The Florida Panhandle, John Gorrie and Air-conditioning

by Norman Berdichevsky (September 2014)

–– an irony –  that appealed to my geographic imagination along with the enchantment of staying at three bread and breakfast homes officially listed in the National Register and certified in every guidebook as “haunted.”

What we discovered along the way outweighed the discomfort. The humidity wasn’t that bad for the first day when we stayed in Quincy (which, believe it or not, once boasted an “opera house”) and passed through Chattahoochie next to the Georgia line (within the Central Standard Time Zone). The next day we “enjoyed” low humidity again below 40%. The last day of our trip however ensured that we didn’t escape from the worst summer heat and humidity which plagued the entire state and Gulf Coast for generations before the advent of air-conditioning about which we learned a fascinating story. As a geographer, I have had many experiences visiting places about which I had read and studied a lot but always found something intriguing, deceptive, or inexplicable about places when actually encountering and observing them. Speaking to local residents and seeing their home environment often unleashes a stream of consciousness about how other people live and what might have been.

During our drive we passed at least a dozen “correctional institutes” and often saw the inmates at work on outdoor projects. Scores of flatbed trucks hauling enormous logs zipped passed us with only a few inches of clearance, a sight we hadn’t paid attention to in other parts of the state.

The three haunted houses were not too pricey given the time of the year when tourism is at a low point. I tried to figure out what it would be best to call us – the opposite of the typical “snowbirds” who come to sunny Florida during the winter, ice and snow of the Northern states. It may well be the attraction of eccentrics undisturbed by the season following the careers of literary greats drawn to Florida such as Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac. None of these however was attracted to the Panhandle!

Apalachicola features a beautiful antebellum home built in 1838 by Thomas Orman, overlooking the Apalachicola River and was used for both business and social gatherings. Orman was a cotton merchant and businessman from 1834 to the mid-1880s and a contemporary of physician and inventor John Gorrie. Orman helped the tiny town become one of the Gulf Coast’s most important cotton exporting ports.  The magnificent home has been beautifully restored and features details of both Federal and Greek revival styles with pine floorboards, wooden mantelpieces, and molded plaster cornices. Nevertheless the most fascinating look at this period of history and an understanding of its society can be gained by a visit to the museum a stone’s throw away celebrating the life and work of Dr. John Gorrie.

John Gorrie, is a name I assume most readers (like myself) have never heard of. What the museum reveals is also a telling critique of the negative side of the oft repeated mantra of the so called “American Dream” – repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseum by politicians of all stripes declaring that if an immigrant or individual with no social standing or economic resources simply works hard, is honest and applies himself, he will inevitably “succeed.”  

John Gorrie (1803 – 1855) was a physician, scientist, inventor, and humanitarian, born on the Caribbean Island of Nevis (then under British rule) to Scottish parents. He spent his childhood in South Carolina and received his medical education at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York in Fairfield. Gorrie’s appearance was unusual – he had a “foreign air” about him due to his olive complexion and very dark hair and eyes. Rumor had it that his mother was born in Spain and had fled to the Caribbean.

Dr. Gorrie was appalled at the poor sanitary conditions and how illness was aggravated by the region’s tropical climate of high heat and humidity. His medical research concentrated on the study of tropical diseases. Although the cause of yellow fever and malaria were unknown at the time, many ascribed the symptoms to bad hot humid air. He originally proposed draining swamps and the cooling of air in sickrooms. To achieve this, Gorrie hit on the simple idea of cooling rooms with ice in a basin suspended from the ceiling. Cool air, being heavier, flowed down towards the floor across the patient and could be conducted out of the room by a vent thus causing a circulation current. By 1845, he became so enthused by the idea of manufactured ice, that he gave up his medical practice to pursue refrigeration projects. 

