The physician
Who Manufactured Ice
(A factual account)
From the period he was a tiny boy coping with his Spanish mother in Charleston, Sc, John Gorrie had imagined becoming a key medical doctor in a hospital.
At this point at age thirty-two through the aid of a good friend, the prestigious United States senator John C. Calhoun, Gorrie had received an appointment while physician responsible for the new Ocean Hospital in Apalachicola, Fl, a busy seaport on the northeast coast with the Gulf of Mexico. The season was 1833.
The taller grave-mannered bachelor medical doctor arranged upon his new obligations with quiet, optimistic view, and with skills and knowledge specifically suited to his new obligations. As a child he had witnessed the misery of men and women afflicted with yellowish fever and malaria. In Charleston he had familiarized him self with the conditions believed at the moment to trigger the conditions.
Dr . Gorrie also discovered the benefits of glaciers from his frequent sessions to the ice houses. Snow companies such as the famous Tudor's cut organic ice in the north and shipped this packed in sawdust towards the warmer weather, such as the Western world Indies, Sarasota, and India.
When funds to support his mother and himself halted coming from his absent, unfamiliar father, the dark-complexioned Gorrie supported they are all. An industrious person, he learned quickly. He learned several dialects, including Spanish and Latina, and became well-versed in math and physics-subjects that would afterwards be of wonderful benefit to him, his community, and his patients.
His likeable individuality and keen nature helped him get hold of financial aid to go to Fairfield Medical College in New York, in which he excelled in the studies and developed a fantastic treatise about nerve diseases.
Shortly after obtaining his medical degree, Doctor Gorrie and his mother moved to Abbeville, T. C., where he practiced medication briefly and learned even more about the prevention and cure of yellow fever, malaria, and treatment of nerve disorders.
It was at this point in the career that Dr . Gorrie's friend, Senator Calhoun, received him the appointment for Marine Medical center. Dr . Gorrie and his mother quickly jam-packed their property and went overland simply by stagecoach through Georgia clay-based country into a small city named Sneads, Florida, close to the commercially active Apalachicola Riv. Leaving his mother in Sneads, the young doctor traveled simply by boat to his fresh assignment.
Right now there in the busy cotton seaport of Apalachicola, Dr commercial soft serve ice cream machines for sale. Gorrie began a life that would bring him increasing fame, fortune, and eventual bitter disappointment. Working long, difficult hours, the rangy medical doctor used his knowledge, training, and skills to cure and ease the struggling of his patients-sailors and civilians, slaves and freemen.
The fresh doctor urged the townspeople to adopt methods used in Charleston to eliminate conditions believed accountable for the propagate of discolored fever and malaria. These steps included fill-in or drainage of low-lying swampy areas; fires; tree groves; and gauze curtains around bed frames at night.
For those who contacted the fever, this individual prescribed foundation rest, medication , gause nets, and decreasing of body temperature through make use of cold gaze and by lowering heat and humidity inside the sickrooms.
An inventor. Doctor Gorrie acquired developed a crude nevertheless workable cooling system. He installed urns filled with ice from a New Britain shipping business from the ceilings of his sickrooms and ran piping through the ceiling. As the environment was driven through the pipes, it approved over the glaciers in the urns. As the environment passed over the ice, it had been cooled and circulated during the rooms, displacing the hot, humid air flow that induced the individuals so much soreness.
Dr . Gorrie was thrilled with the effects, but the most important item in the air-cooling apparatus-ice-was expensive but not always obtainable in sufficient volumes. Because the glaciers had to be sent in by ice firms from locations like faraway Boston, Ma, the price occasionally rose to as much as a dollars and fifty cents a pound-a sharp price at that time. Sometimes the ships showed up late.
Finally, in the hot climate glaciers melted quickly, in spite of methods used to slow the process, just like packing the ice in pine sawdust or perhaps hay, gift wrapping it in blankets, and keeping it in specifically built storage rooms.
Still looking for a better way to cool his sickbays, Doctor Gorrie chosen to use his knowledge of physics to build a mechanically driven machine to reduce the temperature and moisture for his patients. Operating nights in an old shed behind the hospital, he developed a crude but workable machine which harnessed warm air, pressurized it, and changed that to refreshing cool air that brought much relief to his fever-ridden patients.
The physician-inventor experienced solved two problems: He had made the need for ice obsolete in chilling the sickrooms, and he previously reduced the price of cooling down them. Even now, he thought, what if an individual could by mechanical means produce ice cubes? Not only on a small scale yet also commercially.
Looking in advance, he found the advantages of such an invention: Perishable food could be carried in warm climates; ice cream and other frosty foods could possibly be manufactured over a more popular scale and then for less expense; other foods could be frosty, kept pertaining to indefinite amounts of time, then thawed and eaten; and medications requiring very much cooler conditions for storage could be maintained.
Dr soft ice cream machine. Gorrie retired from most of his medical practice to commit time to his ice-maker job. He closeted himself yet again in the outdated shed at the back of the hospital and began secretly to try things out. He made a decision to work in key because in the event that he failed, he would certainly not be exposed to scorn and ridicule. And there is another reason if you are clandestine regarding his invention: There would be much less chance of somebody stealing his idea in the event that he been successful in his venture.
However , he found that inventing a great ice-making machine became tougher than inventing his mechanical air-cooling system. Like with Thomas Edison as well as the electric light light bulb later inside the century, he failed often. When he finally discovered the main element, it came by accident.
A single night during an extraordinarily severe warmth wave, Doctor Gorrie's assistants left the mechanical air-cooling machine jogging all night to provide continuous comfort and ease for some from the physician's even more seriously sick patients. The next morning when an assistant found turn off the machine, this individual found the pipes stopped up with glaciers. Excited in the breakthrough, Doctor Gorrie stepped with reconditioned zeal into his job. Within a year-by 1845-he acquired built a crude but workable program that could manufacture brick-size ice cubes blocks.
In short ,, Dr . Gorrie's ice machine used physical force to compress and expand surroundings, gradually getting rid of heat from your water in the freezing yacht. The heat was then soaked up in an liquefied similar to bout, circulating over the freezing value-added tax. As the warmth was taken off, the water inside the vessel cooled and halted.
Dr . Gorrie's invention first became open public knowledge if he promised some Episcopal girls that he would supply these ice for their ice cream event if the dispatch bringing glaciers did not turn up on time. The ship was delayed plus the doctor happy his promise.
Although popularity did not arrive to Dr . Gorrie in the life time, this individual earned the respect and love of his guy Apalachicolans-not just for the technology of his air-cooling program and the physical ice maker but in addition for his treatment and cure of the sick and for advantages to his community as being a mayor, councilman, and deacon of the Episcopal Church.
His efforts to build commercial ice-making machines to generate his frozen product in much larger quantities failed. He was relentlessly compared by the large ice corporations which feared the financial effects these kinds of a successful business undertaking might have on their business interests. Others opposed his efforts about moral and religious environment. Finally, there is the belief that the necessity for ice would not support large, industrial plants.
Ill and disappointed over the inability of his efforts, Doctor Gorrie at some point collapsed and died in l855 at the age of fifty-two.
Today, John Gorrie continues to acquire tributes as the father of modern air-conditioning and refrigeration. A statue from the resourceful doctor stands in Statuary Corridor in Wa, D. C.; a art gallery, a batiment, and a bridge named after him honor his recollection; and the first ice-making machine sits on exhibit inside the Smithsonian Institution--a lasting homage to the doctor who produced ice.
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