Kind: captions
Language: en
In the summer of 1841, Florida doctor
John Gory faced a dire situation. Yellow
fever, also known as the black vomit,
was sweeping through his town, wiping
out entire families. Patients came to
Gory's small infirmary jaundest and
burning with fevers up to 40° C. To cool
his patients down, Gory couldn't turn to
refrigeration because that hadn't been
invented yet. So, he came up with a
radical treatment. He suspended pans of
ice in his infirmary, allowing the cool,
dense air to flow down over his
patients, providing much needed relief.
But this treatment was almost impossible
to sustain because it required hundreds
of kg of ice per day. And Gory had only
one way to get it.
He relied on ice blocks that were
transported thousands of kilometers
through a now forgotten ice empire. A
vast network of ships and ice houses,
all built and controlled by one man,
known to the world as the Ice King.
Over the previous 35 years, he had
forged a monopoly that spanned the
globe, and anyone who wanted ice was at
his mercy.
Gory only got a few deliveries each
year. And now by the peak of summer, the
cost of just a few days ice for the
infirmary would have been more expensive
than the average yearly wage. So locals
began to refer to the ice as white gold.
As Gory's supply ran out, he was forced
to watch his patients suffer and die. It
was in that moment that he decided he
would find a way to free the world from
the grip of the Ice King.
By the turn of the 19th century, most of
America's ice came from the northern
states, where thousands of square
kilometers of lakes would freeze over
for much of the year. The hard part was
getting all that ice out. To get ice out
of a lake or river, first of all, you
had to trust that it was deep enough to
support your weight. Then there's no way
to really tell. Then you had to walk out
several feet onto this plane of ice,
take a saw that's as long as I am tall,
and then carve the very ice that you're
standing on and just, you know, hope to
heaven that it doesn't sink.
Then you had to kind of float it to
shore and a horse would help to kind of
pull the ice into the back of a wagon.
It was frequently common for the the
harvesters and their horses to fall
through into the ice. sometimes to their
death.
>> This dangerous and painstaking process
meant that ice remained a rare commodity
available mostly to wealthy land owners.
One of the few who had access to it was
22-year-old Boston merchant Frederick
Tutor.
In the winter of 1805, Tutor was
thinking back to a tragic incident that
had happened 4 years earlier. He and his
brother came down with a bad fever while
visiting the Caribbean. Back home, they
would have just asked their servants to
get some ice. But on the islands, ice
was unheard of. With no way to cool
down, the brothers cut their trip short
and returned to America. And while
Frederick recovered, his brother did
not.
Today, we know that ice wouldn't have
saved his brother's life because he
likely suffered from a rare case of bone
tuberculosis. But at the time, Tutor
believed that it was the lack of ice on
the islands that was responsible for his
brother's death. It was this painful
memory that gave him an idea. What if he
could be the one to bring ice to the
Caribbean and in the process make his
fortune? So, Tutor got to work. He hired
dozens of men to gather ice and
approached investors to help finance a
ship. But to the investors, this plan
seemed ridiculous. Tutor wrote, "People
only laugh when I tell them I'm going to
carry ice to the West Indies, which is
understandable because the journey would
take 3 weeks sailing through warm seas
under the blazing Caribbean sun. I mean,
can you really transport ice in those
conditions for that long? Wouldn't it
all just melt?" It turns out people had
figured out ways to make ice last a long
time, even thousands of years ago. As
far back as 500 BC, in the scorching
summers of the Persian Empire, ancient
kings like Xerxes enjoyed refreshing
frozen desserts, even when the outside
temperature climbed as high as 35° C.
Now, ice in the desert might seem
strange, but during the winter months,
temperatures can drop dramatically. So,
the Persians filled shallow pools with
water, which would freeze overnight, and
in the morning, they would break up the
ice sheets and collect the pieces. To
make that ice last until the summer,
they used three key techniques.
