The Pessimists Archive posted an article about how modern refrigeration really started in the US in the late 1840s, when the inventor Dr. John Gorrie served ice to guests in the summer, in Florida. He got a patent on his new process a couple years later.
But this was Florida, which has been…well, Florida…for a long time now. The Florida government responded by banning “artificial ice.” And of course the “natural ice industry,” which was a thing at the time, immediately started with the propaganda…er, “advertising”…to try to convince people that the way things were previously was:
- The way things were meant to be.
- Better, because there was none of that elitist science stuff involved.
- Not going to change (because they made money with the old system).
Business people inherently want things to stay exactly the same forever, if. they’re making money, and for things to change completely no matter the side effects if they’re not making money yet but see a way they might. That kind of sentiment is behind the “disruption” touted in the tech industry. They don’t want things to change on a grand scale; they just want the money to flow to themselves instead of the current recipients.
Also note, by the way, that back in the 1800s business people felt free to invent (lie about) actual testable facts, just like they still do. “Take 100 pounds ‘Natural Ice’…then try 100 pounds ‘Artificial’…compare the two and see difference in degrees of cold obtained.” The greed heads knew perfectly well that the number of ordinary customers who will try this is effectively zero. They almost certainly haven’t done it themselves, because they might have somebody on their staff who would point out that it’s the initial temperature of the ice that’s important, not how the ice was made. For that matter, they might even discover that if you’re going to cool your food with a pile of cold material (instead of, say, getting your own refrigerator, which would very soon make the whole ice industry go away), there might very well be a material other than water that works even better. There are such materials by the way, although they may not have been known in the 1800s. What you want is something that goes through a thermal phase change at the right temperature. Ice is hard to beat for cooling food, though.
Once you crazy-glue your mind to a single motivation, whether it’s money or power or “race” (which doesn’t even exist) or some other fantasy, the glue sticks and the crazy starts. People often seem susceptible to this kind of thing, and it’s probably a combination of the way our minds inherently work and the education they receive, which has pretty obviously been going badly wrong for a long time.
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Thanks to the Pessimists Archive, from which I swiped the image.
