James Burke : Connections, Episode 8, "Eat, Drink and be Merry", 4 of 5 (CC)

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Episode 8 of James Burke's most well-known series "Connections" which explores the surprising and unexpected ways that our modern technological world came into existence. Each episode investigates the background of usually one particular modern invention and how it came into being. These explorations are an attempt to locate the "connections" between various historical figures who seemingly had nothing to do with each other in their own times, however once connected, these same figures combined to produce some of the most profound impacts on our modern day world; in a "1+1=3" type of way.

It is this type of investigation that is the core idea behind the Knowledge Web project, whereby sophisticated software is being developed to attempt to discover these subtle interconnections automatically. See http://k-web.org.

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The kind of air that comes off rotting vegetation,
heat and stagnant water.

Pretty fashionable at the time, this rot.

Everybody thought all disease was due to it,
which is why our story

brings us to this pleasant little holidy spot.

Beause if you ever wanted to see miles-and-miles
of "hot rot"

come here.

To the Florida swamps.

[♪ lurking, danger ♪]

At the same time the meat-packers in London
were going bananas about what bad air

was doing to their success rate,

somebody else, here in Florida,

was doing just the same thing
for just the same reason.

Only his success rate depended on keeping
people healthy.

He was a doctor, fellow called "John Gorrie"

And in 1833 he had come to a small cotton port
on the Gulf of Mexico called "Apalachicola"

Surrounded on 3 sides

by this creepy stuff.... full of alligators,

and snakes that drop from the trees
and other goodies

including malaria

Which was John Gorrie's problem.

You see, every year people went down with it
by the hundreds.

And Gorrie reckoned, well just like everybody else,

that malaria was caused by and invisible -

disease-ridden gas, seeping in from these swamps

and made,
just like the air in the London cans,

from a mixture of:

1. rotting vegetation

2. stagnant water

3. and heat.

So when, not long after he got back to Apalachicola,

Gorrie became:

• Bank manager

• Post master

• Chief of the Masonic Lodge

• City treasurer and Mayor,

he thought he'd try to stamp the disease out by
draining wetlands, filling in ponds, building in brick

instead of wood, that would rot.

Great...

everybody still got malaria.

So, defeated by the rotting muck and the stagnant water,

Gorrie turned to the one ingredient that he reckoned
could control:

The heat.

You see, back in those days

there were regular shipments of ice

down here to the southern states from Boston,

where they used to hack it out of the
frozen rivers and ponds during the winter

and store it for shipment right through the summer.

Went as far as "Calcutta"

Now Gorrie reckoned that since people didn't get malaria
in the winter,

he'd crack the problem if he could use the ice
to help his patients "keep their cool"

right through the summer.

What he didn't know

and what he couldn't have known in 1837 because nobody
had discovered that malaria was caused by an insect

was that here

he was surrounded by a giant "Mosquito Menagerie"

[♪ jazz, notes rolling up and down quickly ♪]

[♫ ♫ ...]

As far as Gorrie was concerned,
the billions of mosquitos here

were... just an annoyance.
[♫ ♫ ...]

[♫ ♫ ...]

[♫ ♫ faster ...]

So Gorrie set up a chilly fever-room
[♫ ♫ ...]

where you could very easily have caught yourself a cold!
[♫ ♫ ...]

[♪ stops ♪]

And for a few years Apalachicola murmured to the
chattering teeth of Gorrie's victims... ☺I mean patients!☺,

as he proceeded his grand design.

His idea was quite brilliant,

and of course, totally wrong.

But Gorrie was indefatigable
in bending the ear of any visitors on the subject.

Me too so:

The hanging bucket is filled with ice.

Above, a pipe bringing in air from outside.

The ice chills the air,
and if you block up the fire place,

the only place the air can get out is down,

through a pipe

in the skirting board.

Alas, poor Gorrie, he so-nearly got it right.

Gauze curtains help, he said,

'cause they keep out the vapours
that bring in the disease.

His only problem, he thought, was
a way of getting cheap ice!

Sometime after 1845, he found it:

With this machine.

May not look much,

but if you've got a cool house on a hot day,
thank that.

