The Forgotten Father of Air Conditioning

Summary

HISTORY This Week – “The Forgotten Father of Air Conditioning”

Air Date: July 13, 2026
Host: John Earle
Guests: Bern Nagengast (technology historian), Linda Thompson (docent, Rainey House Museum, Apalachicola, FL)

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Episode Overview

This episode of "HISTORY This Week" uncovers the remarkable yet largely forgotten story of Dr. John Gorrie—the 19th-century physician, inventor, and humanitarian whose quest to ease suffering in a muggy frontier town led him to invent the first mechanical cooling machine. The episode charts Gorrie’s struggles against disease, public skepticism, and entrenched business interests, ultimately illustrating how his “insane, crazy idea” laid the groundwork for air conditioning and modern refrigeration, and transformed the way billions live and thrive in today’s ever-hotter world.

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Key Discussion Points & Episode Structure

Setting the Scene: Apalachicola, Florida, 1850

• [04:02] John Earle recounts the sweltering Florida climate and a Bastille Day party in 1850, where the French consul bets he can provide ice despite the delayed shipment.
• Champagne on ice becomes a symbol for the near-miraculous delivery of cold in a world without artificial cooling.

“The room falls silent as [French consul] Rossan rises to speak… On Bastille Day, he says, France gave her citizens what they wanted. Rossan… gives his guests what they want: Cool wines, even if it demands a miracle.” – John Earle [05:21]

Life in Swamp City: Climate, Plagues, and Profiteers

• [07:03] Linda Thompson colorfully describes the oppressive humidity and relentless biting insects of the Florida basin.
• Apalachicola’s prosperity hinges on cotton labor—mainly by enslaved people—and global trade, making it a magnet for adventurers and outcasts.
• The region is plagued by recurring fever outbreaks, especially malaria and, later, yellow fever.

“The air is… just feels damp, and it just kind of soaks you down.” – Linda Thompson [07:10] “The sickness begins with a chill so violent their teeth chatter… Then the chill gives way to a burning, sweaty fever. The cycle repeats…” – John Earle [09:09]

Enter Dr. John Gorrie: Physician, Inventor, Visionary

• [08:46–10:56] Gorrie arrives in Apalachicola circa 1833, a mysterious figure with continental style. Driven by the town’s annual fevers and fatalities (attributed to “bad air”), he campaigns to drain swamps and eventually turns to invention.
• His early prototype: ice suspended in rooms to cool fever patients—a rudimentary air conditioner.

“[Gorrie] writes, ‘Man must conquer these morbid woes.’ And so, year after year, he goes to the city council and tries to convince them to drain the marshes…” – John Earle [09:57]

The Science and Skepticism of Comfort Cooling

• Gorrie is inspired by scientific texts describing the cooling effect of compressing and decompressing air.
• He dares to imagine machines that cool entire cities, publishing under a pseudonym to avoid ridicule.
• [17:01–19:32] He faces cultural resistance—many see thwarting “nature’s way” as potentially unhealthy or even sinful. Others simply think him crazy.

“People felt that it’s nature’s way to have these periods of heat and cold… If we become too radical… maybe it’s not such a good idea.” – Bern Nagengast [17:14] “He was a very quiet man, not a big promoter, and that might have cost him.” – Linda Thompson [19:21]

From Cooling to “White Gold”: The Business of Ice

• Investors show no interest in comfort cooling, but the luxury and scarcity of ice (still harvested from frozen lakes and transported globally) signals a lucrative opportunity.
• Enter “the Ice King,” Frederick Tudor, who monopolizes the natural ice trade and ruthlessly undermines potential rivals.

“He relishes his hard won success. And he crushes potential rivals by slashing prices and waiting for their supply to just melt away. His personal motto projects the confidence of a powerful man: ‘I have so willed it.’” – John Earle [22:31]

Gorrie’s Moment: The Bastille Day Miracle

• [23:56–24:49] Gorrie unveils his machine-made ice at the Mansion House celebration, stunning guests and briefly stealing the spotlight from Tudor’s ice empire.
• He earns a U.S. patent for mechanical refrigeration and is locally lauded (“Here, everybody knows John Gorrie and we love John Gorrie…” – Linda Thompson [25:11]).

