History Is Cool
SCHOLARS LOVE GRAND IDEAS that neatly tie together everything in history. One of the more intriguing theories of this type comes from Jonathan Coopersmith of Texas A&M, who has written that much of the history of communications, from printing to VCRs to the Internet, was determined by the need to distribute pornography more efficiently. Other historians point out that many of the first buyers of answering machines were prostitutes and that phone-sex lines routed through such countries as Guyana and São Tomé financed much of the telephone infrastructure in the Third World.
None of this is too surprising; sex may as well drive communications technology, since it drives everything else. But if recent news items are any guide, much of technological history actually stems from a different need, one that is nearly as basic and in many cases harder to satisfy: the desire for a nice cold drink. Consider, for example, the report that a chunk of ice “the size of Rhode Island” (a comparison that somehow never sounds as impressive as it’s meant to) has broken off the Antarctic ice shelf. Some scientists attribute this event to global warming caused by destruction of the ozone layer the result of decades of use of flourocarbon propellants. In this way the search for improved refrigeration in the 1920s and 1930s which led to the developments of flourocarbons, may continue to affect global events a century later.
Going a century in the direction, to the early 1800s, we find that Thomas Jefferson experimented with a “refrigerator”—essentially an icebox—after he retired from the Presidency. (Jefferson was always interested in the latest technology; today he would be instant-messaging John Adams.) In the 1830s Frederick Tudor of Boston began shipping ice from New England rivers to India. Besides introducing refrigeration to that steamy land, the ice business became a mainstay of U.S.-lndia trade for several decades to come.
The latest in refrigeration research comes from Karl A. Gschneidner, Jr., of the U.S. Department of Energy’s laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Instead of expanding and compressing a volatile liquid, as occurs in most refrigerators, Gschneidner’s design transfers heat by alternately magnetizing and demagnetizing powdered gadolinium, taking advantage of what is known as the magnetocaloric effect. The news brings to mind a previous attempt at inventing an improved refrigerator by no less a luminary than Albert Einstein. Along with Leo Szilard, who could be called the Kevin Bacon of physics for his connection with virtually every important discovery of the twentieth century, Einstein filed at least 45 patent applications in at least six countries on refrigerating apparatus.
The pair performed their research between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s. First they tried an elegant but complicated gas-liquid mixture as a coolant; next they devised an immersion cooler that used no electricity. Finally they came up with what is still called the Einstein-Szilard pump, in which a varying electromagnetic field causes liquid metal to compress a coolant with no moving parts. All these designs worked, but none of them were practical enough to be commercialized, so the two physicist-inventors went on to other things. Most notable among these was the atom bomb, for which Szilard in 1934 patented the basic idea of a nuclear chain reaction and Einstein in 1939 wrote his famous letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting what became known as the Manhattan Project.
It’s tempting to speculate how the world might be different today if Szilard’s refrigeration ideas had proved practical and his chain reaction had not (although the EinsteinSzilard pump was invaluable for cooling the world’s first atomic pile). In fact, we’ll venture to say that just about every major historical event of the last two centuries has some sort of cooling apparatus involved if you look hard enough, though in some cases it can be as tough as finding a jar of pimientos way in the back of a crowded refrigerator shelf. It all goes to show that there’s a lot more history in your refrigerator than last month’s leftover fried rice.