Gorrie built it,

using an idea that had been around for some time,
but that nobody had put into practice.

The idea was that, if you compress air, it gets hot.

If you then let it expand, it gets cold

and it draws heat from it's surroundings.

Look:

Here's a steam-driven wheel,
driving a force-pump that compresses the air.

Here comes the compressed air,
through that coil, in a bath of cold water,

into this chamber, where it expands.

And as it expands, it gets very cold.

Ok, the cold air then comes up through tubes
in this container, which is full of brine,

and the cold air draws heat from the brine.

Now on every cycle,

the air draws heat from the brine until the brine
is the same temperature as the cold air.

And from then on,

as the air comes out of the top here,

it's cold.

"Air conditioning"

Invented by a man
*very few* people have ever heard of.

I mean had you?

One more trick:

If you run the cold air tube up here

through a resevoir of water, the cold air
chills the water down.

And the chilled water drips down into a container
which is immersed

in the super-cooled brine,

and that causes it to make something that looked as if
it was gonna make John Gorrie a very rich man,

in a very hot climate:

Ice.

[♪ La Marseillaise ♪]

On Bastille day, 1850,

Gorrie made his invention public.

The occasion was a boozie get-together
in the home of Apalachicola's French consort

who was hold a little "soirée"
in honor of the anniversary of the French revolution

with more French red wine and French champain
than you could shake a stick at!

Now, unfortunately the iceboat from Boston
hadn't come.

And snide remarks were passed about
what a social gaff it was

for a Frenchman to offer warm champain!

[snide remarks being made]

In spite of the snickering however,
the host displayed the symptoms of a man

utterly confident of his savoir faire.

You see, our hero had previously shown him
his magic machine.

And both men were looking forward
to their little moment of triumph.

It was, sad to say,
to be Gorrie's only moment of triumph.

[clapping]

[♪ fairground ♪]

It was at the port of New Orleans in 1869,

14 years after Gorrie had died,

broken by his failure to get any backing
for his machine,

that is idea suddenly turned up again.

It was the end of a steamboat race,
along the coast from Texas.

The winner,

the good ship "Agnes",

had beaten the other boat
with a cargo of chilled beef.

The first in history, and long-since forgotten.

[♫ ♫ ...]

So here we are on the New Orleans waterfront
in the summer of 1869

because:

Charles of Burgundy got clobbered by Swiss pikemen
who then made infantry fashionable

and because the armies got so big,
Napolean desperately needed provisions for them,

Appert invented preserved food

which Donkin put in cans
because his paper-making venture failed.

And the rot that spoiled the meat and also
maybe gave people malaria

which Gorrie tried curing with cold air
that chilled the beef

that the Agnes bought
for the great New Orleans Beef race.

Uhh, remember?

[♪ triumphant, cowboy ♪]

[♫ ♫ ...]

[♫ ♫ ...]

[crowd cheering]

[bravo! bravo!]
[crowd cheering]

[crowd cheering]

[clapping]

[Man: Ladies and gentlemen -]

[to the chilled beef!]

[Crowd: to the chilled beef!]

Now, by an extraordinary coincidence,

as the flower of New Orleans' upper-crust were
tucking into their beef,

a fellow called "Mr. J. D. Postle"
was chilling his first beef,

also with cold air.

Only he was doing it in a place
where interest in the idea ran very high.

Because Postle lived in Australia.

See, unlike here in New Orleans,

these were the years
of the great British starvation scare.

As the country became more industrialized
and the population shot up,

the government decided

that if some new way of getting lots of fresh meat
from Australia and New Zealand wasn't found,

well then the old country was finished!

Spurred on by patriotism,

☺and profit☺

the Australians did it.

They had a few horrendous goes at it first though.

In 1873 a ship left Melbourne with a cargo of meat
covered in ice and salt.

uh... It leaked.

In London the smell was described as:
"Indescribable"

They had another go in 1876 with a load of mutton
and a rather more sophisticated cooling system.

It leaked... before it left!

ended up in Sidney Harbour.

Finally, in 1880

the "SS Strathleven" docked in London
with a cargo frozen solid

to be sold here at Smithfield.

Britain was saved! ...