Welcome to Backbone. I'm Jeff Keltner.

And I'm Cyrus Mistry.

And this is the show where we go looking for the technologies that hold the modern world up, the stuff you never think about until the day it stops working. And, Cyrus, I have to say, for the first one, I think we picked well. We did, which is kind of

the paradox of this one. It's the most boring appliance in your house, and I think it has the most interesting past of anything in there.

That's the bet. The stuff you stop noticing is where the best stories hide, and I don't think either of us is gonna look at it the same way again.

A 100%. I've now told my kids more about this than they ever wanted to know. They take it for granted. Like, there's fridges now. That's just the world.

And the thing is, it wasn't. For most of human history, cold was weather. It happened to you. Nobody sold it, and the first guy who tried to sell it got laughed at in the newspaper.

Okay. I wanna hear about that guy.

Okay. So it's February eighteen o six, Boston Harbor, and a small two masted ship, a brig, has just cleared customs headed for Martinique, which is a French sugar island in the Caribbean, three weeks south, 2,000 miles. And the town paper, the Boston Gazette, runs a little notice about it. I'm gonna read it because it might be my favorite sentence in the whole story. Quote, no joke.

A vessel has cleared at the custom house for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.

Slippery speculation. That is a 220 year old burn, and it still lands. Like, whoever wrote that went home happy that night.

Oh, absolutely. And the whole town thought this was insane. The ship is carrying about 80 tons of ice, pond ice, cut off a family farm North Of Boston in a town called Saugus, and it belongs to a 23 year old named Frederick Tudor.

23?

Yeah. And here's the thing you have to understand about Frederick Tudor. He is a Boston Brahmin kid. His father was a lawyer, studied law in John Adams' office, was George Washington's first judge advocate general in the Continental Army. Serious family.

His older brother William went to Harvard, class of 1796, and later founded the North American Review. And Frederick is the one son who didn't go to Harvard. He left school at 13. 13. Went to work as the youngest apprentice in accounting house on State Street, and his own family did not think much of him.

There's a journal entry from his older brother in eighteen o one that says, and I'm paraphrasing only slightly, it is the greatest difficulty I can get him to do anything. I hope there will be a time when I shall be able to rouse him.

So he's the family disappointment.

Completely. And on top of that, his father has just lost a big chunk of the family fortune speculating on land in South Boston. So you've got a kid who opted out of the approved path, whose own brother thinks he's lazy, whose dad just lost the money, and that kid decides the thing he's going to do with his life is ship frozen pond water to the tropics.

Okay. But where does the idea even come from? Like, nobody in Boston is sitting around going, you know what The Caribbean needs?

Yeah. That's the thing. The record doesn't really tell us. What we do have is his diary. August first eighteen o five.

William and myself have this day determined to get together what property we have and embark on the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies. And then later that same year, this line, which I love. People only laugh and believe me not when I tell them I'm going to the West Indies.

So he knows. He knows he's the joke before the ship ever leaves.

He's writing it down, and it gets better. Nobody in Boston would carry the cargo, not one ship owner. Because 80 tons of ice melts, the meltwater floods your hold, rots your timbers, ruins your ship. So Tudor buys his own ship. He'd raised about $10,000, most of it borrowed, and he spends nearly half of it, $4,750 on the brig.

Half the money on the boat before he sold a pound of ice.

Yeah. And then the ice goes in, and he sails. Three weeks. And the cargo actually does okay on the voyage. A lot of it survives.

The problem is what happens when he gets there because there's no ice house in Martinique. His brother and a cousin had gone ahead to build one and line up buyers, and they basically failed at both. So the ice is sitting on a dock in the Caribbean melting while Frederick Tudor goes looking for anyone who wants it, and he prints a handbill, March seventh eighteen o six. The price is 10¢ a pound. It is necessary to bring a wool cloth or a piece of covering to wrap

the ice. He has to tell people to bring a blanket?

Because nobody there has anywhere to keep it. His biographer quotes his diary. Customers wrapping their chunk of ice in a blanket, waddling home, and wondering why it's gone by the time they get there.

Of course, it's gone.

The one thing that does sell is ice cream. He makes it himself, and a local businessman clears a small fortune in one night, but that's it. And there's a line in his diary from that trip that I think is the whole emotional core of the guy. I found myself without money and without friends and with only a cargo of ice in a torrid zone to depend on. He loses about $4,500 on the voyage, nearly half his stake, almost exactly what the ship cost.

And then it gets worse. He tries Havana, loses more. Then Jefferson's embargo in eighteen o seven wrecks the whole West Indies trade, and he's tens of thousands of dollars in debt. And within a few years, more than once, between eighteen o nine and 1813, Frederick Tudor is in debtor's prison.

