How We Got to Now (2014–…): Season 1, Episode 5 - Cold - full transcript
Ice delivery becomes big business, the father of frozen foods, Clarence Birdseye, and his vision for the future, and penguins who live in the desert.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Imagine what life was like
before we could make anything
cold.
Just a few generations ago,
we had no idea how
to keep food fresh,
and hot places like
Arizona or Dubai
were basically uninhabitable.
And forget about ice cream.
So how did we get to today's
refrigerated world?
Two hundred years ago,
there would have been
no way to escape the heat.
Well, it took people like
the college dropout
who first decided to ship ice
around the world...
Everywhere he goes,
the ice melts.
But he doesn't give up.
and a guy trying to feed
his family in the Arctic...
Imagine trying to live
the entire winter
on, like, moose jerky.
who winds up changing
the way we eat forever.
Ice fishermen.
These are classic examples
of the kind of people
who actually made
the modern world.
People you've probably
never heard of.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
They are the hobbyists,
garage inventors,
and obsessive tinkerers.
Ordinary people doing
extraordinary things.
The thing about these pioneers
is that they didn't just make
our world a cooler place,
but they also set in motion an
amazing chain reaction of ideas.
From the places we live
to the food on our plates,
from politics to Hollywood
to mass migrations,
I want to show how these
seemingly unconnected worlds
are linked by the unsung
heroes of cold.
I'm Steven Johnson.
I write about ideas
and innovation.
And this is the untold story
of How We Got to Now.
How We Got to Now
was made possible in part by
the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting
Fire: man's original
innovation.
We've been tinkering with that
for over 100,000 years.
But what about the opposite
of fire?
What about our relationship
with cold?
I don't actually normally
sleep like this in my ski gear,
but I'm actually in one of
the most extraordinary rooms
I've ever been in.
I'm in Quebec, in a hotel
made entirely out of ice.
I mean, not just the structure,
but look around me, everything.
This bed is made of ice,
that table is made of ice,
this object -- I don't even
know what this is,
but it's made of ice.
I mean, normally when you
check into your room
and it's 10 below freezing,
you're like calling the front
desk to complain,
but people come from all over
the world to stay at this hotel.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Apart from an average
temperature below freezing
and the fact that it all melts
every spring,
this is just like
a normal hotel:
dozens of rooms, a front desk,
a grand lobby.
It's even got a chapel
and, of course, a bar.
Refrigerators are there actually
to keep the drinks warm,
because it's actually warmer
in the fridge
than it is in the ambient
temperature of the hotel.
Otherwise all the drinks
would freeze.
For Jacques Desbois, the man
who created this palace of ice,
it is a symbol of how far
the French-Canadian settlers
of Quebec have come
in their relationship
with cold.
Snow and ice, it's just kind of
like an inconvenience.
It's getting your car stuck
in it or something like that.
But there's so much creativity
and innovation here
in this space.
You know, we -- well, in a way,
this is an igloo.
- It's a huge igloo.
- Right, right.
And we're at a point that
that snow shelter,
which was used for survival
centuries and centuries ago,
now exists for our own pleasure,
for our own amazement.
And in Quebec province here,
our ancestors were
Mediterranean people
that have lost their way.
- Right.
- They were thinking --
they were looking
for tropical places in Asia,
but, more and more, we are
becoming real northern people.
- Right, embracing winter.
- And this is -- yeah, sure.
And it's a way
to make people realize
that snow is not only
an inconvenience,
but we can take
advantage of it.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
People have been doing
imaginative things with ice
in frozen parts of the world
forever,
but just 200 years ago,
eons after we first
mastered fire,
something profound changed.
We began to realize that
we could use ice and cold
as tools to make life better
in warmer climates.
And that revolution began
with a simple idea,
one of those little pleasures
of modern life
that we take for granted:
an ice-cold drink
on a hot summer's day.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Meet Frederic Tudor,
a wealthy young Bostonian.
[ horse snorts ]
In 1805, aged just 21,
Tudor visits the fine state
of South Carolina,
the perfect environment
for the fashionable elite.
Or at least it would be
the perfect environment
if it weren't so insanely hot.
I mean, it is really humid,
and look at me,
I've got like
seven layers on.
I mean, it looks good,
but, you know, until you die
of heatstroke
in the middle
of the afternoon.
But 200 years ago,
there would have been no way
to escape the heat of these long
summer months in the South.
And Frederic Tudor
found it unbearable.
Back then, living in
a hot place,
you would never experience
anything cold.
I mean, warm lemonade,
anyone?
And this gets him thinking
about home,
about the cold of the north,
and it inspires him
to start taking notes
in a journal.
He calls it
The Ice House Diary.
In New England
there's a resource
that's free and abundant
during winter: ice.
Upper class families
store it for the summer
and use it to make ice cream,
chill drinks,
and preserve food.
Tudor thinks, "What if I could
cut ice from frozen lakes
and ship it to people
in hot places?"
He writes about
"the transporting of ice
to popular climes."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
[ birds cawing ]
Tudor thinks that ice
is going to make him rich,
but the reality is
in 1805,
moving ice long distances
is impossible.
And even if you could get it
to some faraway hot location,
there's no way it would last.
In one of his first attempts,
Tudor sends a ship full of ice
3,200 kilometers
from Boston to the Caribbean
island of Martinique.
It almost all melts, and his
attempts to transport ice
lose Tudor the modern
equivalent
of nearly $1 million.
Tudor's attempts to bring ice
to the South
end up landing him
in a debtor's prison.
He loses his friends
and his family fortune.
He ultimately has
a nervous breakdown.
His basic problem is simple:
back then, no one knows how
to keep frozen water frozen...
and everyone thinks
his idea is nuts.
Okay, so the way I see it is
Tudor's problem
is that his idea is really
only half-baked.
And if you think about it,
it's just a fragment
of an idea, really,
and it's going to take him
decades
to get all the pieces togethe.
It's what I call
"the slow hunch."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
If you want to understand
how big ideas truly
change the world,
you need to get rid of the myth
of the eureka moment.
The truth is there's
no such thing
as a light bulb going off
in the mind of a lone genius.
Our best ideas start
as something else,
a vague sense of possibility,
a hint of something bigger.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Trying to turn his hunch
into a viable business,
Tudor endures more than
a decade of disaster.
At one point, he even writes
to himself,
"Had you not better entirely
abandon this ice business?"
All the signs suggest
that Tudor's dream is going
to come to nothing.
So what does he do next?
He packs up a ship filled
with ice and heads south.
Tudor's perseverance
might seem crazy to us now,
but the thing is, he's sensing
that his slow hunch
is finally going to pay off.
Let me show you why.
Tudor's problem is,
how do you move ice around
without it melting?
But now he has
his light bulb moment,
except that it's not really
a light bulb moment
because it takes him
10 years.
But he realizes that thanks
to the lumber trade,
New England is filled with
another abundant and free
resource
that will solve his problem:
sawdust.
So let me show you
how he would do it.
I feel like I'm actually
doing a cooking show here.
But basically he would take
these ships
and line them entirely
with sawdust,
and he would fill the space
between all the blocks of ice,
and then he would put
another layer of ice
on top of the sawdust.
And when he did this, he found
that sawdust was the perfect
insulator.
The ice wouldn't melt.
It was beautifully simple.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Tudor's bigger challenge,
though, is how to store ice
once it arrives
in sunnier climes.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
But he has a plan.
I'm in the Lowcountry
of Sth Carolina.
It's late July,
and it's pretty humid.
But imagine what it would have
been like 150 years ago.
It's sweltering like this
for months on end,
and there's literally no way
to escape the heat.
There's no air conditioning,
there's no refrigeration.
And then you walk
into a space like this.
This may look like an ordinary
19th-century barn,
but if I open up this hatch,
we find something miraculous:
it's a giant frozen chunk
of Massachusetts.
It may seem like I'm just
in a hole
in the bottom of a barn here,
but actually, this was
state-of-the-art technology
in the middle
of the 19th century.
In fact, you can really feel
how effective it is.
I mean, my upper body is still
really quite warm and humid,
but my pants are starting
to freeze.
And the key thing here
is this cavity
on the side of the structure.
This is double-shelled
insulation,
and this was the major
breakthrough
that helped him take these giant
blocks of ice that you see
and keep them cold
for long periods of time.
And it was so efficient that
a large block of ice like this
would actually last
for four to six months
through the hottest time
of the year.
Now Tudor can get ice
exactly where he wants it,
and a huge new industry
is born.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Ice cream, cocktails,
chilled food:
America gets hooked.
Soon hundreds of thousands
of people work the ice harvest.
In New York,
the ice man cometh.
Nearly half the city's
population keeps ice at home.
Reports of mild winters
create panic,
and something extraordinary
happens.
Previously, Americans had
only eaten fresh food
produced on their doorstep.
Now trains chilled with ice
create a food network.
Produce from the South
and West
become staples
of Northern meals.
ANNOUNCER: When you realize that
about 1,000 food trains
bring perishable food
to New York every week,
you'll understand that ice
for refrigeration
is something of the first water.
We become much healthier
and better nourished,
while our cities,
freed from the limits
of their surrounding resources,
experience rapid growth.
Cold is shaping
a new America.
But what I find incredible
is how primitive our ideas
about cold are at this point.
I mean, this is the middle
of the 19th century, right?
It's an era of coal-powered
factories and railroads
and telegraph wires
connecting cities,
and yet the state of the art
in cold technology
is cutting chunks of frozen
water out of a lake.
