston, South Carolina, run by Samuel Inexperienced, one among only a handful of medical doctors within the metropolis and by far essentially the most well-known by locals.
All through a lot of the 12 months, their sufferers suffered from unusual diseases like colds and minor aches and pains. Then got here “fever season,” a stretch of 4 or 5 months when yellow fever returned to the South. Referred to as “yellow fever” as a result of jaundice is a standard symptom, the mosquito-borne virus causes excessive fever, convulsions, complications and leg ache. Yellow fever kills as much as 50 % of these with extreme infections, and between 1790 and 1860 it killed greater than 200 residents yearly in Charleston alone.
For practically 10 years, Gorrie labored with Inexperienced to manage experimental remedies to ease sufferers’ signs. After one particularly lethal summer time, Inexperienced satisfied Gorrie to use to medical college. When Gorrie graduated from the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York three years later, he selected to go to the place a number of the worst yellow fever outbreaks occurred in North America: the Florida Territory.
In February 1833, on the age of 29, Gorrie left for the tiny Gulf Coast city of Apalachicola. When he arrived, the climate was nonetheless comparatively cool and Gorrie spent his days smoking a pipe and studying medical textbooks. Then spring turned to summer time, bringing a lethal wave of yellow fever that worn out 69 % of those that caught it in coastal Florida.
The sick arrived at Gorrie’s door jaundiced and dehydrated and shivering with fever. He quickly had so many sufferers that he transformed your complete second flooring of his house right into a sick ward. Gorrie handled them with concoctions blended simply as Inexperienced had taught him. When these failed, he utilized leeches taken from close by swamps to his sufferers’ aching joints with the hope that their bloodsucking would do the sickly good. Few folks acquired higher. By August, the beds on the second flooring have been full, and he discovered himself turning folks away.
Ultimately, Gorrie started to rethink. Yellow fever got here with the warmth and handed with it, too. Why not apply the identical precept to a affected person? That’s, why not attempt to decrease their physique temperature?
Alongside the patent software, Gorrie submitted a picket mannequin of his ice-making machine. This mannequin comprised a compression cylinder, an increasing cylinder and a crankshaft. (Credit score: U.S. Patent No. 8,080/Public Area)
Stuffed with ice
Throughout the summer time of 1841, because the sickness swept via city, Gorrie put his ice idea into apply. He discovered that rubbing ice straight on a affected person risked injuring their pores and skin — however wrapping it in fabric would depart the affected person damp and vulnerable to extra sickness, or so went the considering of the day. He turned his consideration to the room round him. If he couldn’t decrease his sufferers’ temperatures straight, maybe he may cut back the warmth of the encircling air?
Drawing on his faculty programs in thermodynamics, whereby he discovered that cool air fell and sizzling air rose, he sketched a contraption that he hoped would get physics to work in his favor. He drilled a gap right into a clear metallic bedpan and stuffed it with ice, then hung the pan from the ceiling. He opened a window to encourage a breeze, and because the air flowed over the ice and thru the outlet, it cooled earlier than swirling downward. Inside minutes, the room started to really feel cooler. Gorrie had created one of many world’s first air conditioners.
The cool air appeared to ease his sufferers’ struggling, even when they didn’t instantly — or ever — get effectively. This glimmer of hope was sufficient to persuade Gorrie to maintain suspended bedpans filled with ice over every of his sufferers’ beds. However because the epidemic raged on, he went via his small ice reserve rapidly; even when he had all the cash on this planet, he nonetheless wouldn’t be capable of purchase sufficient ice to maintain each affected person cool.
Ice was dubbed “white gold” by locals as a result of solely the wealthiest Floridians may afford it — and Apalachicola was not a affluent city. When shipments arrived from the North in winter, ice price as a lot as $5 per pound (practically $30 at the moment), and in summer time, it was nonexistent. If Gorrie needed extra ice, he must make it himself.
The following three years of Gorrie’s life have been marked by obsession. He labored lengthy days, dividing his time between caring for sufferers and experimenting with ice-making. Whereas experimenting with air strain to empty a bucket, he found that the fast compression and enlargement of air had a cooling impact. When he utilized the compressor to water, it shaped a hair-thin sheet of ice crystals throughout the highest. The physician had lastly finished it. He’d created ice.
Influence and scale
This primary ice-making prototype needed to be cranked by hand and its output was sluggish, however it was able to creating lots of ice. Gorrie had concepts for growing the machine’s pace — his patents reveal he thought-about including a water pump, a steam engine, even a horse to energy his machine — however such enhancements would price cash that he didn’t have.
Within the spring of 1844, Gorrie started writing a collection of articles in Apalachicola’s newspaper, The Business Advertiser, entitled “On the Prevention of Malarial Ailments.” These have been his first public admissions that he’d begun experimenting with ice making, an explosive declare in spiritual, small-town Florida. On the time, ice was thought-about to be God’s creation — not the province of people. Fearful for his popularity, he adopted “Jenner” as a nom de plume in tribute to Edward Jenner, the discoverer of the smallpox vaccine.