Gorrie invented a machine that produced ice by proposing the motive energy of either horses, water, wind-driven sails, or steam power that could drive a compressor. This machine lay the groundwork for modern refrigeration and air-conditioning. On May 6, 1851, he was granted Patent No. 8080. Although the mechanism produced ice in quantities, leakage and irregular performance sometimes impaired its operation. Gorrie went to New Orleans in search of venture capital to market the device, but met with the immediate opposition of what can today be called “The Ice Lobby.”

The international trade in ice can be said to have begun in 1806 when the New England businessman Frederic Tudor – the “Ice King” who shipped ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique, intending to sell it to well off members of the European elite there. In spite of the enormous wastage due to melting, the trade proved profitable due to the insatiable demand. Tudor quickly attracted competitors. During the 1830s and 1840s the “natural’ ice trade expanded further, with shipments reaching the American south, England, India, South America, China and Australia. Gorrie realized that if he could find an alternative and artificially manufacture ice, it would prove to be not only a boon to health but also establish a lucrative business.

The “Ice Trade” was a 19th-century industry, centering on New England (Tudor was from a wealthy Boston family) and Norway. It facilitated the large-scale harvesting, transport and sale of natural ice for home consumption and commercial purposes. Ice was cut from the surface of ponds and streams, then stored in “ice houses” wrapped in insulating material, sawdust or hay, before being sent on by ship, barge or railroad to its final destination around the world. Ice wagons were typically used to distribute the product to the final domestic and smaller commercial customers.

On July 14, 1847, Gorrie received acknowledgment for his project when the French consul Monsieur Rosan was celebrating Bastille Day, and guests were upset at the prospect of having to dink warm wine. Rosan gave his guests a surprise when waiters delivered cool wine that had been prepared with the help of Gorrie’s device.

With his invention being ridiculed regularly in the press, his other investors fell by the wayside. Gorrie suspected that Frederic Tudor had spearheaded a smear campaign against him and his invention. Gorrie even expressed the long term view that his invention would not only benefit health, and preserve food but also would regulate the temperature of buildings, thus envisioning centralized air conditioning. He died impoverished in 1855, and the idea of air-conditioning languished for 50 years.

The basic principle was cooling caused by the rapid expansion of gases. Using two double acting force pumps, air was first condensed and then rarified. A small amount of water was then injected and the air was then submerged in coils surrounded by a circulating bath of cooling water. He then allowed the interjected water to condense out in a holding tank of lower pressure containing brine. Drip-fed, brick-sized, oil coated metal containers of non-saline water, were then immersed into the brine, producing manufactured ice bricks.

At the time of Gorrie’s death, the industry was already quite large. In 1855, around $6–7 million ($250 million in today’s dollars) was invested in the industry in the U.S. and an estimated two million tons of ice was kept in storage at any one time in warehouses across the nation – a powerful opponent of any “artificially” manufactured alternative.

His life ended in tragedy. Gorrie was humiliated by the libel and criticism, financially ruined, and his health broken. He died in seclusion on June 29, 1855 and is buried in Gorrie Square in Apalachicola. A version of Gorrie’s “cooling system” was used when President James A. Garfield lay dying in 1881. Naval engineers built a box filled with cloths that had been soaked in melted ice water and forced hot air to blow on the cloths thereby causing a drop in room temperature by 20 degrees Fahrenheit. 

What would have or could have happened had Gorrie secured major financial backing? There is no doubt that with the improvements in railroads and shipping the cost of both producing and transporting refrigerated fresh fruits and vegetables and ice would have declined significantly thus opening up a huge opportunity to a modern agriculture in the South not reliant on the crops of cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo tied to slavery and share-cropping. It would have raised health standards in the South and help prevent the deeply held prejudices of many in the South against innovative change by “foreigners” (or “Yankees”). It is also a sad reminder that the “American Dream” has sometimes stumbled against the harsh realities of powerful vested economic interests.

We didn’t cool off on our trip to The Panhandle but it was an illuminating and educational experience.

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Norman Berdichevsky is the author of The Left is Seldom Right and Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language.

 

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