Chilled
How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling, mystery-lifting narrative history of the refrigerator and the process of refrigeration
The refrigerator. This white box that sits in the kitchen may seem mundane nowadays, but it is one of the wonders of 20th century science – life-saver, food-preserver and social liberator, while the science of refrigeration is crucial, not just in transporting food around the globe but in a host of branches on the scientific tree. Refrigerators, refrigeration and its discovery and applications provide the eye-opening backdrop to Chilled, the story of how science managed to rewrite the rules of food, and how the technology whirring behind every refrigerator is at play, unseen, in a surprisingly broad sweep of modern life.
Part historical narrative, part scientific mystery-lifter, Chilled looks at the ice-pits of Persia (Iranians still call their fridge the 'ice-pit'), reports on a tug of war between 16 horses and the atmosphere, bears witness to ice harvests on the Regents Canal, and shows how bleeding sailors demonstrated to ship's doctors that heat is indestructible, featuring a cast of characters such as the Ice King of Boston, Galileo, Francis Bacon, and the ostracised son of a notorious 18th-century French traitor.
As people learned more about what cold actually was, scientists invented machines for making it, with these first used in earnest to chill Australian lager. The principles behind those white boxes in the kitchen remain the same today, but refrigeration is not all about food – a refrigerator is needed to make soap, penicillin and orange squash; without it, IVF would be impossible.
Refrigeration technology has also been crucial in some of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last 100 years, from the discovery of superconductors to the search for the Higgs boson. And the fridge will still be pulling the strings behind the scenes as teleporters and intelligent computer brains turn our science-fiction vision of the future into fact.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jackson (Physics: An Illustrated History of the Foundations of Science) packs an amazing amount of information into this fascinating history of humanity's ongoing quest for refrigeration. While readers might guess that humans' first efforts to preserve food through cold occurred with the 19th-century icebox or the 20th-century refrigerator, that's woefully incorrect. Jackson describes elaborate efforts to preserve ice and use it as a food preservative in ancient Mesopotamia and Persia, as early as 1775 BCE. He works his way forward through the centuries, chronicling first a growing understanding of just what "cold" actually is, and then the ways and means that individuals began to profit from it. Jackson makes it clear that "it's the fridge that makes the modern city" and that refrigeration makes possible everything from nitrogen fertilizers to the bizarre Bose-Einstein condensate, a fifth state of matter only possible at billionths of a degree above absolute zero. He also looks to the future for further advances that frigidity may make possible, noting that development of a quantum computer will almost certainly depend on scientists' ability to wield cold and seeing the Bose-Einstein condensate as a potential component of teleportation engineering. Jackson magnificently shows that science is "cool."
More Books Like This
More Books by Tom Jackson