OK...So some anonymous cave dweller brought fire. Big deal. Far more important to us in Florida is John Gorrie– who gave us the ice machine and air conditioner You may not know the name John Gorrie, but you’ve no doubt given thanks for the product of his imagination time and again this past summer: every time you gulped a chilly fountain drink; every time you stepped out of the sweltering heat and into the delicious cool of a supermarket... Gorrie will be best known for his innovative treatment of yellow fever patients. He found that by cooling a patient’s room with blocks of ice, he could reduce their fever and save lives. The problem was, it took 500 pounds of ice–shipped from the north in sawdust at $1.50 a pound–to cool a room for a day. At a time when the average skilled wage was $15 a week, Gorrie’s treatment was enormously expensive. So he devised a series of steam-powered machines that harnessed the cooling effects of evaporation and expanding air in a series of tubes and tanks. First, he compressed ordinary air to 125 p.s.i., which heated it to 500 degrees. Then, he added water, which dropped the temperature to 300 degrees by evaporation. When he allowed the air to expand again to normal, the temperature had dropped below freezing. Eventually, his iron contraption (which is about the size of a modern refrigerator) could produce a brick of ice in about two hours. Gorrie received a patent for his ice maker in 1851, but public acceptance of his creation proved more difficult than the act of invention. “In those days, it was like saying you have a machine that will levitate you three feet up or something,” The press considered Gorrie a quack; the pulpits preached that he was in cahoots with the devil. Gorrie’s ice machine would pave the way for modern air conditioning and would eventually transform the face of the nation. (How many of us would be living in Florida without it?) But he would never see how important his invention would become. After a failed attempt to market his machines, Gorrie died in 1855 at the age of 52,
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 11:45:06 +0000
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