This day in tech 1850-Dr Gorrie's Ice maker

John Gorrie's ice-making machine got a dramatic debut.
Diagram: U.S. Patent 8,080, May 6, 1851.

1850: Florida physician John Gorrie uses his mechanical ice-maker to astonish the guests at a party. It's America's first public demonstration of ice made by refrigeration.

William Cullen had demonstrated the principle of artificial refrigeration in a University of Glasgow laboratory in 1748, by allowing ethyl ether to boil into a vacuum. American Oliver Evans designed in 1805 -- but never built -- a refrigeration machine that used vapor instead of liquid. Jacob Perkins used Evans' concept for an experimental volatile-liquid, closed-cycle compressor in 1834.

Nonetheless, mid-century cooling in the tropics and subtropics -- and in the temperate summer -- relied on natural ice blocks carved from frozen lakes and rivers in the North, kept in shaded sheds and cellars under layers of sawdust for insulation, and often delivered at great expense by specially fitted ice ships.

Gorrie was born in the tropics, on the Caribbean island of Nevis. He received his medical education in New York state before settling in the Florida cotton-shipping port of Apalachicola. There, he served at various times as mayor, justice of the peace, postmaster and bank president, besides carrying on his medical practice.

It would be another half-century before the causes of the killer diseases malaria and yellow fever were discovered, but Dr. Gorrie knew they relied on heat and moisture to propagate. He urged the draining of swamps and the enforcement of hygiene in the town's food market.

Gorrie also sought to improve the survival rate of his feverish patients by cooling them down. He suspended pans of ice water high in their sickrooms, so the cooled, heavy air would flow downward.

But ice was expensive in the Florida summer and often completely unavailable. Gorrie wanted to make it mechanically. He wrote:

If the air were highly compressed, it would heat up by the energy of compression. If this compressed air were run through metal pipes cooled with water, and if this air cooled to the water temperature was expanded down to atmospheric pressure again, very low temperatures could be obtained, even low enough to freeze water in pans in a refrigerator box.

Gorrie began tinkering with compressor-coolers and had a working model by the mid 1840s. The power source was irrelevant to his invention: It could be driven by wind, water, steam or the brute force of an animal.

He applied for patents in 1848 and had a prototype built in Ohio by the Cincinnati Iron Works. It was described in Scientific American the following year, but Gorrie still had to attract venture capital to fight the existing ice-block industry.

He arranged a dramatic demonstration of his machine for a social, rather than medical, occasion. It was a muggy July in Florida. Ice from the North had been exhausted. Gorrie attended an afternoon reception given by the French consul to honor Bastille Day.

The doctor first complained about drinking warm wine in hot weather, then suddenly announced, "On Bastille Day, France gave her citizens what they wanted. [Consul] Rosan gives his guests what they want, cool wines! Even if it demands a miracle!"

Then he signaled for waiters to enter with bottles of sparkling wine on trays of ice. Mechanically made ice in the sweltering Florida summer: It was a sensation. Smithsonian magazine dubbed that party the "chilly reception."

Gorrie received a British patent a month later and U.S. patent 8,080 on May 6, 1851, but he failed at business. His business partner died, and Gorrie's inefficient, leaky machines were mocked in the press by the ice-shipping establishment. He died in poverty and ill health in 1855, still in his early 50s. It would take Frenchman Ferdinand P.E. Carre's closed, ammonia-absorption system (patented in 1860) to make way for practical, widespread mechanical refrigeration.

Florida has honored Gorrie by placing his statue in the National Statuary Hall collection in the U.S. Capitol. (The other Florida statue is Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith.)

So, have a happy Bastille Day (or joyeux Fête Nationale), chill out and lift a cold one to the father of refrigeration. You can use the very words spoken 158 years ago: "Let us drink to the man who made the ice: Dr. Gorrie."