Frederic Tudor's slow hunch,
his crazy idea,
has become America's second
biggest export after cotton.
India, the Caribbean,
even Queen Victoria
has New England ice
served with dinner.
But Tudor hasn't just created
a global appetite for ice.
He's also created a platform
for ideas about cold
which will soon trigger
a chain of events
not even Tudor could
have imagined.
I read this article
the other week
about scientists who discovered
this primitive ski
in a Swedish bog,
and when they dated it,
it turned out that
it was 4,000 years old.
And I thought,
"Skiing is really a microcosm
of our whole relationship
to cold."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
So we've literally spent eons
taking the natural cold
of snow and ice
and figuring out fun ways
to do things with it.
But then cold got so fun
that everybody wanted
a piece of the action.
And so we started tinkering
with making artificial cold.
And that's when things
started to get really weird.
Okay, enough television
trickery.
I'm not really
in the mountains.
This is one of the world's
biggest indoor ski resorts.
But it gets even crazier.
Come on, you've got to check
this out.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
The modern world of cold does
not get any weirder than this.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
I'm standing above
the city of Dubai.
We're in the middle of
the Arabian Desert.
It's about 100 degrees out,
it's 8:00 a.m. in the morning,
which means that I have
to take my ski gear off
because it's insane
to be out here wearing this.
And here we are in this
vast city in the desert,
and yet beneath me...
are skiers,
ski lifts, real snow,
a toboggan run, and, get this,
penguins.
Now, Ski Dubai might look like
some sort of futuristic
spacecraft
that has crashed into
a parking garage,
but, in fact, some
of the technology
keeping this place cold
is 200 years old.
I'm here in the space
between the ceiling
of the indoor ski slope
and the roof of the overall
structure,
and it's this really strange,
a little bit creepy space.
They call it "the void."
And it's an extraordinary space,
because basically this is
the primary means of insulation
that they're using here.
It's just the gas of the air
that's keeping the temperature
28 degrees Fahrenheit below me
and 110 right above me.
And what I love about this
is that the principle of using
the air in this void
to keep the ski slope cool,
it's something
that Frederic Tudor would have
recognized in a heartbeat.
It's basically the same design
that he used in his ice house.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And down below on the slopes,
there's another 19th-century
innovation
making the snow and maintaining
a temperature
just below freezing:
artificial cold.
So there's an entire
winter wonderland
on the other side of that wall,
and yet we are in the middle
of the desert;
it's 110 degrees outside.
How do you pull this off?
There what you need is
a really, really big fridge.
It's the same principle as
a fridge I've got in my house?
Absolutely, the refrigeration
is very much the same
as the fridge in your house,
and even the way the building
is constructed and designed
is very similar to a fridge.
Do you worry about
the cold escaping
when people are coming
in and out?
I mean, is that a big concern?
Yeah. Think of your
fridge at home, right?
Every time you get
an orange juice out,
you open the door, and all
the cold air rushes out.
If you look at your fridge
again, and we mimic Ski Dubai,
your fridge, your big
American fridge,
would have a door
the size of my thumb.
- Really?
- And we only have three doors
leading into Ski Dubai
from outside,
so we control that airflow
in and out very, very well.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
This place, and the fact
that I'm hanging out
in the middle
of the Arabian Desert
with a bunch of penguins,
is proof of just how
sophisticated
the modern use of artificial
cold has become.
But the beginnings
of manmade refrigeration
were far from being fun.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
It's an innovation born
of suffering and war.
Like much of the south, Florida
has a subtropical climate.
That means mosquitoes.
[ mosquitoes buzzing ]
And in the 1840s,
mosquitoes mean diseases
like malaria are rife.
In 1841, an outbreak
of yellow fever
decimates the population
of northern Florida.
And in the middle of all
of this death and misery,
there's this guy,
Dr. John Gorrie,
who is about to start working
on an idea that is so big,
it will ultimately transform
all of our lives.
But the thing about it is today
he's completely unknown.
What I find fascinating
about Gorrie's life
is that it's a great reminder of
one of the most important things
about innovation, which is
that timing is everything.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Gorrie's hospital is filled
with patients
burning up with fever.
I mean, just imagine
what a hospital
would have been like
in the American South in 1842.
Take all the advanced
technology
of a modern hospital out,
and you're left basically just
with beds
and patients dying
in the sweltering heat.
But Gorrie thinks that
if he can cool the air
around his feverish patients,
he can both ease their suffering
and stop the spread of disease.
So he sets out to build
a contraption to do just that.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
This is how Gorrie's design
would have worked.
He's got a chimney bringing in
air from above the hospital
that flows down
over this giant basin.
And he would take
these huge blocks of ice
and put them in the basin,
and the result would be
perfectly chilled air
flows over the patients
in their beds,
reducing their fevers,
potentially saving their lives.
It's a brilliant idea,
and it's all in the service
of Gorrie being
a better physician.
[ thunder rumbles
and wind whistles ]
But Florida isn't done
with Gorrie yet.
Shipwrecks along
Hurricane Alley
mean delayed ice shipments
from Frederic Tudor's
New England,
so one day Gorrie's supply
runs dry.
Now Gorrie has the crazy idea
to make his own ice.
But how?
Luckily, Gorrie is living
at the perfect time
to have this idea.
For all of human history,
you couldn't even conceive
of making artificial cold.
But then, somehow, in the
middle of the 19th century,
the idea becomes imaginable.
So how do we explain
this kind of breakthrough?
I mean, it's not like there's
some kind of solitary genius
who's so much more brilliant
than everybody else
that they come up with the idea
on their own,
and that's because
ideas are fundamentally
networks of other ideas.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
We take the tools, concepts,
and scientific understanding
of our time,
and then remix them
into something new.
But if you don't have
the right building blocks,
you can't make
the breakthrough,
however brilliant
you might be.
The smartest mind in the world
couldn't invent a refrigerator
in the middle
of the 17th century.
But by 1850, the pieces
had come together.
The first thing
that had to happen
seems almost comical
to us now.
We had to discover that air was
actually made of something,
that it wasn't just
empty space between objects.
That happened in the 1600s,
when scientists used a pump
to suck air from a jar
and discovered the vacuum,
proving that air was made
from some mysterious
invisible elements.
We then found that
when air or other gases
are squashed together,
they heat up,
and when they are stretched
out, they cool down.
The thermometer comes along,
followed by a universal scale
or two,
allowing us to measure
temperature.
And now amazing machines
can be built
that convert the heat from
gases into a usable energy.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Gorrie brings all these ideas
together
and builds America's first
mechanical refrigerator,
a machine that makes ice.
And then Gorrie applies
for a patent for his invention.
Listen to the language he uses
to describe this thing:
"Artificial cold
might better serve mankind.
Fruits and vegetables and meat
will be preserved in transit
by my refrigeration system,
and thereby enjoyed by all."
He completely nails the modern
world of artificial cold.
The rural doctor has created
a technology
that's now as ubiquitous
as the light bulb.
So why isn't John Gorrie
as famous as Thomas Edison?
So he's got a magical artificial
ice-making machine in the South,
and one would think that would
be a huge financial success.
There's a proven market
for ice,
there's a machine that will
do it artificially.
That's true,
but the problem is
is that there was a lot
that had to be done
to perfect the equipment.
John Gorrie had a basic idea,
he had a vision,
he had a machine
that rudimentally did it,
but it had to be perfected,
and it had to be brought in
to a point
where you could afford to use
the machine to make ice.
Like any new technological
innovation,
Gorrie's working prototype
needs development.
The problem is his manmade
ice invention
hasn't exactly come along
at a great time,
because this is an era
dominated
by the now very powerful
and ruthless natural ice baron,
Frederic Tudor.
People who were
in the business
of harvesting so-called natural
ice from rivers and lakes,
they saw a threat
to their business
by a machine that could
actually make the ice.
And of course,
they were the ones
who came up with the term
"artificial ice,"
in other words, fake ice.
It's not real ice.
And the thing that's
interesting about it
was that the natural ice people
said that,
"Well, this artificial ice
could make you sick
or it could cause disease"
and things like that,
and on the other hand,
their natural ice was becoming
progressively more
from polluted sources,
and that was causing people
to get sick.
I would -- drinking pond water
from, like,
a swampy pond in New England,
that's not something --
I would much rather have
a nice "artificial" ice.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Unable to find backers,
John Gorrie dies penniless,
without selling
a single machine.
But his vision
of manmade refrigeration
is about to inspire
a new generation of inventors.
It was an idea
that's time had come.
It just needed a trigger
to launch it
into the public consciousness.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
[ booms ]
That comes in the shape
of the Civil War.
The Union blockades
the South
to cripple the Confederate
economy.
Suddenly, the Southern states
have no ice.
Vital supplies were smuggled
past the blockade
into the Southern states.
Blockade runners used to hide
out in creeks like this one,
slipping out into
the open ocean at night.
But they weren't just smuggling
weapons or gunpowder;
sometimes they had
an equally precious cargo:
ice-making machines.
Check this out:
this is one of the first
ice-making machines ever built.
It's designed by the Frenchman
Ferdinand Carré.
It can output about 400 pounds
of ice in an hour.
This is one of the world's
first refrigerators,
and it was smuggled all the way
to the American South
from France.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
In the decades
after the Civil War,
artificial refrigeration
patents explode
as a network of innovators
adapt and improve
on Gorrie's ideas.
In the 20 years following
Gorrie's invention,
there are 54 separate
refrigeration patents filed.