Collapse and Obscurity: Why Gorrie Was Forgotten

• [28:31–32:26] Gorrie’s patent rights become entangled after his investor’s death. Financial struggles mount as Northerners and potential backers ignore or ridicule his invention.
• Press coverage paints him as an eccentric or crank (“No one can make ice as well as God Almighty.” [30:10]), possibly abetted by Tudor’s interests.
• Suffering depression, Gorrie isolates himself. He concludes that his technology was simply “in advance of the wants of the country.”
• Gorrie dies in obscurity in 1855, leaving behind his visionary articles and the seed of modern cooling technology.

“His machine, he writes, has been found in advance of the wants of the country. In other words, the United States isn’t ready for artificial ice or artificial cold. For most Americans, God Almighty is still good enough.” – John Earle [32:26]

Legacy: The Chilled World He Imaged

• Gorrie’s cause–effect puzzle about fevers and climate was half right—mosquito-borne illnesses thrive in heat and humidity.
• His invention sets the stage for comfort cooling, refrigeration, and the global transformation of everyday life.
• The episode concludes by noting Gorrie’s relevance in the age of rising heatwaves and urgent need for cooling access worldwide.

“If they have air conditioning, access to refrigeration and so on, they can live better lives. As a result… All of this [is] the result of what was considered to be an insane, crazy idea in 1842.” – Bern Nagengast [34:59]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On climate misery:
  “They’re like a gnat that you really cannot see, but they have the teeth of a shark.” – Linda Thompson [07:56]

• Gorrie’s ambition:
  “He’s gone to medical school… and he has an idea. It’s so out there that he publishes under a pseudonymous. His idea is to turn Herschel’s theory into a real machine. A machine powerful enough to cool an entire city.” – John Earle [15:32]

• Prophecy of modern AC:
  “He’s like: Cooling machines and insulation should be standard in all new buildings. And we can power these machines with wind power.” – John Earle [19:32]

• On being before his time:
  “His machine… has been found in advance of the wants of the country.” – John Earle, quoting Gorrie [32:26]

• On transformation:
  “The inventions which John Gorrie proposes are calculated, if true, to alter and extend the face of civilization.” – contemporary observer [33:53]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [04:02–07:03] – Setting the scene: Bastille Day, Apalachicola, FL, and the desperate need for ice.
• [07:03–08:46] – Climate, insects, and why Apalachicola mattered.
• [08:46–13:18] – Gorrie’s arrival; tackling malaria and yellow fever.
• [13:18–19:32] – Gorrie’s inventive process; cultural skepticism; early AC concepts.
• [21:04–23:56] – The ice trade & Frederick Tudor; Gorrie’s challenge.
• [23:56–25:26] – The Bastille Day ice “miracle”; local fame.
• [28:31–32:26] – Gorrie’s fall: Funding woes, ridicule, and personal decline.
• [32:26–34:59] – Gorrie’s legacy, prophetic insights, and global impact.

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Episode Takeaway

Dr. John Gorrie’s obscured legacy is reclaimed: A frontier physician desperate to fight disease and discomfort, he laid the intellectual and technical groundwork for both artificial ice and comfort cooling. Though rejected and ridiculed in his lifetime, Gorrie’s vision “altered and extended the face of civilization”—granting humanity the ability to thrive in climates that were once unlivable, and showing how one person’s “crazy idea” can change the world.

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For further reading:

• The Fever Man by Vivian Sherlock
• How Air Conditioning Changed Everything by Salvador Basel

Guests:

• Bern Nagengast, technology historian
• Linda Thompson, Rainey House Museum, Apalachicola

Produced by: John Earle, Ben Dickstein (sound design), Back Pocket Studios & The HISTORY® Channel

Transcript

[Host]