When the primary article ran on April 6, 1844, public response ranged from indifference to disgust. The editors of Scientific American printed a letter studying, “We have no idea of any possible plan for producing ice artificially.” Such derision made its method world wide, the place the Bombay Occasions and Journal of Commerce known as the invention a “cock-and-bull story.” Hiding behind his faux title, Gorrie continued to put in writing, publishing 11 articles in all.
In his remaining one, dated June 15, 1844, he tried to persuade the general public of the advantages of ice-making by outlining its financial impacts. If he may construct ice machines on the business scale, he argued, he may create everlasting jobs all through the South. However the article did little to persuade the pious, and the following 5 years stay a gap in Gorrie’s story.
We all know that he lastly secured a U.S. patent for his ice machine in 1851 and that two inventors from Europe — presumably having learn the slanderous articles — visited his workplace that very same 12 months to see the machine in motion. There’s additionally proof he visited cities in Florida, South Carolina and New York to seek for traders, although the place he acquired the cash for journey stays unsure. He lastly discovered an investor in Boston, however the man died earlier than an association was finalized. At his lowest level, he was decreased to strolling the streets of New York Metropolis, hawking pamphlets about his thought and asking to talk with anybody who’d hear.
By 1855, simply 4 years after receiving his patent, Gorrie was bereft of cash, associates and eventually his well being. He most likely caught malaria — a illness that, like yellow fever, he believed he may treatment with ice. When his fever spiked to 104 levels, he went to mattress, the place he died 24 hours later, with a shattered popularity and money owed mounting to greater than $6,000 (about $200,000 at the moment).
Gorrie knew he was forward of his time. Towards the tip of his life, he wrote that his ice machine had “been discovered upfront of the needs of the nation.” A decade after his demise, nonetheless, the nation’s needs lastly caught up along with his imaginative and prescient.
The rise of an trade
At first of the Civil Struggle, inventors from France and England concurrently introduced their “discoveries” of the method of producing ice, although their methods have been curiously much like Gorrie’s. The Europeans improved on the physician’s design by changing air with ether and ammonia, and bought the designs to producers within the U.S. within the 1860s, setting in movement America’s human-made ice age.
The South, specifically, embraced ice machines. The warfare had ended slavery, thus upending the plantation financial system. The area was now competing with northern trade, and ice manufacturing supplied a well timed leg up. By 1875, ice-manufacturing vegetation had opened in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. By 1920, the U.S. boasted greater than 4,800 block-ice vegetation using 160,000 folks and producing 40 million tons of ice per 12 months.
Practically each hospital within the South constructed a commercial-sized icehouse on its grounds. Had Gorrie lived, he would have seen one among his greatest desires come true: Hospitals may now deal with each affected person affected by surgical wounds, damaged bones or fever with ice.
A medical journal reprinted Gorrie’s “On the Prevention of Malarial Ailments” collection, this time along with his actual title, producing curiosity in his bedpan “cooling machine.” The machine’s recognition peaked in 1881, when President James Garfield lay dying on the White Home from a gunshot wound. His nurses used the equipment to chill the room and maintain the president comfy.
The price of ice continued to fall, giving rise to new industries. American retailers shipped ice-packed apples and strawberries to nations world wide. Retailers from these nations shipped citrus to the States in return. Mechanical ice additionally established the American seafood commerce. Fish had been a colonial delicacy on the Gulf Coast for a century — and a staple of Indigenous coastal diets for for much longer — however as a result of fish needed to be saved chilly, it wasn’t eaten various miles inland. The affordability of manufactured ice enabled fishers to pack cargo hulls with ice, which saved their catch recent at sea. Again on shore, they packed their still-fresh catch into insulated practice vehicles and shipped it to the Midwest, sparking new appetites.
Persevering with legacy
As we speak, Gorrie’s stays relaxation beneath a tree throughout the road from the John Gorrie Museum in Apalachicola, a one-room constructing extra Florida roadside attraction than correct museum. His tombstone is small and straightforward to miss, and his story stays largely untold.
A statue of Gorrie stands within the U.S. Capitol’s Nationwide Statuary Corridor Assortment, a present from his namesake museum, and public information of his work are unfold throughout a number of hard-to-find archives. A flip via a recent HVAC textbook reveals that Gorrie’s discoveries are normally credited to innovators who primarily based their work on his thought, however not often to Gorrie himself.
There may be not less than one establishment — past the museum — that credit Gorrie’s achievements: The Nationwide Museum of American Historical past in Washington, D.C., which homes the physician’s first working ice-making machine prototype and his unique patents. On the time of writing, they continue to be in storage, out of public view.
Excerpted from Ice: From Combined Drinks to Skating Rinks — a Cool Historical past of a Scorching Commodity by Amy Brady, printed by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random Home LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Amy Brady.