From now on, the slow decline
of the ice trade is inevitable.
Refrigeration becomes
a huge industry,
and I do mean huge,
with steam-powered monster
machines
soon changing the urban
landscape of America,
turning areas like New York's
Tribeca neighborhood
into a hub of artificial cold.
This building, for instance,
behind me.
Today it's a fancy condo,
it's filled with
your Robert De Niros
and your supermodels,
but 100 years ago, it was filled
with eggs and milk and produce,
feeding a growing city.
It was a giant
high-rise refrigerator.
But as with much
new technology,
the machinery of manmade cold
is destined to get smaller
as the idea of a once-ridiculed
amateur inventor
becomes an essential part
of the modern home.
TV ANNOUNCER: Here she comes,
the lucky woman who owns
a new refrigerator!
Between 1945 and 1949,
Americans purchased
20 million
of these revolutionary
machines.
Now ideas about how to fill
these new refrigerators
will have an even greater
impact on our lives.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Clarence Birdseye --
yes, he was a real person --
grew up in Brooklyn,
New York.
But the story of his big idea
doesn't start here.
In fact, he couldn't wait
to get away from this place.
Birdseye had displayed
an insatiable scientific
curiosity,
a streak of eccentricity,
and a longing for adventure.
At 21 years old,
he becomes a naturalist
with the U.S. Biological
Survey,
studying animal populations
on the American frontier.
He keeps a journal
during this period,
and it's clear
if you read it now
that he's not just interested
in scientifically assessing
these critters.
He's also obsessed
with eating them as well.
[ growls ]
And the weirder, the better.
I mean, listen to this passage:
"For Sunday dinner,
we had horned owl.
Does that sound good?
Well, it was good,
no matter how it sounds."
And he goes on to eat, over
the course of his adventures,
a beaver, a hawk, mice,
gopher, rattlesnake,
porcupine, chipmunk,
even skunk.
Although apparently only
the front half.
And it all leads up
to what he calls
the "pièce de résistance,"
"one of the most scrumptious
meals I ever ate,"
which was a dish
of sherry marinated lynx.
[ growls ]
Birdseye's diet
may sound crazy,
but this is common-sense eating
and valuable training
for the ultimate survival
challenge to come.
[ dogs barking ]
[ ♪♪♪ ]
In 1916, Birdseye brings
his wife and newborn son
to Labrador, a remote,
frozen wilderness
in Canada's subarctic north.
It must have been
quite a shock.
I mean, besides having to be
dragged through the snow
by, like, a pack
of maniacal dogs,
Birdseye had moved his family
to one of the most extreme
environments on the planet.
[ dogs barking ]
But this is an adventure
that will change Birdseye's
life, and ours, forever.
We have this cliché
about innovation
that it just happens
in Silicon Valley garages
and corporate research
development labs,
not in an environment
like this.
I mean, I've got like
30-mile-an-hour winds blowing,
ice pellets hitting me
in the face.
It's hard enough just
to stand upright and talk,
much less, like,
have a brilliant idea.
But, in a way, it's the severity
of this landscape
that's kind of the point.
Because it's here, in the frozen
Canadian winter,
that Clarence Birdseye will have
the beginning of an idea
that will turn out to be
one of the most transformative
ones of the 20th century.
And as always with Birdseye,
this new idea will revolve
around food.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Birdseye is among
a handful of settlers
in a region the size
of Britain
that has no modern
food network --
no stores, no livestock --
and which, during the winter,
is effectively cut off
from the rest of the world.
Everything people ate
during the winter
was preserved and cured
and stockpiled.
There was nothing fresh.
I mean, imagine trying to live
the entire winter
on, like, moose jerky,
right?
But like John Gorrie
before him,
Birdseye is motivated
by basic human concerns.
He just wants to feed
good, healthy, fresh food
to his family.
[ wind whistling ]
But Birdseye is about to get
some culinary inspiration
from Labrador's
indigenous Inuit.
I'm standing out here
on top of a frozen fjord.
I've got 600 feet of water
beneath me.
We've got whiteout conditions.
I can't feel my toes anymore.
Apparently the water
beneath this layer of ice
is actually shark-infested,
I'm told,
so, all in all, it's a perfect
day for fishing.
And Jerri Thrasher,
an Inuit
from Canada's Northwest
Territories,
is going to show me how...
once we've dug a hole
through the ice.
Would you like
to try?
Yeah, give me a chance
at this.
Okay, so I just kind of
hack around the side?
Yep, you want to hit
the ice a little hard,
so the harder you hit,
the bigger the chunks.
Right.
And the less time it'll take
to make your fishing hole.
So if this ice
is three feet thick,
I think it'll probably take us
about three days
- to cut through this.
- It would take you three days.
It would take me three days,
really?
Spending time fishing
with the Inuit,
Birdseye notices that
they use the extreme weather
to their advantage.
They freeze their fish
in the open air
so they can store it.
So how important
is ice fishing
to Inuit culture?
Fresh meats and fresh fish
are very important.
Fish coming out of the water
in -20 or -30,
you can lay the fish
on the side,
and within the hour
it'll be completely frozen.
They would dig like caches
under the ground
in the permafrost
where it would stay cold
during the entire winter,
and there they would store
their winter supply
of fish and meat.
That's amazing.
So basically for thousands
of years, there's frozen food
that the Inuit culture has
kind of figured out how to do.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
For Birdseye,
this is a revelation.
Freshly caught fish,
frozen in the Arctic air,
could be kept for weeks
or even months,
and once thawed and eaten,
it would still taste delicious.
He wonders if freezing
can help other types of food
stay fresh for longer, so he
experiments with vegetables.
He begins to notice a pattern:
food frozen in the coldest
depths of mid-winter
tastes better when it's thawed
than food frozen earlier
or later in the season.
And that's because
slower freezing
creates larger ice crystals,
which damage the cellular
structure of the food.
Birdseye realized something
that the Inuits had almost
instinctively understood
for thousands of years:
that if you wanted to have
really fresh frozen food,
you had to have the smallest
possible ice crystals,
and for that, you needed the
fastest possible freezing time.
This is the point where
you might expect me to say,
"And now Birdseye has an idea
that changes the world
and introduces the universe
of frozen convenience
that all of us enjoy today."
But actually, that's not
what happened at all.
Because, you see,
like Frederic Tudor,
Birdseye's hunch will take
decades to finally pay off,
but unlike Tudor,
Birdseye basically just forgets
about his hunch.
In 1917, Birdseye moves
his family
back to the United States.
He basically stops thinking
about frozen food altogether.
Back in the city, he's got
all the fresh produce
he could possibly eat.
For the next few years,
Birdseye searches for
a new career direction,
and he ends up at
the U.S. Fisheries Association.
Here, he studies
the fishing industry.
He watches how produce
makes its way
from the docks to the consumer
and notices that too many fish
get spoiled
and lose their value
on the way to market.
So Birdseye wonders,
"What's the best way
to get fish to the kitchen
in the freshest way possible?"
And this is where, finally,
his slow hunch resurfaces.
Birdseye decides that
flash freezing is the key.
Birdseye develops
a practical process
for fast freezing food quickly
on a commercial scale.
It's called "multi-plate
flash freezing,"
an idea upon which an entire
industry will be founded.
But of course, no matter
how brilliant Birdseye's idea,
he can't change the world
all on his own.
Ideas don't really work
that way.
For frozen food to reach
today's ubiquity,
it will take a convergence
of other ideas about cold.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And that is where we meet
Frederick McKinley Jones.
Jones was born in 1893,
and he was orphaned
at the age of 9.
By the time he was 11,
he had his first full-time job,
and by the time he was 16,
he was working in
an auto repair shop.
He didn't come from
the world of privilege
like Frederic Tudor,
and he didn't have the advanced
degrees of Dr. John Gorrie.
But he was destined
to change the world
every bit as much
as those other pioneers
in the story of cold.
Jones was a natural tinkerer
with a gift
for innovative ideas.
This ability would lead him
to tackle
the thorny problem
of food transportation.
Ice-chilled food delivery
had changed the world,
but it was far from perfect.
It was always a race
against time.
Freight trains had to stop
at regular intervals
to replace ice
from trackside ice houses.
It wasn't a perfect system,
and it was even tougher
in a truck
because any delays meant melted
ice and a spoiled cargo.
And so, like Birdseye
before him,
Jones began to wonder
if there was a better way.
Jones designed a small,
durable refrigerated unit
that mounted on a truck
to keep its contents chilled.
Although he lived
in a time
when African-American inventors
were rarely recognized
or given opportunities,
he managed to convince
his white boss
to pay for its development.
It was a success.
After World War II,
he developed refrigerated
containers
that could be moved from train
to ship to truck,
perfecting America's
food distribution network.
For nearly a century,
our food networks
had relied on these two
parallel systems:
the older system of natural ice
and the new technology
of artificial refrigeration.
But Fred Jones' mobile
refrigerated truck
marked a turning point.
It was the end of
Frederic Tudor's ice trade.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
New ideas and inventions
for making things cold
come together
and begin to transform
the way we eat.
Freezer trucks,
refrigerated warehouses,
supermarkets with
freezer units,
an electrical grid powering
new suburban homes
with electric refrigerators
in every kitchen.
By 1944, 300,000 tons
of frozen food
are being sold in America
in a single year.
By the time of his death,
the company founded by Jones,
Thermo King, is worth
the modern equivalent
of a quarter of a billion
dollars.