It has been hot outside and Today's History this Week is all about a guy who tried to keep people cool. Maybe before they were ready for it. But before John brings you that story, I have a reminder for you. We just launched History this Week plus if you are looking for an excuse to stay inside today, we have got one even more History this Week. History this Week plus gets you ad free listening and extended interviews. All the tape from our experts that ended up on the cutting room floor, which is a lot and a lot of interesting stuff. Plus you will be supporting the work that we do here. Sign [e-mail] subscribe now. Think cool thoughts and enjoy the story of the man who Wanted to Chill

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[Narrator/Commentator]

The History Channel Original Podcast

[John Earle]

history this week, July 14, 1850. I'm John Earl. It's a summer day in Apalachicola, a port town in the Florida Panhandle. Inside the town's premier hotel, a celebration is underway. Long tables are festooned with red, white and blue flags, but they are not American flags. Apalachicola is thousands of miles from Paris, but today the French consul is throwing a party in honor of Bastille Day, France's Fourth of July, roughly. And what better way to celebrate than by raising a glass of ice cold champagne? The only thing that's missing is ice. The town's ice shipment has been delayed yet again. The consul's elite guests all know it. And yet they also know that there is no other way to get ice. Florida in July is hot, and in the mid-1800s, you can't just make ice. There's no machine that does that. It has to be shipped in from the northern states. And yet the French consul is insistent there will be ice. Monsieur Rouzanne tells his guests, he'll bet you on it. The room falls silent as Rossan rises to speak. On Bastille Day, he says, france gave her citizens what they wanted. Rohsan, talking in the third person, gives his guests what they cool Wines, even if it demands a miracle. A guest rises. Let us drink to the man who made the ice, an American Dr. Gorey. Roseanne waves his hand and the doors swing open. Waiters rush in carrying bottles of champagne on silver platters, bottles nestled in blocks of ice. Today, how did a country doctor become the father of artificial cooling? And how did his futuristic visions shape our chilled modern world? When you picture the American frontier, you probably don't picture the Florida panhandle. But in 1833, for white settlers, this is the American frontier. And Apalachicola is a frontier town teeming with newcomers and possibilities. Florida is still a territory, not a state, and plenty of people are willing to sail as long as three weeks around the peninsula to get here. Think deadwood, but swampier. Apalachicola sits on the Gulf coast, surrounded on three sides by swamp. It's a rough climate, warm, yes, but the real kicker is the humidity.

[Linda Thompson]

It's sometimes almost a smothering kind of. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but the air is. Just feels damp in you, and it just kind of soaks you down. My name is Linda. Johnson is my maiden name. And I'm Linda Thompson, born and raised in the area of Franklin County, Apalachicola, Florida.

[John Earle]

Linda is also a docent at a local history museum. And she says that with the humidity and the swamps comes really nasty bugs. Entire seasons of them. The run up to Bastille Day, that's yellowfly season.

[Linda Thompson]

They look like a regular housefly, but they're yellow and their bite is very ferocious.

[John Earle]

The holiday itself is in deer fly season. They have mouths like tiny scissors. On the barrier islands off the coast, you get swarms of no see ums.

[Linda Thompson]

They're like a gnat that you really cannot see, but they have the teeth of a shark. They are ferocious little animals.

[John Earle]

And lastly, the granddaddy of biting insects.

[Linda Thompson]

And then we also, of course, all the time have the mosquitoes.

[John Earle]

You might wonder why anybody would build a town here. The answer is cotton. Apalachicola sits at the mouth of a river basin that extends deep into Georgia and Alabama. All the cotton grown there, primarily by enslaved people, is sent down the river to Apalachicola. From there, it's shipped to mills in New England and Europe.

[Linda Thompson]

We had a French and a Belgian consulate here in Apalachicola, wheeling and dealing the price of cotton, getting it over to the European market.

