WEBVTT
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The kind of air that comes off rotting vegetation,
heat and stagnant water.
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Pretty fashionable at the time, this rot.
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Everybody thought all disease was due to it,
which is why our story
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brings us to this pleasant little holidy spot.
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Beause if you ever wanted to see miles-and-miles
of "hot rot"
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come here.
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To the Florida swamps.
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[♪ lurking, danger ♪]
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At the same time the meat-packers in London
were going bananas about what bad air
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was doing to their success rate,
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somebody else, here in Florida,
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was doing just the same thing
for just the same reason.
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Only his success rate depended on keeping
people healthy.
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He was a doctor, fellow called "John Gorrie"
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And in 1833 he had come to a small cotton port
on the Gulf of Mexico called "Apalachicola"
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Surrounded on 3 sides
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by this creepy stuff.... full of alligators,
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and snakes that drop from the trees
and other goodies
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including malaria
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Which was John Gorrie's problem.
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You see, every year people went down with it
by the hundreds.
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And Gorrie reckoned, well just like everybody else,
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that malaria was caused by and invisible -
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disease-ridden gas, seeping in from these swamps
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and made,
just like the air in the London cans,
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from a mixture of:
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1. rotting vegetation
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2. stagnant water
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3. and heat.
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So when, not long after he got back to Apalachicola,
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Gorrie became:
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• Bank manager
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• Post master
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• Chief of the Masonic Lodge
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• City treasurer and Mayor,
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he thought he'd try to stamp the disease out by
draining wetlands, filling in ponds, building in brick
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instead of wood, that would rot.
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Great...
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everybody still got malaria.
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So, defeated by the rotting muck and the stagnant water,
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Gorrie turned to the one ingredient that he reckoned
could control:
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The heat.
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You see, back in those days
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there were regular shipments of ice
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down here to the southern states from Boston,
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where they used to hack it out of the
frozen rivers and ponds during the winter
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and store it for shipment right through the summer.
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Went as far as "Calcutta"
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Now Gorrie reckoned that since people didn't get malaria
in the winter,
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he'd crack the problem if he could use the ice
to help his patients "keep their cool"
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right through the summer.
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What he didn't know
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and what he couldn't have known in 1837 because nobody
had discovered that malaria was caused by an insect
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was that here
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he was surrounded by a giant "Mosquito Menagerie"
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[♪ jazz, notes rolling up and down quickly ♪]
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[♫ ♫ ...]
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As far as Gorrie was concerned,
the billions of mosquitos here
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were... just an annoyance.
[♫ ♫ ...]
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[♫ ♫ ...]
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[♫ ♫ faster ...]
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So Gorrie set up a chilly fever-room
[♫ ♫ ...]
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where you could very easily have caught yourself a cold!
[♫ ♫ ...]
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[♪ stops ♪]
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And for a few years Apalachicola murmured to the
chattering teeth of Gorrie's victims... ☺I mean patients!☺,
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as he proceeded his grand design.
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His idea was quite brilliant,
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and of course, totally wrong.
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But Gorrie was indefatigable
in bending the ear of any visitors on the subject.
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Me too so:
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The hanging bucket is filled with ice.
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Above, a pipe bringing in air from outside.
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The ice chills the air,
and if you block up the fire place,
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the only place the air can get out is down,
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through a pipe
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in the skirting board.
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Alas, poor Gorrie, he so-nearly got it right.
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Gauze curtains help, he said,
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'cause they keep out the vapours
that bring in the disease.
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His only problem, he thought, was
a way of getting cheap ice!
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Sometime after 1845, he found it:
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With this machine.
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May not look much,
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but if you've got a cool house on a hot day,
thank that.
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Gorrie built it,
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using an idea that had been around for some time,
but that nobody had put into practice.
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The idea was that, if you compress air, it gets hot.
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If you then let it expand, it gets cold
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and it draws heat from it's surroundings.
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Look:
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Here's a steam-driven wheel,
driving a force-pump that compresses the air.
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Here comes the compressed air,
through that coil, in a bath of cold water,
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into this chamber, where it expands.