His maverick invention
not only makes him
one of the richest black men
in the country,
it also enables frozen foods
to become a part of all
of our lives.
Now, flash freezing is just
the beginning of the story.
Because once they get
into circulation,
good ideas like this
have a way
of opening up new doors
of possibility.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And today, fast and flash
freezing
is shaping our world
in profound ways
that even a visionary
like Birdseye
could have never expected.
We freeze sperm, eggs,
and embryos,
creating millions
of new human lives.
So this is Eamon.
Now, tell me the story of how
this guy came into the world.
Sure. Well, we were
lucky enough to use IVF.
We have a 5-year-old at home
who was conceived that day
and was never frozen,
and then we were lucky enough
to freeze the extra embryos.
Hopefully we'll come back.
And so to store them,
you have to freeze them?
Freeze them, yeah.
Two days later they froze them
and, you know,
then they thawed them out,
and it's like, all right,
they're still good,
and like, great.
And we were able
to have him implanted,
and here he is,
18 months old.
Because it's extraordinary
to think -- I mean,
there are so many different
scientific breakthroughs,
technological breakthroughs
that make IVF possible,
but if you think about it,
Eamon, without artificial cold,
without the ability to kind of
flash freeze something,
- he wouldn't be here.
- He wouldn't exist.
It's an extraordinary,
extraordinary thing.
- We'd be a smaller family.
- We're so glad it worked out!
- We're blessed.
- We are very lucky.
From the idea that ice could
cool a drink on a summer's day
to Clarence Birdseye's
innovation,
the journey of cold helped
shape how we live now.
But perhaps the biggest impact
of all
would come as ideas about cold
start to define not just
how we live, but where.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
In the summer of 1925,
a man with a big idea
takes a seat in a packed
New York movie theater.
It's the first golden age
of Hollywood,
but the crowds that are there
that day
are not there for the usual
movie escapism.
The man with the big idea
has just invented something
that will revolutionize
the movies.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
The roots of this story
go back to 1902,
when on a roasting hot
summer's day, the same man,
a young engineer
called Willis Carrier,
is called out to a Brooklyn
printworks with a big problem.
The humid air inside
the building
is causing the ink to smear
on their prints.
So they need, somehow,
a way to make the air
consistently dry.
Carrier starts trying to solve
the humidity problem
by taking notes
in this actual journal.
Check this out.
It's filled with all
these physics equations,
so I literally have no idea
what it means.
I mean, it's just
amazingly detailed,
and he's doing this
before computers.
I mean, this is a guy who
clearly needed a spreadsheet.
But out of all
this amazing work,
he comes up with
a new invention,
and he calls it
"an apparatus for treating air."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
It's basically
a giant dehumidifier.
Air goes into
a refrigerated chamber,
moisture condenses
over metal coils,
and dry, cool air
comes out the other end,
which is then pumped
into the print rooms.
It stops the ink from smearin,
but Carrier notices something
interesting:
people enjoy the cool
air-conditioned air, too.
And that's how,
a few years later,
Willis Carrier came to be
sitting nervously
in a movie theater
in New York City.
You see, Hollywood
had a problem.
Nobody in their right mind
would go see a movie
in the summer.
It was just too hot.
But Carrier hoped that
was about to change
thanks to a prototype
AC system he'd installed
in the theater's basement,
a monster machine similar
to the one
sitting in the basement
of this Jersey City cinema
built in 1929 to bring
a new world of comfort cooling
to the audience sitting above.
So now we're in front
of this massive structure.
What is this part?
Well, this is the big blower
that pulls air in off the street
to be conditioned and then
ventilates it out the building.
And that huge fan over there
is kind of powering
the whole thing.
- That's it, yep.
- That's amazing.
Well, what do you think, should
we try and actually turn it on?
There's a little switch here.
If you want to --
I'm going to just hide
behind this pillar over here,
- because it seems very scary.
- All right, you ready?
Okay, duck and cover,
here we go.
[ loud thrumming ]
Oh, my God!
- Wow.
- It works!
That's extraordinary.
God, I feel like a jet
is about to take off.
This is from 1929,
this is the original.
And it's still working.
Right now upstairs
in that giant auditorium
people are beginning
to feel cool.
I'm beginning to feel
a little cool.
It's kind of incredible
when you have a machine
that's, you know,
almost 100 years old,
and it's still working.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Once the AC unit starts up,
cool air is transported
aroundhe building via
a series of enormous ducts...
reaching the customers
via these beautifully
camouflaged grills.
You can really feel--
I mean, the air is really
circulating here,
it's just kind of pouring in
through this doorway.
Yeah, I think this is why
they call it a house fan.
It really ventilates
the entire house.
It's amazing.
I've got dust in my eye
from like the Roosevelt
administration.
Carrier's idea, AC in a cinema,
is revolutionary,
but what will
the cinemagoers think?
Carrier takes a massive risk
on this one demonstration,
even inviting Paramount
Pictures' chief Adolph Zukor,
one of Hollywood's
most powerful men.
Carrier stayed up
all the night before
trying to get
the equipment ready.
Now it was time
to crank up the AC.
He wrote later
about what happened:
"Final adjustments delayed us
in starting up
the air-conditioning system.
From the wings we watched
in dismay
as 2,000 fans fluttered.
But gradually the fans dropped
into laps
as the effects of the air
conditioning became evident.
We had stopped them cold
and breathed a great sigh
of relief.
Afterwards, when Mr. Zukor
saw us, he said tersely,
'Yes, the people are going
to like it.'"
[ applause ]
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And that was the understatement
of the century.
Basically you start
air conditioning theaters,
and what happens to the kind of
American love of cinema?
If you had stopped
the average person in the street
in, say, 1900 or 1910 and said,
"I have a system
where if you push a button,
you'll get cool air,"
they would have thought
you were joking.
It would have been
science fiction.
So for people to actually enter
a movie theater in the 1920s
and experience comfort cool
for the first time,
it changed the whole way they
thought about their environment.
All of a sudden now
with modern air conditioning,
on the hottest days
of the year,
people are starting to come
to the movies.
In 1930, 80 million Americans
go to the movies every week.
That's 65% of the
entire population.
So you would say
every 12 days on average,
the entire country goes
to the movies.
You can't pick a better venue
to expose a great new innovation
like this than the movies.
So air conditioning
actually ends up
inventing the summer
blockbuster?
Air conditioning and movies
go hand-in-hand
throughout their entire
history.
Willis Carrier's invention,
a machine for cooling air
in a print shop,
has changed Hollywood.
But the idea
of air conditioning
proves irresistible, and soon
it will trigger
chain reactions more dramatic
than any other innovation
in the story of cold.
AC is about to redraw
the map of the world.
Okay, so take a look at a map
of the United States
at the beginning
of the 20th century.
Everyone lives in the growing
and prosperous cities
of the North.
The South and the West,
meanwhile,
are economic backwaters.
Towns like Phoenix
and Miami are tiny.
Las Vegas in 1910
has just 937 inhabitants.
Why? Because this
is the Sun Belt.
It's too hot, and no one
wants to live here.
In 1951, Carrier's company
introduces an air conditioning
unit that is miniaturized
and affordable
for a mass market.
And that's when AC
starts to go crazy.
Between the 1950s
and the 1980s,
AC becomes ubiquitous
in people's homes and cars
across America.
And just see what this does
to where people are living.
Tucson, Arizona, grows 400%
in 10 years.
Phoenix 300%.
Tampa, Dallas, Houston,
and Atlanta:
populations double, triple,
and it's the same story
everywhere you look.
TV ANNOUNCER: By 1960,
30,000 people will live
in Broomfield Heights, making
it the fifth largest city...
Carrier's invention
is circulating people
as well as air,
changing lives,
changing America.
But then something even more
interesting happens.
You see, people moving
to the hot states are older
and tend to vote Republican,
and the growing population
in the conservative South
means more electoral college
votes there.
So check out what happens
to the political map of America.
Between 1940 and 1980,
northern states
lose an incredible 31
electoral college votes,
while the southern states
gain 29, doubling the number
in California, Arizona,
and Florida,
the vast majority
voting Republican.
This is long-zoom history.
Less than a century
after Willis Carrier
started to tinker
with stopping the ink
from smearing on a page
in Brooklyn,
our mastery of molecules
of air and moisture
have helped put Ronald Reagan
into the White House.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Today, many of the world's
fastest growing cities,
like Dubai,
are in hot countries.
It's the first mass migration
in human history
to be made possible
by a home appliance.
And all this started
with a half-baked idea,
a hunch in the mind
of a maverick dreamer.
When you think about
inventions,
we tend to be constrained by
the scale of the original idea.
So we assume that if we invent
artificial cold,
our rooms will be cooler
and we'll have ice cubes
in our drink on a hot
summer day.
But if you tell the story
of cold that way,
you miss the majesty of it.
We make our ideas,
and they make us in return.
And when you look at the story
from that angle,
you can't help feel that cold
isn't done with us yet.
[ strumming rock tune ]
In the next episode,
I'm looking at the strange
and surprising story
of sound.
[ throat singing ]
From mavericks
to movie stars...
She'd rather spend the night
at home
reading Scientific American
than going out
to some glamorous party.
these are the men and women
who transformed sound...
So they're sending out
a sound wave through the water,
and it's going to bounce
off of me.
and change the world in ways
you'd never imagine.
How We Got to Now
was made possible in part by
the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting
and by contributions
to your PBS station from...
[ ♪♪♪ ]
To learn more about
How We Got to Now,
visit us on the web at...