[John Earle]

Apalachicola may be the frontier, but it's no backwater. It's one of America's largest seaports on The Gulf Coast. Tall ships from around the world stop here, and the town gets rich around the time that our story begins. It has elegant homes, two newspapers, and even a racetrack. But like in the Old west, boomtowns attract characters, adventurers, hustlers, people without a past. Dr. John Gorey is no exception. He was born on two different dates and died on three different dates. One observer writes, we don't even really know where he came from. His mother may have fled Spain and given birth to John out of wedlock. Or maybe not. His father was a Spanish royal or a Scottish captain. Or neither. What we do know is that in 1833, when he arrives in Apalachicola, Gorey is in his early 30s. He's just a few years out of medical school, handsome in a way they used to call Spanish looking. And in addition to being hot, he's probably also very warm, in his usual velvet trousers and snug Parisian coat. And he's drawn to Apalachicola, we think, because he's heard that this thriving town is, in a very real sense, cursed. The curse goes by many names. Some are complaint, some are sickness. As the names suggest, it strikes during the hottest months of the year, when the temperatures spike. The rich cotton merchants, bankers and brokers flee the town in terror. Newspapers close. Even the church pulpits stand empty. Apalachicola becomes a ghost town. Those left behind cover their mouths with handkerchiefs soaked in vinegar. They put garlic in their shoes and burn sulfur outside their homes. But these measures don't do much for the truly unlucky ones. The sickness begins with a chill so violent their teeth chatter. They pile on blankets, even in summer. Then the chill gives way to a burning, sweaty fever. The cycle repeats like a metronome, roughly every third day, cycle by cycle, the victim is worn down. Bern Nagengast is a technology historian who studied John Gorey. He says that Gorey, as a medical doctor, tries to help these patients, but often all he can do is watch.

[Narrator/Commentator]

What he saw was that people would suffer. They would show all kinds of horrible symptoms, and they would ultimately, in many cases, die.

[John Earle]

Like most people at the time, Gorey believes that the disease is caused by bad air. Mala aria in Italian. Bad air generated by decaying swamp matter, like soggy plants boiling in the sun, which is a big problem if your town is surrounded by swamps. But Gorey is committed to doing something about it. He writes, man must conquer these morbid woes. And so, year after year, he goes to the city council and tries to convince them to drain the marshes he even serves as the town's mayor. But the problem doesn't go away every summer. Malaria. To make matters so much worse, the area also suffers epidemics of of another, even deadlier disease. In the summer of 1841, yellow fever decimates the neighboring town of St. Joseph. John Gorey is there too. He looks into the ominous yellow eyes of the dying. 20 die in just eight days. Those who can flee. Of its 4,000 inhabitants, less than 400 remain. After the epidemic, the town is nearly wiped off the map. To Goree, yellow fever is another swamp gas disease, just like malaria. And he thinks they're both made worse by the heat and the humidity.

[Narrator/Commentator]

What they thought was that this obviously came from the high heat, the high humidity, and the fact that this caused a lot of vegetation to deteriorate, to emit all these horrible odors, to, you know, just rotation. And of course, people then were breathing all of this. And so John Gorey felt that we need to somehow figure out how we can control the high temperature and the high humidity.

[John Earle]

So Gorey changes course to his already long physician mayor. He adds one more title. Inventor. An inventor at war with heat itself.

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[Linda Thompson]

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[John Earle]

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only, go to Roe Co Safety for serious side effects and boxed warning associated with GLP1s. If you want to keep your house cool in the 1840s, your options are limited. Option one is to build it nice and open so the breeze blows through it. Option two, plant a shady tree. Option three, well, there really is no option three. People have been trying to cool the air for a very, very long time. The ancient Persians built wind towers that funneled breezes into their palaces. Leonardo da Vinci designed a machine that pumped water chilled air into into the bedroom of an Italian duchess. Now it's John Gorey's turn. He's gone to medical school. He reads the scientific literature and he's intrigued by the work of this English scientist named Sir John Herschel. Now, Herschel says if you compress air, cool it and then decompress it, the resulting air will be colder than it was at the beginning. Gorey reads this and he has an idea. It's so out there that he publishes it under a pseudonymous. His idea is to turn Herschel's theory into a real machine. A machine powerful enough to cool an entire city.

[Narrator/Commentator]

And I'm sure that people at the time probably thought the man was out of his mind. How could we possibly control the atmosphere in an entire city?

[John Earle]

It's not just the scale that invites skepticism. It's the very idea of comfort cooling. A hundred years before AC becomes common in American homes, the idea of cooling your house with a machine is bonkers.

