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RedditIt was July 14, 1847, in the muggy port town of Apalachicola, Florida, and the stores of ice from the North had run out. The French consul Monsieur Rosan was celebrating Bastille Day, the story goes, and his guests were fearing a dreadfully uncomfortable afternoon. As if on cue, a local doctor complained theatrically about the necessity of drinking warm wine. Monsieur Rosan rose. "On Bastille Day," he announced, "France gave her citizens what they wanted; Rosan gives his guests what they want, cool wines! Even if it demands a miracle!" Suddenly, waiters appeared carrying large silver trays piled with bottles of champagne nestled in ice. But where had it come from? Had a shipment come through from the North? Mais non. The ice had been created right there in Florida.
"Let us drink to the man who made the ice," one of the guests declared. "Dr. Gorrie."
Local physician John Gorrie had spent more than five years tinkering with a mechanical refrigeration machine, a contraption that could both make ice and cool air. For years, he had used it in his infirmary, to make his fever patients more comfortable.
Within a few years of Rosan’s soiree, Dr. Gorrie’s artificial ice machine would be patented in London and the United States, and the doctor would largely forgo his practice, devoting himself to promoting his device.
In a corner of the National Museum of American History, now closed off for the creation of a new exhibit, there stood for many years a case labeled "Mechanical Refrigeration." It held the patent model of Gorrie’s invention—the first machine of its kind—along with the U.S. patent and a portrait of the earnest-looking Gorrie.
Just across the exhibit space was another display, labeled "Ice," and within it, another portrait. This one was of the so-called Ice King, a man named Frederic Tudor, whom Gorrie blamed for making the last years of his life very uncomfortable indeed.
In a world in which air-conditioning has made possible the mass movement of whole populations to warmer climates, it is hard to imagine a time when man-made cold was considered an impossible dream. But in the mid-1800s, even having natural ice delivered to tropical climes was a relatively recent development. For millennia, people in the earth’s warmer regions had needed to drink milk when it was drawn from the cow, eat fruits and vegetables just as they ripened, and (mon Dieu!) endure warm wine.