How We Got to Now
is available on DVD.
A companion book
is also available.
Imagine what life was like
before we could make anything
cold.
Just a few generations ago,
we had no idea how
to keep food fresh,
and hot places like
Arizona or Dubai
were basically uninhabitable.
And forget about ice cream.
So how did we get to today's
refrigerated world?
Two hundred years ago,
there would have been
no way to escape the heat.
Well, it took people like
the college dropout
who first decided to ship ice
around the world...
Everywhere he goes,
the ice melts.
But he doesn't give up.
and a guy trying to feed
his family in the Arctic...
Imagine trying to live
the entire winter
on, like, moose jerky.
who winds up changing
the way we eat forever.
Ice fishermen.
These are classic examples
of the kind of people
who actually made
the modern world.
People you've probably
never heard of.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
They are the hobbyists,
garage inventors,
and obsessive tinkerers.
Ordinary people doing
extraordinary things.
The thing about these pioneers
is that they didn't just make
our world a cooler place,
but they also set in motion an
amazing chain reaction of ideas.
From the places we live
to the food on our plates,
from politics to Hollywood
to mass migrations,
I want to show how these
seemingly unconnected worlds
are linked by the unsung
heroes of cold.
I'm Steven Johnson.
I write about ideas
and innovation.
And this is the untold story
of How We Got to Now.
How We Got to Now
was made possible in part by
the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting
Fire: man's original
innovation.
We've been tinkering with that
for over 100,000 years.
But what about the opposite
of fire?
What about our relationship
with cold?
I don't actually normally
sleep like this in my ski gear,
but I'm actually in one of
the most extraordinary rooms
I've ever been in.
I'm in Quebec, in a hotel
made entirely out of ice.
I mean, not just the structure,
but look around me, everything.
This bed is made of ice,
that table is made of ice,
this object -- I don't even
know what this is,
but it's made of ice.
I mean, normally when you
check into your room
and it's 10 below freezing,
you're like calling the front
desk to complain,
but people come from all over
the world to stay at this hotel.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Apart from an average
temperature below freezing
and the fact that it all melts
every spring,
this is just like
a normal hotel:
dozens of rooms, a front desk,
a grand lobby.
It's even got a chapel
and, of course, a bar.
Refrigerators are there actually
to keep the drinks warm,
because it's actually warmer
in the fridge
than it is in the ambient
temperature of the hotel.
Otherwise all the drinks
would freeze.
For Jacques Desbois, the man
who created this palace of ice,
it is a symbol of how far
the French-Canadian settlers
of Quebec have come
in their relationship
with cold.
Snow and ice, it's just kind of
like an inconvenience.
It's getting your car stuck
in it or something like that.
But there's so much creativity
and innovation here
in this space.
You know, we -- well, in a way,
this is an igloo.
- It's a huge igloo.
- Right, right.
And we're at a point that
that snow shelter,
which was used for survival
centuries and centuries ago,
now exists for our own pleasure,
for our own amazement.
And in Quebec province here,
our ancestors were
Mediterranean people
that have lost their way.
- Right.
- They were thinking --
they were looking
for tropical places in Asia,
but, more and more, we are
becoming real northern people.
- Right, embracing winter.
- And this is -- yeah, sure.
And it's a way
to make people realize
that snow is not only
an inconvenience,
but we can take
advantage of it.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
People have been doing
imaginative things with ice
in frozen parts of the world
forever,
but just 200 years ago,
eons after we first
mastered fire,
something profound changed.
We began to realize that
we could use ice and cold
as tools to make life better
in warmer climates.
And that revolution began
with a simple idea,
one of those little pleasures
of modern life
that we take for granted:
an ice-cold drink
on a hot summer's day.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Meet Frederic Tudor,
a wealthy young Bostonian.
[ horse snorts ]
In 1805, aged just 21,
Tudor visits the fine state
of South Carolina,
the perfect environment
for the fashionable elite.
Or at least it would be
the perfect environment
if it weren't so insanely hot.
I mean, it is really humid,
and look at me,
I've got like
seven layers on.
I mean, it looks good,
but, you know, until you die
of heatstroke
in the middle
of the afternoon.
But 200 years ago,
there would have been no way
to escape the heat of these long
summer months in the South.
And Frederic Tudor
found it unbearable.
Back then, living in
a hot place,
you would never experience
anything cold.
I mean, warm lemonade,
anyone?
And this gets him thinking
about home,
about the cold of the north,
and it inspires him
to start taking notes
in a journal.
He calls it
The Ice House Diary.
In New England
there's a resource
that's free and abundant
during winter: ice.
Upper class families
store it for the summer
and use it to make ice cream,
chill drinks,
and preserve food.
Tudor thinks, "What if I could
cut ice from frozen lakes
and ship it to people
in hot places?"
He writes about
"the transporting of ice
to popular climes."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
[ birds cawing ]
Tudor thinks that ice
is going to make him rich,
but the reality is
in 1805,
moving ice long distances
is impossible.
And even if you could get it
to some faraway hot location,
there's no way it would last.
In one of his first attempts,
Tudor sends a ship full of ice
3,200 kilometers
from Boston to the Caribbean
island of Martinique.
It almost all melts, and his
attempts to transport ice
lose Tudor the modern
equivalent
of nearly $1 million.
Tudor's attempts to bring ice
to the South
end up landing him
in a debtor's prison.
He loses his friends
and his family fortune.
He ultimately has
a nervous breakdown.
His basic problem is simple:
back then, no one knows how
to keep frozen water frozen...
and everyone thinks
his idea is nuts.
Okay, so the way I see it is
Tudor's problem
is that his idea is really
only half-baked.
And if you think about it,
it's just a fragment
of an idea, really,
and it's going to take him
decades
to get all the pieces togethe.
It's what I call
"the slow hunch."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
If you want to understand
how big ideas truly
change the world,
you need to get rid of the myth
of the eureka moment.
The truth is there's
no such thing
as a light bulb going off
in the mind of a lone genius.
Our best ideas start
as something else,
a vague sense of possibility,
a hint of something bigger.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Trying to turn his hunch
into a viable business,
Tudor endures more than
a decade of disaster.
At one point, he even writes
to himself,
"Had you not better entirely
abandon this ice business?"
All the signs suggest
that Tudor's dream is going
to come to nothing.
So what does he do next?
He packs up a ship filled
with ice and heads south.
Tudor's perseverance
might seem crazy to us now,
but the thing is, he's sensing
that his slow hunch
is finally going to pay off.
Let me show you why.
Tudor's problem is,
how do you move ice around
without it melting?
But now he has
his light bulb moment,
except that it's not really
a light bulb moment
because it takes him
10 years.
But he realizes that thanks
to the lumber trade,
New England is filled with
another abundant and free
resource
that will solve his problem:
sawdust.
So let me show you
how he would do it.
I feel like I'm actually
doing a cooking show here.
But basically he would take
these ships
and line them entirely
with sawdust,
and he would fill the space
between all the blocks of ice,
and then he would put
another layer of ice
on top of the sawdust.
And when he did this, he found
that sawdust was the perfect
insulator.
The ice wouldn't melt.
It was beautifully simple.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Tudor's bigger challenge,
though, is how to store ice
once it arrives
in sunnier climes.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
But he has a plan.
I'm in the Lowcountry
of Sth Carolina.
It's late July,
and it's pretty humid.
But imagine what it would have
been like 150 years ago.
It's sweltering like this
for months on end,
and there's literally no way
to escape the heat.
There's no air conditioning,
there's no refrigeration.
And then you walk
into a space like this.
This may look like an ordinary
19th-century barn,
but if I open up this hatch,
we find something miraculous:
it's a giant frozen chunk
of Massachusetts.
It may seem like I'm just
in a hole
in the bottom of a barn here,
but actually, this was
state-of-the-art technology
in the middle
of the 19th century.
In fact, you can really feel
how effective it is.
I mean, my upper body is still
really quite warm and humid,
but my pants are starting
to freeze.
And the key thing here
is this cavity
on the side of the structure.
This is double-shelled
insulation,
and this was the major
breakthrough
that helped him take these giant
blocks of ice that you see
and keep them cold
for long periods of time.
And it was so efficient that
a large block of ice like this
would actually last
for four to six months
through the hottest time
of the year.
Now Tudor can get ice
exactly where he wants it,
and a huge new industry
is born.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Ice cream, cocktails,
chilled food:
America gets hooked.
Soon hundreds of thousands
of people work the ice harvest.
In New York,
the ice man cometh.
Nearly half the city's
population keeps ice at home.
Reports of mild winters
create panic,
and something extraordinary
happens.
Previously, Americans had
only eaten fresh food
produced on their doorstep.
Now trains chilled with ice
create a food network.
Produce from the South
and West
become staples
of Northern meals.
ANNOUNCER: When you realize that
about 1,000 food trains
bring perishable food
to New York every week,
you'll understand that ice
for refrigeration
is something of the first water.
We become much healthier
and better nourished,
while our cities,
freed from the limits
of their surrounding resources,
experience rapid growth.
Cold is shaping
a new America.
But what I find incredible
is how primitive our ideas
about cold are at this point.
I mean, this is the middle
of the 19th century, right?
It's an era of coal-powered
factories and railroads
and telegraph wires
connecting cities,
and yet the state of the art
in cold technology
is cutting chunks of frozen
water out of a lake.
Frederic Tudor's slow hunch,
his crazy idea,
has become America's second
biggest export after cotton.