[Narrator/Commentator]

People felt that it's nature's way to have these periods of heat and cold. And yeah, we try to protect ourselves against it to a reasonable degree, but if we become too radical with this, maybe it's not such a good idea.

[John Earle]

Sit in the shade, fan yourself, all fine. Anything more than that, it's just not right.

[Narrator/Commentator]

And those ideas range from people who felt that, well, because it's nature's way, it's really against nature, you know, to try to do this type of a thing. Other people felt that, well, if you start changing the temperature around you to any kind of an extreme, it's probably going to cause you to become ill.

[John Earle]

Gorey doesn't buy any of this. To him, comfort Cooling is a public health measure. It's necessary to fight malaria and yellow fever. So he throws himself into developing his cooling machine. He works, you might say, feverishly.

[Narrator/Commentator]

Gorey at the time became almost obsessed, I think, with this idea to the point where he was spending apparently as much time as he could with his experiments.

[John Earle]

Before long, he's got a prototype. It's pretty rudimentary, just buckets of ice suspended from the ceiling with air flowing over them, but it works. Supposedly he uses it to cool the sick rooms for malaria patients in his own home. Gorey then publishes a series of articles about his experiments, also under a pen name, which it's actually worth pausing on this. Nagengast says that it was once common to publish radical ideas under a pseudonym.

[Narrator/Commentator]

You didn't want people who knew you to recognize that you had proposed this radical idea, and then they would come at you telling you things like, you're out of your mind. You can't possibly do that. Or even to the extent of thinking you're just plumb crazy.

[John Earle]

But Gorey seems to have been particularly sensitive to ridicule. Linda Thompson says that he was kind of a sensitive guy in a brilliant

[Linda Thompson]

man who had a lot of insight to do things, but he was a very quiet man, not a big promoter, and that might have cost him.

[John Earle]

For the moment, though, Gorey is flying high. These articles he writes, they're incredible. He drops the idea of cooling entire cities. It's too impractical. Instead, he does something more amazing. He predicts the future. He's like cooling machines and insulation should be standard in all new buildings. And we can power these machines with wind power. Gori pictures horizontal sails like on a sailing ship. Imagine entire cities of billowing sails. It's also a rare moment when I feel like I can see Gory. Not the statue, the actual person. Because his personal papers have been lost. Gory's articles and patents are all we have. And here he comes through. Passionate, doesn't even capture it. He's a fiery humanitarian. High temperatures, Gorey writes, prevent a large portion of the human family from sharing the natural advantages they possess. It is a source of evil. Gori keeps tinkering, designing a steam powered motor that actively compresses and cools hot air. And four years later, he has a vastly improved prototype. But he's running into a problem.

[Narrator/Commentator]

By 1848 or so, Gorey had started to realize that his idea for comfort cooling wasn't an idea that people very much were interested in from a standpoint of developing and paying for its development or even paying for such a service.

[John Earle]

People don't seem to want AC again. They think nature's way is good enough. And Gorey's would be. Investors won't back a device that nobody wants. They have a better idea. Something there is a market for a big market. Ice. Ice is a delicacy. To plop a cube into your drink on a hot summer day is the height of luxury. At up to 10 times the price of beefsteak, ice lives up to its nickname, white gold. The reason it's so expensive is that there's no way to manufacture it. Ice has to be harvested during wintertime from frozen lakes. Then it's stored and shipped around the world. The ice trade is big business and it's controlled by one guy, a man they call the Ice King. Frederick Tudor looks the part. A photo of him shows an older man with pursed lips and a furrowed brown framed by thick white mutton chops. Tudor is born into a wealthy Boston family. And in the early 1800s, before anybody outside of cold climates was plopping ice into their drinks. He sees an opportunity.

[Narrator/Commentator]

Hey, I can make money by organizing an industry to harvest ice, to store ice, to ship ice, to sell ice.

[John Earle]

Beginning with one tiny ship, he builds an empire.

[Narrator/Commentator]

He succeeded to such an extent that he not only controlled much of that business in the United States, but he also controlled much of that business worldwide.