>> Let's try a simple experiment. I have
eight ice cubes spread evenly in one
dish here. And I have another eight ice
cubes now stacked together in one mega
cube in this dish over here. Now, if you
leave these two plates to melt for a few
hours, the stacked ice cubes fare a lot
better. And that's because the main way
ice melts is through heat conduction on
its surface. So even though the volume
was the same, the surface area exposed
here is double what we had here. The key
idea here is that you want to pack your
ice as tightly as possible.
In fact, the best shape to minimize the
surface area is a sphere. So if you
think about it, a snowman is pretty much
mathematically optimal to survive as
long as possible.
But you don't need perfect geometry to
make ice last a long time. In the winter
of 2010, the city of Helsinki dumped all
the snow plowed from their streets onto
this huge pile around 30 m high and 100
m wide. Almost a year later, that very
same pile was still around, despite
being exposed to one of the country's
hottest summers in decades.
The main reason it lasted so long is
because the ratio of surface area to
volume actually decreases for larger and
larger amounts of ice. For example, if
you double the radius of this snowman,
then the volume of ice increases by a
factor of 2 cubed or 8, but the surface
area only increases by a factor of 2
squared or 4. This is known as the
square cubed law, which was the second
technique used by the Persians. And
finally, they needed a way to shield the
ice from the harsh desert.
Okay, I have another example. Two ice
cubes, two dishes. The only difference
really is going to be that I have this
fan which is going to be blowing air
onto this ice cube. Now, it's not
heating any of the air. It's just
blowing away any air the ice would have
chilled for itself and it's introducing
more warmer ambient temperature air
which heats the ice cube better.
After about an hour of the fan blowing,
this ice cube is completely gone.
Whereas this one is only about 40%
melted. So, obviously, you want to
minimize the amount of air flow that
you're getting around your ice. One way
you can do that is by putting the ice in
a deeper dish like a pit because colder
air sinks to the bottom so it collects
around the ice and lets it stay there
for longer. And a way you can one up
that is to seal the ice which is exactly
what the Persians did. This is a
yakchaw, an ancient Persian ice house.
It's a massive dome structure with walls
up to 2 m thick at the base. Here, the
Persians collected up to 220 tons of ice
and packed it tightly together in a pit.
This allowed the cold, dense air to
collect while warm air was funneled up
and out of the dome. After the winter,
the entire structure was sealed up,
insulating the ice until summer.
For the next 2,300 years, these
techniques barely changed. And now,
Tutor was ready to bet his fortune on
these ancient principles. So he
mortgaged land on his family estate to
buy a ship and he began modifying it for
the long journey to the West Indies.
>> He did that by building out a cargo hole
in a ship that was built similarly to
the ice houses. The ice was elevated off
the ground so it wasn't sitting in melt
water because melt water, you know,
speeds up the melting of ice. And the
blocks of ice were also packed really
tightly. Tutor went allin, sinking a
full $10,000 of mostly borrowed money
into the venture, which is the
equivalent of over a4 million today. He
sent his youngest brother and his cousin
ahead to the island of Martineique to
build an ice house ready to receive the
cargo. On the morning of February 13th,
1806, Tutor departed Boston Harbor,
carrying with him over 80 metric tons of
ice, the first shipment of its kind. The
Boston Gazette ran an article that read,
"No joke, a vessel has cleared at the
customhouse with a cargo of ice. We hope
this will not prove a slippery
speculation."
After nearly 3 weeks at sea, Tutor's
ship arrived, and to his relief, around
half of the ice had survived the trip.
But there was a problem. His brother and
cousin had failed to build an ice house.
So with no place to store the ice, Tutor
had to sell it straight off the dock
under the hot sun. He sold as quickly as
possible. But after 2 days, he had only
made about $50. The locals were confused
by the strange frozen water, and many
were shocked when their new product
disappeared before their eyes. One
customer tried to save his precious ice
by submerging it in a bath of water,
only to find it vanishing even faster.