India, the Caribbean,
even Queen Victoria
has New England ice
served with dinner.
But Tudor hasn't just created
a global appetite for ice.
He's also created a platform
for ideas about cold
which will soon trigger
a chain of events
not even Tudor could
have imagined.
I read this article
the other week
about scientists who discovered
this primitive ski
in a Swedish bog,
and when they dated it,
it turned out that
it was 4,000 years old.
And I thought,
"Skiing is really a microcosm
of our whole relationship
to cold."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
So we've literally spent eons
taking the natural cold
of snow and ice
and figuring out fun ways
to do things with it.
But then cold got so fun
that everybody wanted
a piece of the action.
And so we started tinkering
with making artificial cold.
And that's when things
started to get really weird.
Okay, enough television
trickery.
I'm not really
in the mountains.
This is one of the world's
biggest indoor ski resorts.
But it gets even crazier.
Come on, you've got to check
this out.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
The modern world of cold does
not get any weirder than this.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
I'm standing above
the city of Dubai.
We're in the middle of
the Arabian Desert.
It's about 100 degrees out,
it's 8:00 a.m. in the morning,
which means that I have
to take my ski gear off
because it's insane
to be out here wearing this.
And here we are in this
vast city in the desert,
and yet beneath me...
are skiers,
ski lifts, real snow,
a toboggan run, and, get this,
penguins.
Now, Ski Dubai might look like
some sort of futuristic
spacecraft
that has crashed into
a parking garage,
but, in fact, some
of the technology
keeping this place cold
is 200 years old.
I'm here in the space
between the ceiling
of the indoor ski slope
and the roof of the overall
structure,
and it's this really strange,
a little bit creepy space.
They call it "the void."
And it's an extraordinary space,
because basically this is
the primary means of insulation
that they're using here.
It's just the gas of the air
that's keeping the temperature
28 degrees Fahrenheit below me
and 110 right above me.
And what I love about this
is that the principle of using
the air in this void
to keep the ski slope cool,
it's something
that Frederic Tudor would have
recognized in a heartbeat.
It's basically the same design
that he used in his ice house.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And down below on the slopes,
there's another 19th-century
innovation
making the snow and maintaining
a temperature
just below freezing:
artificial cold.
So there's an entire
winter wonderland
on the other side of that wall,
and yet we are in the middle
of the desert;
it's 110 degrees outside.
How do you pull this off?
There what you need is
a really, really big fridge.
It's the same principle as
a fridge I've got in my house?
Absolutely, the refrigeration
is very much the same
as the fridge in your house,
and even the way the building
is constructed and designed
is very similar to a fridge.
Do you worry about
the cold escaping
when people are coming
in and out?
I mean, is that a big concern?
Yeah. Think of your
fridge at home, right?
Every time you get
an orange juice out,
you open the door, and all
the cold air rushes out.
If you look at your fridge
again, and we mimic Ski Dubai,
your fridge, your big
American fridge,
would have a door
the size of my thumb.
- Really?
- And we only have three doors
leading into Ski Dubai
from outside,
so we control that airflow
in and out very, very well.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
This place, and the fact
that I'm hanging out
in the middle
of the Arabian Desert
with a bunch of penguins,
is proof of just how
sophisticated
the modern use of artificial
cold has become.
But the beginnings
of manmade refrigeration
were far from being fun.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
It's an innovation born
of suffering and war.
Like much of the south, Florida
has a subtropical climate.
That means mosquitoes.
[ mosquitoes buzzing ]
And in the 1840s,
mosquitoes mean diseases
like malaria are rife.
In 1841, an outbreak
of yellow fever
decimates the population
of northern Florida.
And in the middle of all
of this death and misery,
there's this guy,
Dr. John Gorrie,
who is about to start working
on an idea that is so big,
it will ultimately transform
all of our lives.
But the thing about it is today
he's completely unknown.
What I find fascinating
about Gorrie's life
is that it's a great reminder of
one of the most important things
about innovation, which is
that timing is everything.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Gorrie's hospital is filled
with patients
burning up with fever.
I mean, just imagine
what a hospital
would have been like
in the American South in 1842.
Take all the advanced
technology
of a modern hospital out,
and you're left basically just
with beds
and patients dying
in the sweltering heat.
But Gorrie thinks that
if he can cool the air
around his feverish patients,
he can both ease their suffering
and stop the spread of disease.
So he sets out to build
a contraption to do just that.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
This is how Gorrie's design
would have worked.
He's got a chimney bringing in
air from above the hospital
that flows down
over this giant basin.
And he would take
these huge blocks of ice
and put them in the basin,
and the result would be
perfectly chilled air
flows over the patients
in their beds,
reducing their fevers,
potentially saving their lives.
It's a brilliant idea,
and it's all in the service
of Gorrie being
a better physician.
[ thunder rumbles
and wind whistles ]
But Florida isn't done
with Gorrie yet.
Shipwrecks along
Hurricane Alley
mean delayed ice shipments
from Frederic Tudor's
New England,
so one day Gorrie's supply
runs dry.
Now Gorrie has the crazy idea
to make his own ice.
But how?
Luckily, Gorrie is living
at the perfect time
to have this idea.
For all of human history,
you couldn't even conceive
of making artificial cold.
But then, somehow, in the
middle of the 19th century,
the idea becomes imaginable.
So how do we explain
this kind of breakthrough?
I mean, it's not like there's
some kind of solitary genius
who's so much more brilliant
than everybody else
that they come up with the idea
on their own,
and that's because
ideas are fundamentally
networks of other ideas.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
We take the tools, concepts,
and scientific understanding
of our time,
and then remix them
into something new.
But if you don't have
the right building blocks,
you can't make
the breakthrough,
however brilliant
you might be.
The smartest mind in the world
couldn't invent a refrigerator
in the middle
of the 17th century.
But by 1850, the pieces
had come together.
The first thing
that had to happen
seems almost comical
to us now.
We had to discover that air was
actually made of something,
that it wasn't just
empty space between objects.
That happened in the 1600s,
when scientists used a pump
to suck air from a jar
and discovered the vacuum,
proving that air was made
from some mysterious
invisible elements.
We then found that
when air or other gases
are squashed together,
they heat up,
and when they are stretched
out, they cool down.
The thermometer comes along,
followed by a universal scale
or two,
allowing us to measure
temperature.
And now amazing machines
can be built
that convert the heat from
gases into a usable energy.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Gorrie brings all these ideas
together
and builds America's first
mechanical refrigerator,
a machine that makes ice.
And then Gorrie applies
for a patent for his invention.
Listen to the language he uses
to describe this thing:
"Artificial cold
might better serve mankind.
Fruits and vegetables and meat
will be preserved in transit
by my refrigeration system,
and thereby enjoyed by all."
He completely nails the modern
world of artificial cold.
The rural doctor has created
a technology
that's now as ubiquitous
as the light bulb.
So why isn't John Gorrie
as famous as Thomas Edison?
So he's got a magical artificial
ice-making machine in the South,
and one would think that would
be a huge financial success.
There's a proven market
for ice,
there's a machine that will
do it artificially.
That's true,
but the problem is
is that there was a lot
that had to be done
to perfect the equipment.
John Gorrie had a basic idea,
he had a vision,
he had a machine
that rudimentally did it,
but it had to be perfected,
and it had to be brought in
to a point
where you could afford to use
the machine to make ice.
Like any new technological
innovation,
Gorrie's working prototype
needs development.
The problem is his manmade
ice invention
hasn't exactly come along
at a great time,
because this is an era
dominated
by the now very powerful
and ruthless natural ice baron,
Frederic Tudor.
People who were
in the business
of harvesting so-called natural
ice from rivers and lakes,
they saw a threat
to their business
by a machine that could
actually make the ice.
And of course,
they were the ones
who came up with the term
"artificial ice,"
in other words, fake ice.
It's not real ice.
And the thing that's
interesting about it
was that the natural ice people
said that,
"Well, this artificial ice
could make you sick
or it could cause disease"
and things like that,
and on the other hand,
their natural ice was becoming
progressively more
from polluted sources,
and that was causing people
to get sick.
I would -- drinking pond water
from, like,
a swampy pond in New England,
that's not something --
I would much rather have
a nice "artificial" ice.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Unable to find backers,
John Gorrie dies penniless,
without selling
a single machine.
But his vision
of manmade refrigeration
is about to inspire
a new generation of inventors.
It was an idea
that's time had come.
It just needed a trigger
to launch it
into the public consciousness.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
[ booms ]
That comes in the shape
of the Civil War.
The Union blockades
the South
to cripple the Confederate
economy.
Suddenly, the Southern states
have no ice.
Vital supplies were smuggled
past the blockade
into the Southern states.
Blockade runners used to hide
out in creeks like this one,
slipping out into
the open ocean at night.
But they weren't just smuggling
weapons or gunpowder;
sometimes they had
an equally precious cargo:
ice-making machines.
Check this out:
this is one of the first
ice-making machines ever built.
It's designed by the Frenchman
Ferdinand Carré.
It can output about 400 pounds
of ice in an hour.
This is one of the world's
first refrigerators,
and it was smuggled all the way
to the American South
from France.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
In the decades
after the Civil War,
artificial refrigeration
patents explode
as a network of innovators
adapt and improve
on Gorrie's ideas.
In the 20 years following
Gorrie's invention,
there are 54 separate
refrigeration patents filed.
From now on, the slow decline
of the ice trade is inevitable.