[John Earle]

Tudor ships New England ice as far away as India. He relishes his hard won success. And he crushes potential rivals by slashing prices and waiting for their supply to just melt away. His personal motto projects the confidence of a powerful man. I have so willed it. John Gorey isn't the smiling type either. But he can't contain his excitement. Ahead of the Bastille Day celebration, he has a secret, which he confides to his closest friend. He's done it. He's created ice to hell. You have, the friend says, to which Gorey replies, this has nothing to do with hell. Without all the costs of harvesting, storing and shipping ice, a machine that can produce ice would undercut Tudor empire. But before Gorey can become the new king of cool, he needs money to perfect and mass produce his machine. And what better way to attract investors than with an old fashioned publicity stunt for Bastille Day. Apalachicola's French consul wants to have a big celebration. As you'll recall, the town's shipment of ice has been delayed. The planners are worried that it will be a huge buzzkill to go without ice.

[Narrator/Commentator]

But John Gorey ended up Telling the people of Apalachicola, you don't have anything to worry about. I can provide the ice. And you can imagine that they're thinking, where's he going to get this ice?

[John Earle]

Gorey's ice making machine is still very much under wraps. But now he's brought it to the Mansion House, the swanky hotel where the celebration is being held.

[Narrator/Commentator]

When Bastille Day came here, all of a sudden, this guy who isn't an ice merchant or anything of the sort, he comes up with all of this ice. People right away are going to be asking, wow, where did you get this ice?

[John Earle]

And Gory probably says, I made it.

[Narrator/Commentator]

And then I can just see the people of Apalachicola saying, what? You made it? That's impossible. How could you possibly make ice without it being cold? How could you possibly make ice essentially out of thin air? Which is really what he did.

[John Earle]

July 14, 1850, is John Gorey's great public triumph. It gets him a place in the history books. He'll later receive the first U.S. patent for mechanical refrigeration. It's why there's a statue of him in the U.S. capitol's National Statuary Hall, a John Gorey Memorial Bridge, and a little John Gorey Museum in Apalachicola, where he's still a household name.

[Linda Thompson]

Here, everybody knows John Gorey and we love John Gorey. We talk about, you know, we're glad y' all came down here to the south, but if y' all get hot now, remember, we got air conditioned. I can give you a nice cold drink out of ice because John Gorey really did all that for us, you know.

[John Earle]

John Gorey comes out of Bastille Day with a head of steam, ready to raise money for his invention, ready to take on the world, ready perhaps to slay the ice king. Little does he know that he's about to run headlong into a wall. Harder and colder than ice. There's a reason you've probably never heard his name.

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[John Earle]

In an eerie harbinger of things to come, the Mansion House, the site of the Bastille Day celebration, burns down. The following year, the site of Gorey's triumph is reduced to ashes. Worse news follows. Gori's main financial backer is dead. Gori had sold 3/4 of his patent to this guy, and the man's will made no provisions for future support. Gorey is now in business with a corpse. With only a minority stake in his own patent, he hits the road in search of more capital. Still, it seems like it would be a slam dunk. A machine that makes ice. Who wouldn't want to invest in that?

[Narrator/Commentator]

He was very, very persistent in trying to promote his idea and seemingly Exhausted almost everything you might think of to be able to do this.

[John Earle]

He pitches investors in New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond, Boston. And in the winter of 1852, he goes to New York. He has all these pamphlets printed and trudges through the slush to distribute them to potential investors. But New Yorker's attention is elsewhere. They are enthralled by the new practice of bump fingering, better known as the now dispute credited pseudoscience of phrenology. They're packing lecture halls to hear about the evils of slavery and fawning over the Swedish nightingale soprano sensation Jenny Lind on her first and only US tour. Nobody seems interested in a little pamphlet entitled Dr. Gorey's Apparatus for the Artificial Production of Ice in Tropical Climates. But Gorey suspects that something else might be at work. The press coverage of his invention is just so weirdly bad.

[Narrator/Commentator]

Supposedly was said in one newspaper article that he was a crank in the southern US proposing this outrageous, crazy idea. And that one of the sayings supposedly was that, you know, no one can make ice as well as God Almighty.