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And as it expands, it gets very cold.
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Ok, the cold air then comes up through tubes
in this container, which is full of brine,
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and the cold air draws heat from the brine.
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Now on every cycle,
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the air draws heat from the brine until the brine
is the same temperature as the cold air.
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And from then on,
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as the air comes out of the top here,
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it's cold.
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"Air conditioning"
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Invented by a man
*very few* people have ever heard of.
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I mean had you?
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One more trick:
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If you run the cold air tube up here
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through a resevoir of water, the cold air
chills the water down.
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And the chilled water drips down into a container
which is immersed
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in the super-cooled brine,
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and that causes it to make something that looked as if
it was gonna make John Gorrie a very rich man,
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in a very hot climate:
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Ice.
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[♪ La Marseillaise ♪]
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On Bastille day, 1850,
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Gorrie made his invention public.
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The occasion was a boozie get-together
in the home of Apalachicola's French consort
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who was hold a little "soirée"
in honor of the anniversary of the French revolution
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with more French red wine and French champain
than you could shake a stick at!
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Now, unfortunately the iceboat from Boston
hadn't come.
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And snide remarks were passed about
what a social gaff it was
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for a Frenchman to offer warm champain!
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[snide remarks being made]
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In spite of the snickering however,
the host displayed the symptoms of a man
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utterly confident of his savoir faire.
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You see, our hero had previously shown him
his magic machine.
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And both men were looking forward
to their little moment of triumph.
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It was, sad to say,
to be Gorrie's only moment of triumph.
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[clapping]
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[♪ fairground ♪]
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It was at the port of New Orleans in 1869,
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14 years after Gorrie had died,
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broken by his failure to get any backing
for his machine,
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that is idea suddenly turned up again.
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It was the end of a steamboat race,
along the coast from Texas.
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The winner,
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the good ship "Agnes",
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had beaten the other boat
with a cargo of chilled beef.
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The first in history, and long-since forgotten.
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[♫ ♫ ...]
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So here we are on the New Orleans waterfront
in the summer of 1869
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because:
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Charles of Burgundy got clobbered by Swiss pikemen
who then made infantry fashionable
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and because the armies got so big,
Napolean desperately needed provisions for them,
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Appert invented preserved food
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which Donkin put in cans
because his paper-making venture failed.
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And the rot that spoiled the meat and also
maybe gave people malaria
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which Gorrie tried curing with cold air
that chilled the beef
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that the Agnes bought
for the great New Orleans Beef race.
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Uhh, remember?
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[♪ triumphant, cowboy ♪]
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[♫ ♫ ...]
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[♫ ♫ ...]
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[crowd cheering]
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[bravo! bravo!]
[crowd cheering]
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[crowd cheering]
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[clapping]
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[Man: Ladies and gentlemen -]
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[to the chilled beef!]
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[Crowd: to the chilled beef!]
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Now, by an extraordinary coincidence,
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as the flower of New Orleans' upper-crust were
tucking into their beef,
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a fellow called "Mr. J. D. Postle"
was chilling his first beef,
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also with cold air.
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Only he was doing it in a place
where interest in the idea ran very high.
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Because Postle lived in Australia.
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See, unlike here in New Orleans,
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these were the years
of the great British starvation scare.
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As the country became more industrialized
and the population shot up,
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the government decided
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that if some new way of getting lots of fresh meat
from Australia and New Zealand wasn't found,
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well then the old country was finished!
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Spurred on by patriotism,
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☺and profit☺
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the Australians did it.
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They had a few horrendous goes at it first though.
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In 1873 a ship left Melbourne with a cargo of meat
covered in ice and salt.
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uh... It leaked.
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In London the smell was described as:
"Indescribable"
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They had another go in 1876 with a load of mutton
and a rather more sophisticated cooling system.
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It leaked... before it left!
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ended up in Sidney Harbour.
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Finally, in 1880
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the "SS Strathleven" docked in London
with a cargo frozen solid
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to be sold here at Smithfield.
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Britain was saved! ...