Which we don't even have a modern equivalent for. You failed at a business, and they put you in jail.

Right. And in his journal, through all of this, there's one line that keeps showing up. And I don't know exactly when he first wrote it. Nobody does. But he wrote it, and he came back to it.

Let those laugh who win.

That's the whole guy in five words.

That should be on the wall of every founder's office, honestly.

I mean, this guy would fit right in in Silicon Valley. Like, drop him in Palo Alto in 2026, and he has a pitch deck by Tuesday.

Okay. Receipts. Why? Look at

the shape of it. Dropout, family thinks he's lazy, product nobody's asked for, burns half his capital on infrastructure before revenue, and this is the part, his twenty years of losses were financed. That's family money absorbing the hits. That's not grit alone. That's a seed round from your parents that keeps getting extended.

That's fair. Although most founders I know would have quit after the second prison stint.

The good ones would have pivoted to ice cream.

So, okay, before we follow him out of jail, I think we have to answer the newspaper because the Gazette wasn't being dumb. Everybody in Boston thought this was funny.

Right. And that's the question I kept coming back to. Why was it a joke? We're sitting here in a world where cold is the most boring thing imaginable. What did the world look like that made a boatload of ice funny?

Yeah. And you went deeper on this than I did. What did you find?

So this is the part I found genuinely hard to picture. In eighteen o six, cold is a season. It's not a thing you have. It's a thing that happens to you for a few months if you live far enough north. Outside of that belt, it basically doesn't exist.

My favorite example is Calcutta. Before American ice showed up there, the local ice was made by laying porous clay pots of water out on straw in shallow trenches on cold, clear winter nights. The pot sweat, the straw insulates you from the ground, a clear night radiates heat to the sky, and by morning, there's a skin of ice you can scrape off. It works a few nights a year, and what you get is gritty, slushy, and expensive. That was ice in one of the biggest cities on Earth.

And in Boston? In Boston, you had winter, and then you had ways to stretch winter. A spring house over a cold stream, a root cellar. Rich estates had ice houses. Dig a pit, pack it in January, hope it lasts to July.

And mostly, you ate in season because there was no alternative.

Right. And there's a version of this that's kind of charming. Oh, everybody ate seasonally. How lovely. And then there's the other version.

Which is the babies.

Yeah. So the lethal version of no cold is summer in a city with an infant. In 1891 in New York City, infant mortality was about two hundred and forty per thousand births. That is roughly one baby in four, not surviving the first year.

One in four.

And it spiked every July and August. They called it the summer complaint, and the reason is milk. Heat spoils milk fastest, and the babies who died were disproportionately the bottle fed ones. Did you come across the Jacob Riess passage on this, how the other half lives 1890?

I did not get to Riess. Walk me through it.

So Riess is a reporter, not a doctor, but he's in the tenements, and he writes, life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones whom the doctor's skill is powerless to save. And the board of health every summer sends 50 specially trained doctors, he calls them the summer doctors, into the tenements with free medicine. 50 doctors every summer. And there's a line about the little coffins stacked on the deck of the charity boat that goes out to the city cemetery twice a week.

A scheduled boat for the coffins.

And there's an ugly detail underneath it, which is where a city's milk actually came from. Whiskey distillers kept cows in sheds next to the stills, fed them the leftover mash, and sold the milk, thin and bluish, so they'd whiten it with plaster of Paris. When the papers exposed it in 1858, the Times put the toll in the thousands of babies a year

Plaster of Paris in the milk.

To make it look like milk. And it's easy to make the distillery guys into monsters, but that was the only urban dairy model that worked. If milk can't survive a hot day's cart ride from the countryside, the cows have to be in the city, and the cheapest place to keep a cow in the city is next to the thing producing tons of leftover grain mash. The horror isn't personal. It's structural.

And that's the number that moves, by the way. Like, that's the number this whole story is about moving. By 1914, New York's rate is down to 71 per thousand. Today in The United States, it's about five and a half.

From 240.

Now can I do the other half of this? Because I think there's a version of the world before that's actually kind of wonderful, and it's the part I'm weirdly grateful for.

Please. I have a personal stake in this half.

So here's the thing. Humanity had already solved no cold. Not with cold, with salt, smoke, and thyme. And basically, every cured food you love exists because somebody needed summer's abundance to survive the winter without refrigeration. Bacon, ham, salami, salt cod, prosciutto.