Refrigeration becomes
a huge industry,
and I do mean huge,
with steam-powered monster
machines
soon changing the urban
landscape of America,
turning areas like New York's
Tribeca neighborhood
into a hub of artificial cold.
This building, for instance,
behind me.
Today it's a fancy condo,
it's filled with
your Robert De Niros
and your supermodels,
but 100 years ago, it was filled
with eggs and milk and produce,
feeding a growing city.
It was a giant
high-rise refrigerator.
But as with much
new technology,
the machinery of manmade cold
is destined to get smaller
as the idea of a once-ridiculed
amateur inventor
becomes an essential part
of the modern home.
TV ANNOUNCER: Here she comes,
the lucky woman who owns
a new refrigerator!
Between 1945 and 1949,
Americans purchased
20 million
of these revolutionary
machines.
Now ideas about how to fill
these new refrigerators
will have an even greater
impact on our lives.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Clarence Birdseye --
yes, he was a real person --
grew up in Brooklyn,
New York.
But the story of his big idea
doesn't start here.
In fact, he couldn't wait
to get away from this place.
Birdseye had displayed
an insatiable scientific
curiosity,
a streak of eccentricity,
and a longing for adventure.
At 21 years old,
he becomes a naturalist
with the U.S. Biological
Survey,
studying animal populations
on the American frontier.
He keeps a journal
during this period,
and it's clear
if you read it now
that he's not just interested
in scientifically assessing
these critters.
He's also obsessed
with eating them as well.
[ growls ]
And the weirder, the better.
I mean, listen to this passage:
"For Sunday dinner,
we had horned owl.
Does that sound good?
Well, it was good,
no matter how it sounds."
And he goes on to eat, over
the course of his adventures,
a beaver, a hawk, mice,
gopher, rattlesnake,
porcupine, chipmunk,
even skunk.
Although apparently only
the front half.
And it all leads up
to what he calls
the "pièce de résistance,"
"one of the most scrumptious
meals I ever ate,"
which was a dish
of sherry marinated lynx.
[ growls ]
Birdseye's diet
may sound crazy,
but this is common-sense eating
and valuable training
for the ultimate survival
challenge to come.
[ dogs barking ]
[ ♪♪♪ ]
In 1916, Birdseye brings
his wife and newborn son
to Labrador, a remote,
frozen wilderness
in Canada's subarctic north.
It must have been
quite a shock.
I mean, besides having to be
dragged through the snow
by, like, a pack
of maniacal dogs,
Birdseye had moved his family
to one of the most extreme
environments on the planet.
[ dogs barking ]
But this is an adventure
that will change Birdseye's
life, and ours, forever.
We have this cliché
about innovation
that it just happens
in Silicon Valley garages
and corporate research
development labs,
not in an environment
like this.
I mean, I've got like
30-mile-an-hour winds blowing,
ice pellets hitting me
in the face.
It's hard enough just
to stand upright and talk,
much less, like,
have a brilliant idea.
But, in a way, it's the severity
of this landscape
that's kind of the point.
Because it's here, in the frozen
Canadian winter,
that Clarence Birdseye will have
the beginning of an idea
that will turn out to be
one of the most transformative
ones of the 20th century.
And as always with Birdseye,
this new idea will revolve
around food.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Birdseye is among
a handful of settlers
in a region the size
of Britain
that has no modern
food network --
no stores, no livestock --
and which, during the winter,
is effectively cut off
from the rest of the world.
Everything people ate
during the winter
was preserved and cured
and stockpiled.
There was nothing fresh.
I mean, imagine trying to live
the entire winter
on, like, moose jerky,
right?
But like John Gorrie
before him,
Birdseye is motivated
by basic human concerns.
He just wants to feed
good, healthy, fresh food
to his family.
[ wind whistling ]
But Birdseye is about to get
some culinary inspiration
from Labrador's
indigenous Inuit.
I'm standing out here
on top of a frozen fjord.
I've got 600 feet of water
beneath me.
We've got whiteout conditions.
I can't feel my toes anymore.
Apparently the water
beneath this layer of ice
is actually shark-infested,
I'm told,
so, all in all, it's a perfect
day for fishing.
And Jerri Thrasher,
an Inuit
from Canada's Northwest
Territories,
is going to show me how...
once we've dug a hole
through the ice.
Would you like
to try?
Yeah, give me a chance
at this.
Okay, so I just kind of
hack around the side?
Yep, you want to hit
the ice a little hard,
so the harder you hit,
the bigger the chunks.
Right.
And the less time it'll take
to make your fishing hole.
So if this ice
is three feet thick,
I think it'll probably take us
about three days
- to cut through this.
- It would take you three days.
It would take me three days,
really?
Spending time fishing
with the Inuit,
Birdseye notices that
they use the extreme weather
to their advantage.
They freeze their fish
in the open air
so they can store it.
So how important
is ice fishing
to Inuit culture?
Fresh meats and fresh fish
are very important.
Fish coming out of the water
in -20 or -30,
you can lay the fish
on the side,
and within the hour
it'll be completely frozen.
They would dig like caches
under the ground
in the permafrost
where it would stay cold
during the entire winter,
and there they would store
their winter supply
of fish and meat.
That's amazing.
So basically for thousands
of years, there's frozen food
that the Inuit culture has
kind of figured out how to do.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
For Birdseye,
this is a revelation.
Freshly caught fish,
frozen in the Arctic air,
could be kept for weeks
or even months,
and once thawed and eaten,
it would still taste delicious.
He wonders if freezing
can help other types of food
stay fresh for longer, so he
experiments with vegetables.
He begins to notice a pattern:
food frozen in the coldest
depths of mid-winter
tastes better when it's thawed
than food frozen earlier
or later in the season.
And that's because
slower freezing
creates larger ice crystals,
which damage the cellular
structure of the food.
Birdseye realized something
that the Inuits had almost
instinctively understood
for thousands of years:
that if you wanted to have
really fresh frozen food,
you had to have the smallest
possible ice crystals,
and for that, you needed the
fastest possible freezing time.
This is the point where
you might expect me to say,
"And now Birdseye has an idea
that changes the world
and introduces the universe
of frozen convenience
that all of us enjoy today."
But actually, that's not
what happened at all.
Because, you see,
like Frederic Tudor,
Birdseye's hunch will take
decades to finally pay off,
but unlike Tudor,
Birdseye basically just forgets
about his hunch.
In 1917, Birdseye moves
his family
back to the United States.
He basically stops thinking
about frozen food altogether.
Back in the city, he's got
all the fresh produce
he could possibly eat.
For the next few years,
Birdseye searches for
a new career direction,
and he ends up at
the U.S. Fisheries Association.
Here, he studies
the fishing industry.
He watches how produce
makes its way
from the docks to the consumer
and notices that too many fish
get spoiled
and lose their value
on the way to market.
So Birdseye wonders,
"What's the best way
to get fish to the kitchen
in the freshest way possible?"
And this is where, finally,
his slow hunch resurfaces.
Birdseye decides that
flash freezing is the key.
Birdseye develops
a practical process
for fast freezing food quickly
on a commercial scale.
It's called "multi-plate
flash freezing,"
an idea upon which an entire
industry will be founded.
But of course, no matter
how brilliant Birdseye's idea,
he can't change the world
all on his own.
Ideas don't really work
that way.
For frozen food to reach
today's ubiquity,
it will take a convergence
of other ideas about cold.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And that is where we meet
Frederick McKinley Jones.
Jones was born in 1893,
and he was orphaned
at the age of 9.
By the time he was 11,
he had his first full-time job,
and by the time he was 16,
he was working in
an auto repair shop.
He didn't come from
the world of privilege
like Frederic Tudor,
and he didn't have the advanced
degrees of Dr. John Gorrie.
But he was destined
to change the world
every bit as much
as those other pioneers
in the story of cold.
Jones was a natural tinkerer
with a gift
for innovative ideas.
This ability would lead him
to tackle
the thorny problem
of food transportation.
Ice-chilled food delivery
had changed the world,
but it was far from perfect.
It was always a race
against time.
Freight trains had to stop
at regular intervals
to replace ice
from trackside ice houses.
It wasn't a perfect system,
and it was even tougher
in a truck
because any delays meant melted
ice and a spoiled cargo.
And so, like Birdseye
before him,
Jones began to wonder
if there was a better way.
Jones designed a small,
durable refrigerated unit
that mounted on a truck
to keep its contents chilled.
Although he lived
in a time
when African-American inventors
were rarely recognized
or given opportunities,
he managed to convince
his white boss
to pay for its development.
It was a success.
After World War II,
he developed refrigerated
containers
that could be moved from train
to ship to truck,
perfecting America's
food distribution network.
For nearly a century,
our food networks
had relied on these two
parallel systems:
the older system of natural ice
and the new technology
of artificial refrigeration.
But Fred Jones' mobile
refrigerated truck
marked a turning point.
It was the end of
Frederic Tudor's ice trade.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
New ideas and inventions
for making things cold
come together
and begin to transform
the way we eat.
Freezer trucks,
refrigerated warehouses,
supermarkets with
freezer units,
an electrical grid powering
new suburban homes
with electric refrigerators
in every kitchen.
By 1944, 300,000 tons
of frozen food
are being sold in America
in a single year.
By the time of his death,
the company founded by Jones,
Thermo King, is worth
the modern equivalent
of a quarter of a billion
dollars.
His maverick invention
not only makes him
one of the richest black men
in the country,
it also enables frozen foods
to become a part of all
of our lives.
Now, flash freezing is just
the beginning of the story.
