Chilled : how refrigeration changed the world, and might do so again

195 Pages·2015·1.47 MB·English

by  Jackson

CHILLED
Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:
Sex on Earth by Jules Howard
p53 – The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong
Atoms Under the Floorboards by Chris Woodford
Spirals in Time by Helen Scales
For Sarah
CHILLED
How refrigeration changed the world, and might
do so again
TOM JACKSON
Contents

1.
Introduction

1.
1: Old-School Cool
2.
2: Conjuring Cold
3.
3: Applying Pressure
4.
4: The Temper of the Air
5.
5: Chill and the Airs
6.
6: Going for the Motion
7.
7: An Ice King – Or Two
8.
8: Taking the Heat
9.
9: Living in the Chain
10.
10: Deep Cold
11.
11: The Hidden Chill
12.
12: The Future is Cold
2.
Further Reading
3.
Acknowledgements
4.
Index
Introduction
THE refrigerator is something of a Boo Radley, the cloistered figure in Harper
Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: it’s normally pale, frequently indoors, seldom
thought about much but always there, and in the end (spoiler alert) we need it to
make everything all right.
The point is that among the cast of characters that tell the story of refrigeration
and its impact on humanity, the refrigerator itself does not have much of a
starring role. It just hangs around in the background most of the time, being cool.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that refrigerators, fridges, are nothing to get
excited about. They are nothing special. There are hundreds of millions of them.
Every household in the developed world has one; a quarter of American homes
have at least two. And elsewhere a refrigerator is at the top of the wish list of
household appliances – just below the television. When we fancy something cold
– an ice cream, glass of milk, chilled beer – there they are in the refrigerator. In
this day and age, access to cold is so easy there’s no need to think about it.
Nicolas Monardes, a Spaniard writing in , reports more of a difficulty. Cold
1574
was available to him for the right price as ice, but Monardes advises that care
should be taken to avoid sources mingled with ‘smelles and evil smokes …
especially that which passeth by places where are rotten plantes, and naughtie
tree, and where dead babies are.’ All good advice then and good advice now, but
thankfully refrigeration has moved on.
The fridge occupies a central place in the lives of the privileged many. To the
initiated, life without one would be intolerable. By following just a few simple
rules (helpfully spelled out on packets) we can enjoy foods and drinks of pristine
freshness whenever we desire them. And when we run out, we simply make a
trip to the larger refrigerators at the supermarket to restock.
So ubiquitous is this routine that we don’t give it a second thought. We do not
consider that our kitchen fridge is the very tip of a chilled tendril, one of millions
more that make up a network known in food-industry circles as the cold chain.
The cold chain, with its myriad nodes and branches, entangles the globe,
creating a temperature-controlled transport corridor that connects the farmer’s
field and the trawler’s hold to every grocery store chiller.
Linking to the chain gets us sashimi in Vegas, strawberries at Christmas and
sorbets whatever the weather. The chain gives us choice and the luxury of time
to make it. No longer is fresh produce rushed into cities during the cool of the
night to be consumed within hours of its arrival. Forget the skyscrapers, subways
and information superhighways – it’s the fridge that makes a modern city. The
refrigerators of Greater Tokyo, the world’s largest urban area, provide the
ingredients for at least million meals a day. Without the cold chain, life in such
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a metropolis would be an unimaginable ordeal.
But the modern world is full of innovations, so what’s the big deal about the
refrigerator? The kitchen alone is equipped with all kinds of technological
necessities – the electric kettle, the fan oven, the microwave … and the fridge.
There is of course one obvious defining difference: all but one of them heats,
and only the fridge cools.
Heat and light have been at the command of humanity for at least millennia
100
since we learned to make and control fire. We only really won the battle over
cold a century ago, and still the spoils of that victory have yet to be shared with
many parts of the globe. Today, the idea that hot and cold are two sides of the
same coin seems second nature, but that was far from obvious to the long line of
scholars whose combined efforts figured it out for us. Their stories run from the
inspired to the bizarre, as they employed gnomes, meteors, perpetual motion
machines and tortured mice to reveal the truth.
The knowledge that they – the likes of Cornelius Drebbel, Robert Boyle and
James Joule – revealed was to form the basis of thermodynamics, the field of
physics that tackles the behaviour of energy. Martin Goldstein, an American
chemist and author on the subject of thermodynamics, had it right when he
wrote: ‘Some people want to know how a refrigerator works. Others want to
know the fate of the universe … The science that relates them is
thermodynamics.’
A refrigerator is a ‘heat pump’, which on the face of it is perhaps an
uninspiring term. However, dig a little deeper into the concept and it reveals
something rather amazing – tiny acts of rebellion against the conformity of the
universe.
The idea of a ‘heat sink’ is perhaps a familiar one. Basically it means that the
energy of a hot space is transferred to one that is less hot. So heat pours out of
the Sun, warming objects around it – mostly the planets, including Earth. In turn
Earth’s heat energy dissipates into the growing emptiness of space, which is the
ultimate ‘heat sink’. This one-way travel is an unbreakable law of
thermodynamics, but one that can be disrupted, albeit temporarily, by a ‘heat
pump’. A heat pump can push heat against the universal flow. In the case of a
refrigerator, it is pushing heat out of the food and freezer compartments into the
surroundings, and as a result everything inside gets colder.
Our planet alone, among the billions postulated to exist, is home to an army of
heat pumps, machines that are working against the inexorable collapse of order
into chaos. Now it is perhaps becoming clearer why palaeolithic man had little
trouble torching a wooden stick, but had to wait several dozen millennia before
he could put an ice-lolly on it.
The technology that could harness physical laws to create cold was far from
an overnight sensation. It took years to transform it from a prototype in to
170 1750
anything approaching a mass-market product. However, the demand for cold had
raced ahead of the technology.
The storage of natural ice had been a niche practice for the wealthiest since
antiquity, especially in Asia. As with so many other technologies, Eastern
knowhow was put to work in Renaissance Europe, so the nobility of Italy,
France and Spain also had the luxury of chilled wines and iced desserts. Luxury
was not all it was used for. In , Cesare Borgia, the notorious leader of an army
1503
that had swept across swathes of southern Europe in the name of the Pope –
Cesare was a bastard son of the incumbent – used his supply of ice for a less
traditional purpose.
Cesare had already made his mark on history by that time. He is reputed to be
the inspiration behind Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince ( ), a handy guide on
1513
how to rule with terror and treachery, and he also appears as one of the bad guys
in the Assassin’s Creed games. Neither makes reference to his possibly unique
experience with ice. Both he and his father, Pope Alexander VI, were struck
down by a terrible fever – retold as a planned poisoning gone awry. While the
Pope opted for a thorough-going bleeding to combat the malady, Cesare’s fever
raged so strongly that he was immersed in a man-sized oil jar filled with iced
water. It did the trick; Cesare survived to lie, cheat and murder for another
20
years – but the treatment is reported to have made all of his skin fall off (Pope
Alexander died, and his body was so swollen by the disease that it had to be
literally hammered into the coffin).
The medicinal virtues of cold were widely considered – although drinking too
much cold water was also deemed a dangerous and unnatural act – but
preservation of food was not regarded as a primary use for ice at first. The rise of
icehouses across Europe was primarily due to a demand for chilled wines and
dessert but the vogue grew for stocking them with sides of fresh meat and
ripening fruits.
It would take some nineteenth-century American get-up-and-go to
commercialise the use of ice on a global scale, first as slabs of natural ice and
then through mechanical refrigeration. A social revolution had begun, slow for