The oldest recipe I found is Cato the Elder, a Roman, around one hundred sixty BC, and it's a recipe for salting hams. Layer them in salt so that meat does not touch meat. Leave them twelve days, hang them in a draft, smoke them. And he ends with no moths or worms will touch them.

That's prosciutto. He's describing prosciutto.

That is functionally a country ham, written down twenty centuries before anybody built a compressor. Salt doesn't kill the bacteria so much as it steals their water. You pack the surface with salt, and osmosis pulls the water out of everything, including the microbes. Get to around 20% salt, and almost nothing can live in it. Wood smoke is full of phenols, which slow the fat from going rancid and slow the bacteria.

But smoke doesn't penetrate very far into meat, so you salt first and smoke second. Smoke is mostly a flavor with a preservative side hustle. Salt does the heavy lifting.

And I'd always assumed, this is the thing everybody says, that the whole spice trade was about covering up rotten meat. Right? That's why they wanted pepper.

Yeah. So I went looking for that, and the food historians basically say no. Spices were incredibly expensive. Nobody was wasting saffron on a bad roast. People who could afford fresh meat got fresh meat.

Everybody else had perfectly good preservation. The rotten meat thing is a myth.

Okay. I'm gonna have to retire that one.

I know. I was sad too. But salt cod is real, and it's my favorite. Basque fishermen were working the Newfoundland Coast by 1517, and dried salted cod keeps for years. A fish caught off Canada eaten in Portugal months later.

A global food trade with zero cold in it.

Yeah. And, I mean, thank God we had a couple thousand years without refrigeration, so we learned how to make pepperoni. Some of my favorite things in

the world exist because of the lack of refrigeration, literally.

Right. So that's the world Tudor's ship is sailing into. Cold is a season. Milk kills babies every August, and people have gotten really, really good at living without it. So good that the idea of buying cold sounds like a joke.

Right. You can't sell people a thing they don't know they lack.

Yeah. And here's the thing that got me reading all of this. That ridiculous voyage is the opening move in a story that runs two hundred years. And every single time somebody wins a round of it, the wind plants the next problem. And somewhere down this road, Albert Einstein is gonna try to build a refrigerator and fail.

Einstein.

But first, we've got a guy in debtor's prison with a pond and a motto. So Frederick Tudor gets out of debtor's prison, and the thing I find fascinating about the next fifteen years is that he doesn't change the idea. The idea was fine. What he'd learned the hard way is that he had two problems and neither one of them was cold.

Melt and demand.

Right. The ice melts before you can sell it, and when it gets there, nobody knows what to do with it. And he attacks both. And the melt one is the piece I didn't really get until I read your notes. Why does hay fail?

Yeah. This one I loved because it's so counterintuitive. The first cargo reportedly went out packed in hay, and here's the thing. The insulation is never the stuff. It's the air trapped in the stuff.

Still air is a terrible conductor of heat, which is what you want, but hay and straw compress. They mat down. They get wet, and wet insulation conducts heat right through. Worse, the meltwater channels through it, so you've built a wet blanket around your ice. And sawdust?

Sawdust, and the other one they used was spent tan bark, the waste from tanneries, packs into a dense mass of tiny dead air pockets, stays granular when it gets damp, and drains. The water runs off instead of sitting against the ice. The period manuals are very specific. Eight inches of sawdust along the sides of the ship, and the filling has to be dry. Dry.

That's the whole rule.

And here's the part I love. Sawdust is garbage. It's what comes out the back of every sawmill in New England. Tanneries were throwing the bark away. So one industry's disposal problem becomes another industry's most important input at basically zero cost.

Nobody planned that.

Free markets at work.

It's like finding out your key input is somebody else's trash, and he does the same thing at the other end. 1815, he borrows $2,100 and builds an ice house in Havana. Double walls packed with dry tan bark, drainage so the meltwater never pools, and you get in from the roof so you're not opening a door into warm air all day. He'd figured out you can't sell ice off a dock.

So now walk me through the plow because I think the plow is the biggest thing in this whole stretch, and nobody's heard of it.

Yeah. So this is a guy named Nathaniel Wyeth, and he's the operations story behind the visionary. He grew up on the shore of Fresh Pond in Cambridge, running his family's hotel there when Tudor hired him to manage the harvest. Tudor's diary has this wonderful entry from January 18 '28. I found Wyeth wandering about the woods at Fresh Pond in all the lonely perturbation of invention and contrivance.

The lonely perturbation of invention.

Isn't that great? And what he'd invented a few years before was a horse drawn ice cutter.