Because once they get
into circulation,
good ideas like this
have a way
of opening up new doors
of possibility.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And today, fast and flash
freezing
is shaping our world
in profound ways
that even a visionary
like Birdseye
could have never expected.
We freeze sperm, eggs,
and embryos,
creating millions
of new human lives.
So this is Eamon.
Now, tell me the story of how
this guy came into the world.
Sure. Well, we were
lucky enough to use IVF.
We have a 5-year-old at home
who was conceived that day
and was never frozen,
and then we were lucky enough
to freeze the extra embryos.
Hopefully we'll come back.
And so to store them,
you have to freeze them?
Freeze them, yeah.
Two days later they froze them
and, you know,
then they thawed them out,
and it's like, all right,
they're still good,
and like, great.
And we were able
to have him implanted,
and here he is,
18 months old.
Because it's extraordinary
to think -- I mean,
there are so many different
scientific breakthroughs,
technological breakthroughs
that make IVF possible,
but if you think about it,
Eamon, without artificial cold,
without the ability to kind of
flash freeze something,
- he wouldn't be here.
- He wouldn't exist.
It's an extraordinary,
extraordinary thing.
- We'd be a smaller family.
- We're so glad it worked out!
- We're blessed.
- We are very lucky.
From the idea that ice could
cool a drink on a summer's day
to Clarence Birdseye's
innovation,
the journey of cold helped
shape how we live now.
But perhaps the biggest impact
of all
would come as ideas about cold
start to define not just
how we live, but where.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
In the summer of 1925,
a man with a big idea
takes a seat in a packed
New York movie theater.
It's the first golden age
of Hollywood,
but the crowds that are there
that day
are not there for the usual
movie escapism.
The man with the big idea
has just invented something
that will revolutionize
the movies.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
The roots of this story
go back to 1902,
when on a roasting hot
summer's day, the same man,
a young engineer
called Willis Carrier,
is called out to a Brooklyn
printworks with a big problem.
The humid air inside
the building
is causing the ink to smear
on their prints.
So they need, somehow,
a way to make the air
consistently dry.
Carrier starts trying to solve
the humidity problem
by taking notes
in this actual journal.
Check this out.
It's filled with all
these physics equations,
so I literally have no idea
what it means.
I mean, it's just
amazingly detailed,
and he's doing this
before computers.
I mean, this is a guy who
clearly needed a spreadsheet.
But out of all
this amazing work,
he comes up with
a new invention,
and he calls it
"an apparatus for treating air."
[ ♪♪♪ ]
It's basically
a giant dehumidifier.
Air goes into
a refrigerated chamber,
moisture condenses
over metal coils,
and dry, cool air
comes out the other end,
which is then pumped
into the print rooms.
It stops the ink from smearin,
but Carrier notices something
interesting:
people enjoy the cool
air-conditioned air, too.
And that's how,
a few years later,
Willis Carrier came to be
sitting nervously
in a movie theater
in New York City.
You see, Hollywood
had a problem.
Nobody in their right mind
would go see a movie
in the summer.
It was just too hot.
But Carrier hoped that
was about to change
thanks to a prototype
AC system he'd installed
in the theater's basement,
a monster machine similar
to the one
sitting in the basement
of this Jersey City cinema
built in 1929 to bring
a new world of comfort cooling
to the audience sitting above.
So now we're in front
of this massive structure.
What is this part?
Well, this is the big blower
that pulls air in off the street
to be conditioned and then
ventilates it out the building.
And that huge fan over there
is kind of powering
the whole thing.
- That's it, yep.
- That's amazing.
Well, what do you think, should
we try and actually turn it on?
There's a little switch here.
If you want to --
I'm going to just hide
behind this pillar over here,
- because it seems very scary.
- All right, you ready?
Okay, duck and cover,
here we go.
[ loud thrumming ]
Oh, my God!
- Wow.
- It works!
That's extraordinary.
God, I feel like a jet
is about to take off.
This is from 1929,
this is the original.
And it's still working.
Right now upstairs
in that giant auditorium
people are beginning
to feel cool.
I'm beginning to feel
a little cool.
It's kind of incredible
when you have a machine
that's, you know,
almost 100 years old,
and it's still working.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Once the AC unit starts up,
cool air is transported
aroundhe building via
a series of enormous ducts...
reaching the customers
via these beautifully
camouflaged grills.
You can really feel--
I mean, the air is really
circulating here,
it's just kind of pouring in
through this doorway.
Yeah, I think this is why
they call it a house fan.
It really ventilates
the entire house.
It's amazing.
I've got dust in my eye
from like the Roosevelt
administration.
Carrier's idea, AC in a cinema,
is revolutionary,
but what will
the cinemagoers think?
Carrier takes a massive risk
on this one demonstration,
even inviting Paramount
Pictures' chief Adolph Zukor,
one of Hollywood's
most powerful men.
Carrier stayed up
all the night before
trying to get
the equipment ready.
Now it was time
to crank up the AC.
He wrote later
about what happened:
"Final adjustments delayed us
in starting up
the air-conditioning system.
From the wings we watched
in dismay
as 2,000 fans fluttered.
But gradually the fans dropped
into laps
as the effects of the air
conditioning became evident.
We had stopped them cold
and breathed a great sigh
of relief.
Afterwards, when Mr. Zukor
saw us, he said tersely,
'Yes, the people are going
to like it.'"
[ applause ]
[ ♪♪♪ ]
And that was the understatement
of the century.
Basically you start
air conditioning theaters,
and what happens to the kind of
American love of cinema?
If you had stopped
the average person in the street
in, say, 1900 or 1910 and said,
"I have a system
where if you push a button,
you'll get cool air,"
they would have thought
you were joking.
It would have been
science fiction.
So for people to actually enter
a movie theater in the 1920s
and experience comfort cool
for the first time,
it changed the whole way they
thought about their environment.
All of a sudden now
with modern air conditioning,
on the hottest days
of the year,
people are starting to come
to the movies.
In 1930, 80 million Americans
go to the movies every week.
That's 65% of the
entire population.
So you would say
every 12 days on average,
the entire country goes
to the movies.
You can't pick a better venue
to expose a great new innovation
like this than the movies.
So air conditioning
actually ends up
inventing the summer
blockbuster?
Air conditioning and movies
go hand-in-hand
throughout their entire
history.
Willis Carrier's invention,
a machine for cooling air
in a print shop,
has changed Hollywood.
But the idea
of air conditioning
proves irresistible, and soon
it will trigger
chain reactions more dramatic
than any other innovation
in the story of cold.
AC is about to redraw
the map of the world.
Okay, so take a look at a map
of the United States
at the beginning
of the 20th century.
Everyone lives in the growing
and prosperous cities
of the North.
The South and the West,
meanwhile,
are economic backwaters.
Towns like Phoenix
and Miami are tiny.
Las Vegas in 1910
has just 937 inhabitants.
Why? Because this
is the Sun Belt.
It's too hot, and no one
wants to live here.
In 1951, Carrier's company
introduces an air conditioning
unit that is miniaturized
and affordable
for a mass market.
And that's when AC
starts to go crazy.
Between the 1950s
and the 1980s,
AC becomes ubiquitous
in people's homes and cars
across America.
And just see what this does
to where people are living.
Tucson, Arizona, grows 400%
in 10 years.
Phoenix 300%.
Tampa, Dallas, Houston,
and Atlanta:
populations double, triple,
and it's the same story
everywhere you look.
TV ANNOUNCER: By 1960,
30,000 people will live
in Broomfield Heights, making
it the fifth largest city...
Carrier's invention
is circulating people
as well as air,
changing lives,
changing America.
But then something even more
interesting happens.
You see, people moving
to the hot states are older
and tend to vote Republican,
and the growing population
in the conservative South
means more electoral college
votes there.
So check out what happens
to the political map of America.
Between 1940 and 1980,
northern states
lose an incredible 31
electoral college votes,
while the southern states
gain 29, doubling the number
in California, Arizona,
and Florida,
the vast majority
voting Republican.
This is long-zoom history.
Less than a century
after Willis Carrier
started to tinker
with stopping the ink
from smearing on a page
in Brooklyn,
our mastery of molecules
of air and moisture
have helped put Ronald Reagan
into the White House.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Today, many of the world's
fastest growing cities,
like Dubai,
are in hot countries.
It's the first mass migration
in human history
to be made possible
by a home appliance.
And all this started
with a half-baked idea,
a hunch in the mind
of a maverick dreamer.
When you think about
inventions,
we tend to be constrained by
the scale of the original idea.
So we assume that if we invent
artificial cold,
our rooms will be cooler
and we'll have ice cubes
in our drink on a hot
summer day.
But if you tell the story
of cold that way,
you miss the majesty of it.
We make our ideas,
and they make us in return.
And when you look at the story
from that angle,
you can't help feel that cold
isn't done with us yet.
[ strumming rock tune ]
In the next episode,
I'm looking at the strange
and surprising story
of sound.
[ throat singing ]
From mavericks
to movie stars...
She'd rather spend the night
at home
reading Scientific American
than going out
to some glamorous party.
these are the men and women
who transformed sound...
So they're sending out
a sound wave through the water,
and it's going to bounce
off of me.
and change the world in ways
you'd never imagine.
How We Got to Now
was made possible in part by
the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting
and by contributions
to your PBS station from...
[ ♪♪♪ ]
To learn more about
How We Got to Now,
visit us on the web at...
How We Got to Now
is available on DVD.
A companion book
is also available.