In the end, all Tutor could do was watch
his remaining ice melt away. Yet
somehow, he was undeterred. And over the
next four years, he continued to borrow
money, using every cent to ship ice to
new markets like Cuba, Jamaica,
Barbados, and Antigga. But business
remained difficult. Tutor wrote, "I
found myself without money and without
friends, and with only a cargo of ice in
a torid zone to depend on for the supply
of both." By 1809, Tutor owed $40,000 to
investors, which is over a million bucks
today. He was hounded by creditors. He
was forced to hide from sheriffs on his
own ships. And he was even sent to
debtor's prison twice. He later
described it as the winter of my
discontent. But during that time, he had
a revelation. The reason demand wasn't
picking up was because the people of the
West Indies didn't know what to do with
ice. So all he had to do, he reasoned,
was make them understand by offering
them some refreshing drinks.
He convinces the bartenders there to let
him show them how to make icy cocktails
and he gives the ice initially to the
bartenders for free. So the bartenders
can sell both the icy drink and the room
temperature drink at the same price just
to see what their customers prefer. And
lo and behold, they prefer the icy
drink. In Tutor's own words, "A man who
has drank his drinks cold at the same
expense for one week can never be
presented with them warm again." Tutor
even showed them how to make ice cream,
which became an instant hit, especially
in Cuba. 150 years later, during the
Cuban Revolution, its leader, Fidel
Castro, was obsessed with ice cream. He
was actually known to eat up to 18
scoops after lunchtime, which is a bit
crazy. His sweet tooth was so famous
that the CIA actually tried to
assassinate him with a poisoned
milkshake. Now, back in Tutor's day, his
work was finally paying off. The cafe
owners in the West Indies started asking
him for more and more ice. And he
realized that he could increase his
profits just by refining his methods.
So, he started using sawdust to insulate
his ice on the ships because sawdust was
a phenomenal insulator that you could
basically get for free from all the
sawmills around Boston. they were just
trying to get rid of it. And he also
replaced the manual saws at the lakes
with horsedrawn plows which made it all
the easier to get the ice out. Because
of that, the price of extracting a ton
of ice dropped from around 30 cents all
the way down to 10 cents. By the 1820s,
Tutor was finally turning a profit and
the ice trade began to pick up. So much
so that copycat businesses began to crop
up. But Tutor wasn't about to let anyone
else have a share of the market he
created. So to maintain his monopoly, he
often undercut his competition until
they either gave up or went out of
business. Tutor's ambition didn't end
there, and he wrote that there was an
experiment I have been desirous of
making for 20 years. In 1833, he took on
his biggest challenge yet, a 4-month
journey to ship ice halfway across the
world to Kolkata, India.
And despite the trip being five times
longer than his first one to the
Caribbean, more than half of the ice
survived.
In India, the ice was a big hit. Over
the next 20 years, Tutor made around
$220,000
in Kolkata alone, making it one of his
most profitable ventures. Over that same
period, he rapidly expanded his empire,
opening routes to Brazil, Singapore,
Hong Kong, and even Australia. His
yearly sales went from less than 10,000
tons in the 1830s to a record high of
132,000 tons in 1856.
Seeing the wealth and power of his
monopoly, the world gave Tutor a new
name, the Ice King.
In under 50 years, the ice trade had
become one of the largest industries in
the US. and its second largest export by
weight. What was once a luxury product
became a commodity by the 1860s. Devices
known as ice boxes started popping up in
ordinary kitchens. Essentially, they
were insulated wooden cabinets with a
compartment for ice at the top, which
would then cool down the food
underneath, keeping it fresh. Families
across the country soon bought ice daily
or weekly, with the average New Yorker
buying over 600 kg a year. This surge in
demand resulted in a curious new
profession, the Iceman.
The Iceman would go doortodoor
delivering huge blocks of ice up to 45
kg. And while home delivery was nothing
new in the 19th century, the Iceman was
unique in that he needed to go inside
your house to make his delivery.