[John Earle]

Even the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce in faraway India calls Ghori's invention a cock and bull story. Are people really that set in their ways, or is Frederick Tudor conspiring to crush a potential rival? We don't have any evidence of a coordinated smear campaign, but Bern Nagengast says the theory is at least plausible to

[Narrator/Commentator]

somebody in the ice industry who is unscrupulous. They could protect themselves by spreading false stories or impugning the reputation of the person who came up with this idea. And of course, the easiest way to do that was simply to say, this man is out of his mind.

[John Earle]

But there's a more likely explanation, he

[Narrator/Commentator]

says, whether you look at his idea of first comfort cooling, or if you look at his idea of prusing ice artificially. His ideas were so far advanced, so perhaps fantastic to people, that only a small number of people would see in that something that actually could be done could become successful.

[John Earle]

Maybe Gorey just never found those people. And even though he really tried, he just didn't have the flair or the panache of a great salesman.

[Narrator/Commentator]

He wasn't a flamboyant person, apparently. It almost seems like he could be subject to bouts of depression and anxiety. And as a result, after all these efforts he made to try to promote his idea, apparently depression and anxiety really caught up with him. And so he started to become despondent.

[John Earle]

Gorrie has a sort of nervous collapse. He returns home to Apalachicola and broods over what happened.

[Narrator/Commentator]

According to the stories about him, he became more reclusive. He kind of withdrew from everything, and apparently this caused him even to become physically ill. What went wrong?

[John Earle]

Toward the end of his life, Gorey settles on an explanation. His machine, he writes, has been found in advance of the wants of the country. In other words, the United States isn't ready for artificial ice or artificial cold. For most Americans, God Almighty is still good enough. Gorey never recovers from his disappointment. And in 1855, still in his early 50s, he dies. But just before he dies, he publishes one last article. It's clear that his attention has turned away from ice back to comfort cooling. He's once again trying to relieve the suffering of his patients in Apalachicola. On the nature of malaria and prevention of its morbid agency is half swan song, half utopian prophecy. Not only will comfort cooling help the sick, he writes, it will also produce mental and physical energy, the foundation for ingenuity, labor, perseverance and nice economy. It will help countries in warmer climates grow their economies, and it will lead to architectural styles that are better designed for human comfort. All of this will be possible when the world embraces comfort cooling, he writes. And the thing is, he was right.

[Narrator/Commentator]

John Gorey's ideas actually transformed the world.

[John Earle]

An early observer of Gorey's cooling machines sums it up best.

[Narrator/Commentator]

He said, we know no want more urgent than a cheap means of producing artificial cold. The inventions which John Gorey proposes are calculated, if true, to alter and extend the the face of civilization.

[John Earle]

Gorey was correct about the relationship between malaria, yellow fever and the climate, but not exactly in the way he thought. It's not hot temperatures and muggy air that directly cause harm, but that kind of climate is the perfect habitat for mosquitoes and they are the ones that transmit these diseases. The cooler the climate, the lower the burden of mosquito borne illnesses. And beyond the medical realm, comfort cooling and artificial ice eventually become common in many places. Refrigeration makes it possible to transport food and medicine around the world. And on a planet with ever more intense heat waves, his vision of a chilled world is more urgent than ever, especially for the more than 1 billion people at risk today from lack of access to cooling.

[Narrator/Commentator]

If they have air conditioning, access to refrigeration and so on, they can live better lives. As a result, they are more comfortable, they are more productive, they are more healthy. All of this the result of what was considered to be an insane, crazy idea in 1842.

[John Earle]

Thanks for listening to history this week. A Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things history this week, sign [e-mail] and if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email historythisweekistory.com Special thanks to our guests, Bern Nagengast, technology historian and author, and Linda Thompson, docent at the Rainey House Museum in Apalachicola, Florida. We also used the books the Fever man by Vivian Sherlock and How Air Conditioning Changed Everything by Salvador Basel, among other sources. This episode was produced by me, John Earle, and sound designed by Ben Dickstein for Back Pocket Studios. Our executive producer is Ben Dickstein for the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate and review History this week, wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.