>> Iceman,
>> all kinds of rumors and jokes and
cultural thoughts started to, you know,
to crop up. And if you look at some of
the most popular songs at the time, she
fell in love with the Iceman or the
Iceman took my wife. If you look at old
Valentine's Day cards that were
circulating at this time, they all had
puns about the Iceman. You know, the
Iceman made my wife, you know, too hot.
He was supposed to deliver ice. Like, it
was so silly.
>> Consumption of ice in big cities like
New York skyrocketed. And by the end of
the 19th century, ice had grown into a
billiondoll business. And while part of
the demand was due to home ice boxes,
the real driving force was several new
industries. The ice industry also
launched the fish industry, the meat
packing industry, the brewery industry.
It became like this multi-level
industry.
When we get to the point where there are
railroads, then comes the invention of
the refrigeration car. railroad cars
that were insulated with ice blocks to
carry things that are perishable.
>> So, if you think about it, fresh fruits
and vegetables that have been region
locked now can become national staples.
So, you have apricots and cherries from
California. You have strawberries from
Florida. They can all go inland.
Actually, you want to guess the name of
a vegetable that was really popularized
with these chilled cars?
>> Chilled vegetable? I'm going to guess
lettuce.
>> Which one?
>> Iceberg. It's got to be iceberg, right?
>> Exactly.
>> You know, it's like crunchy water. It's
like ice. I iceberg lettuce.
>> It is crunchy water. Uh but it was
actually called iceberg because of the
ice that kept it fresh.
This change marked the beginning of a
new system called the cold chain. And
for the meat packing industry, it was a
huge upgrade. Previously, the only way
to transport fresh meat was by sending
rail cars filled with live cattle
straight from farms to cities. Then the
animals had to be brought into the city
and held in local stockyards before they
were prepared by local slaughter houses
and butchers. The result was that city
centers were filled with dirty, noisy
cows. And on top of that, since almost
half of the animal was inedible,
shipping was extremely inefficient,
pushing up the cost. But with chilled
rail cars, all this changed and the
country's supply chain reorganized into
three parts. First, ranches across the
Great Plains funneled their cattle to
cities in the Midwest. Taking on the
role of industrial food preparation and
distribution, these cities built up vast
stockyards, slaughterhouses, and rail
hubs to send the meat onward. Chicago
emerged as the nation's meat packing
capital, ballooning in size from just
30,000 people in 1850 to 1.7 million in
1900. And at the end of the chain were
the large, insatiable cities. With the
new system in place, almost twice as
much edible meat could be transported in
each rail car, eventually dropping the
cost in urban areas by 39%. As a result,
demand soared. In New York City alone,
beef shipments rose from just 2,400 tons
in 1882 to around 63,000 tons in 1886.
That's a 25-fold increase in just 4
years. But more importantly, with a
national distribution network to rely
on, these cities no longer needed to
prepare meat locally. They could finally
get rid of all the infrastructure and
herds of cows in the city center,
freeing up the land for things like
housing, offices, and factories. This
fundamentally changed their structure
and gave rise to the modern city of
today.
But while the cold chain was redefining
America, a new invention was about to
overthrow the natural ice industry.
Which brings us back to Dr. John Gory in
the 1840s. A few scientists had devised
and even built prototype cooling
machines, but they weren't commercially
viable. And Gory wasn't fairing any
better. He had spent 3 years struggling
to make artificial ice with no success.
But one night while experimenting with
an air pump to drain a bucket, he
noticed that if he let the air expand
quickly, it formed a thin layer of ice
on the surface of the water. He had just
stumbled upon the breakthrough he
needed, and he set about creating a
prototype based on this idea.
Take a sealed cylinder filled with air
and a piston that can move inside it.
We'll assume there's no friction or heat
loss to the environment. When the piston
pushes down, the air is compressed,
increasing its pressure and temperature.
The reason the temperature increases is
because as the piston pushes down, it
moves toward the air molecules. So, when
a molecule bounces off this moving
surface, it gains a little bit of speed.
And since the temperature is
proportional to the molecules speed
squared, well, the air must heat up. But
notice that this process is completely
reversible. If the piston is released,
the high pressure air pushes the piston
back until the pressure equalizes.
So now when one of the molecules bounces
off the piston, it loses a little bit of
speed. Gory knew that if he simply let
all of this hot, high-press air expand,
it would return back to roughly its
original temperature, which wouldn't be
very helpful. But what if he first
cooled the air and then let it expand?
Well, then its temperature would drop
far lower than the ambient air. He
started with a similar setup, a cylinder
and a piston that were powered by a hand
crank, which he then attached to a large
air tank. As Gory turned the crank, the
piston moved down, compressing the air
and raising its temperature. To prevent
the air from being sucked out of the
large tank, Gory added a one-way valve
at the bottom of the cylinder. He also
added a similar valve at the top of the
piston so that the cylinder could refill
with fresh air. So now with each turn of
the crank, more and more air was added
to the tank which allowed Gory to
increase the pressure to around 10
atmospheres. But then he added one extra
step in between the piston and the tank.
He placed a big bucket of water and he
forced the air through a submerged pipe.
This cooled the air down to around the
same temperature as the water. The
result was that his tank was still
filled with high pressure air, but
instead of being hot, it was cool. So
now when Gory released some of his cool
air into another cylinder with a piston,
the air rapidly expanded. This cooled
the air down below its starting point
and dropped it to freezing temperatures.
Gory then placed this entire cylinder
inside a large tank of water, finally
making ice. But to avoid the entire tank
freezing solid and clogging up his
machine, he used one final trick.
Instead of fresh water, he filled the
final tank with salt water, which
freezes below 0° C. Since the salt water
remained liquid, he then submerged metal
molds of fresh water until they froze
into solid blocks, essentially creating
the world's first ice cube tray. For the
first time ever, ice could be created
anywhere, even in the heat of the
Florida summer.
And when he, you know, says to the world
like, "I've invented ice." The reaction
was, "The hell you have, you know, but
what? No man should be creating ice.
Only God can create ice." And what John
Gory also didn't realize is that in the
first public venues in which he
announces his ice machine, Frederick
Tutor has his associates in the
audience. And Frederick Tutor is a man
who does not take lightly to threats to
his empire. And what bigger threat to
the, you know, natural ice harvesting
empire is there than human-made ice?
>> There was no way the ice king was giving
up his empire without a fight.
>> What he ends up doing is he ends up
paying editors up and down the eastern
seabboard at newspapers to publish
scandalous news articles about John
Gory. So everywhere from Tallahassee up
to New York, you see newspapers
publishing headlines like there's this
crank that thinks he can make ice as
good as God Almighty. And ultimately
John Gory, he does patent his machine,
but he never makes a dime on it.
>> Gory spent the next few years in
financial ruin. A decade later, he died
alone and penniless, most likely
succumbing to malaria. There are reports
he suffered an extremely high fever in
his final days. the very symptom he had
tried to alleviate for so many years.
But Gory's invention hadn't been
completely ignored. Soon others began
work on artificial cooling machines,
including James Harrison, a Scottishborn
engineer working in Australia. Harrison
noticed that Gory's machine had one big
drawback. It relied on just two
components to move heat, a compressor
and an expansion engine. So instead of
using air to cool his machine, he tried
a different approach. I have a can of
freeze spray here, which is a liquid
that when I press down on this button,
comes out and immediately evaporates
into a very, very low temperature gas.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
blast it at this cup of water. And the
process is actually so effective that in
essentially under a minute, I'm able to
get some ice to form in there. Okay. So
after a layer of water, what you get is
a bunch of ice.
Now the reason this works is because
something special happens when a
substance changes phase. So in order to
go from a liquid to a gas, it needs to
absorb a lot of energy. And pretty much
all this energy goes into overcoming the
force of attraction between molecules so
that they can disperse and go into the
gas phase. Harrison realized he could
take advantage of this effect by forcing
a fluid to continuously evaporate and
condense as it's going through a loop. A
modern version looks something like
this. Start by adding a liquid under
high pressure to a loop. Passing this
liquid through an expansion valve
quickly drops the pressure and
temperature, causing some of the liquid
to immediately turn into a gas. The
mixture then passes into an evaporator
coil where the remaining liquid
continues to boil. But this phase change
requires a lot of energy. So the liquid
absorbs heat from the environment and
this is what creates the cooling effect.
The cold gas is then cycled through a
compressor raising its temperature and
then it's pushed through a condenser
coil. Here the hot gas cools and turns
back into a liquid releasing the
absorbed heat back into the environment
before returning to the expansion valve.
By repeating this cycle over and over
again, Harrison was reportedly able to
manufacture as much as 3,000 kg of ice
per day, and his machine was a huge
commercial success. Meanwhile, public
resistance to godless ice and artificial
cooling began to fade, overshadowed by a
growing health crisis linked to natural
ice. One of the reasons artificial ice
was so much better is because we make it
on our own terms. with natural ice. We
had to wait until the right season in
the right place. And then whatever
happened in the water that froze, like
something died or was rotting in there,
you had to work with it.
>> By the time we get to the mid-9th
century, the peak of the industrial
revolution, factories and farms just
letting loose their chemicals and
detritis into the nearby lakes and
rivers.
>> You put an ice block into your cocktail,
you could get collar out. They're
they're like stories of hospitals
treating wounds with with ice and then
the ice makes makes you get a disease
and your wound isn't even the problem.
>> They're getting chalera. They're getting
food poisoning or ice poisoning. I mean,
they're they're getting very very sick.
It's so funny when we were first talking
about this story, I was thinking about
this, you know, frozen New England ice,
and I was just imagining like the purest
lake water, this crystal clear ice, and
like just this incredible product,
right? But now that you mention it,
like, yeah, it probably is a lot less
hygienic and uh yeah, there's probably
germs in there. And so the, you know,
human-made ice companies were like,
"Sure, our ice isn't made by God, but
natural ice will kill you. So which one
do you want?"
>> After the first affordable home
refrigerator landed in the mass market
in 1927, it became one of the fastest
adopted new technologies of the entire
20th century, going from less than 1% of
homes having one in the 1920s to 85% by
1944. This made its takeoff even faster
than the motorc car replacing the
horsedrawn cart. There's this argument
of would the world really be so
different without refrigeration. Like
sure, food, strawberries, iceberg
lettuce, but then you think about
vaccines, blood donations, insulin, the
same cold chain transports those things.
And then beyond medicine, the same
principles that Harrison and Gory used
for for their fridges are what allow us
to cool things down to almost absolute
zero. Over the past century, so many of
the discoveries that we made rely on
this principle of refrigeration. MRIs,
the the large Hadron collider at CERN,
the James Webb telescope, all of that is
is also refrigeration. And my favorite
is the the PCR story where
Thermosquaticus was in a fridge for 16
years before Carrie Mollis discovered
it. There wouldn't have been that
connection to to make PCR viable in that
way without a fridge. I think it's
easier to focus on the movement of
macroscopic objects and macroscopic
things happening, but this is really
about controlling motion on the smallest
scale, controlling thermal motion, which
is pretty remarkable breakthrough. I
mean, we could heat things up for a long
time. So, you want to increase the
thermal energy of molecules. You could
do that from the time we had fire. but
actually taking those molecules and
figuring out how to remove their thermal
energy and really slow them down. That's
the refrigeration story and that's
really recent. Um, but as you point out,
like it has profound effects.
Gory was able to make ice because he
wasn't afraid to step outside his own
profession, medicine, and venture into a
new field, thermodynamics. And while you
probably don't need to reinvent the
fridge, learning a new skill is always
handy. You know, here at Veritasium, we
create simulations and models to test
our ideas and illustrate them. And along
the way, our team has learned to code in
Python to make sure our animations are
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