So picture what harvesting looked like before this. Men with hand saws cutting irregular chunks off a pond, slow and every block a different shape. Wyeth's tool is a plow with two iron blades about 20 inches apart. A horse drags it across the pond and it scores a groove. A guide arm rides in that groove while you cut the next one, so every line is parallel.

Then you do it again at right angles. Now the whole pond is a grid of uniform blocks, and men with iron bars just snap them off and float them to the ice house.

And the number on it. It cut

the cost of harvesting from about 30¢ a ton to 10. Same man, same horse, Three tons where he used to deliver one. But honestly, the cost is the smaller effect. The bigger one is standardization. A uniform block is a unit.

You can price it. You can stack it in a ship's hold with no air gaps, and air gaps are melt. Thoreau, watching this at Walden, says they stack the blocks as surely as so many barrels of flour. That's the moment ice stops being a thing you scrape off a pond and becomes a commodity in the literal sense.

And Tudor, being Tudor, locks up the rights to Wyeth's tools. So he controls the harvest technology, the ships, and the ice houses at the far end.

The founder locks up the ops IP. Of course, does.

Quick aside because you're gonna bring it up anyway. The opening scene of Frozen.

Which I have seen 70 times. The very first scene before any princesses is a crew of men on a frozen lake, sawing blocks in rhythm and loading them onto a sled. That's Wyeth's harvest. Disney opened a billion dollar movie on the pre refrigeration economy, and none of us noticed.

Okay. So melt is solved. Now demand. And this is where I think Tudor is genuinely ahead of his time because he understands that his product isn't ice. His product is the habit of ice.

He gets an ice house into Charleston in 1820, New Orleans the year after. And in New Orleans, he tells his agent to pick four saloons, just four. Give them ice for free for a year. Teach the bartenders how to store it, teach them cocktails, and let them get their customers hooked.

He's running a freemium model on bartenders in 1821.

He is. And he explains the theory himself in a letter to his ice housekeeper in Martinique. Get this. A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again.

That's the entire consumer behavior playbook in one sentence. Same price, better experience, one week, and you can never go back. Right? That's like every subscription business that has ever existed.

And he was right. By 1819, he's writing to a creditor that he has sold nearly $30,000 worth of ice that season and that he is, his words, inevitably and unavoidably rich.

Was he?

On paper. He was in and out of debt his whole life. But the demand was real, and not everybody wanted it. So here's the first person who looked at this stuff and said no. Tudor's agents get a cargo into New Orleans, which is a city that should want ice more than anywhere in America.

Hot, humid, rich, and a yellow fever town, buries people by the hundreds most summers. And the mayor takes one look at it.

The mayor?

His name is Louis Philippe de Roffignac, a French aristocrat. His godparents were the duke and duchess of Orleans, who'd fled the revolution and spent two terms trying to civilize New Orleans. Levees, paved streets, gas lamps, serious reformer. And the story New Orleans has told about him for a hundred and fifty years is that he looked at this boatload of frozen water and decided it was, quote, dangerous to the health of people inhabiting so warm a climb and reportedly had the whole cargo dumped in the Mississippi. He threw it in the river, reportedly.

Nobody's found a paper from the eighteen twenties that confirms it, so I'll say it the way the city says it. But here's why I like it even with the hedge. He wasn't a fool. Nobody in the eighteen twenties knew what a block of frozen water did to a body in August. In a city where fever killed thousands, a public health instinct against a strange new thing off a ship from the north, that's not crazy.

That's a reasonable man being wrong.

And then?

And then within a couple of decades, New Orleans is one of the biggest ice markets on the planet. And the punch line, fifty years after he left office, a cocktail served over ice gets named after him, the raffenack. Brandi, red syrup, soda, and a big glass of the thing he supposedly threw in the river.

That is a very New Orleans way to win an argument.

It really is. Okay. Now the big one. Because by 1833, Tudor has been at this twenty seven years, and instead of The Caribbean, he loads a ship for India.

So I went deep on Calcutta, and I have to know if you found the same thing I did.

Please. This was my favorite piece of the whole story going in, so I want your version.

Okay. 05/12/1833, Tudor's diary. Sailed this day the ship Tuscany, captain Littlefield, for Calcutta with 180 tons of ice, an experiment I have been desirous of making for twenty years. Twenty years he'd wanted to try this. And the route is Boston, down around the Cape Of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, up the Hooghly River to Calcutta, 16,000 miles, four months at sea, across the Equator twice.

Four months. And the ice is just sitting in the hold that whole time?

Packed in tan bark, stowed so the meltwater drains straight to the pump well, and the crew pumps the whole way. And when it gets there in September, and this is where I found the primary source, a London journal that reprinted the Calcutta newspapers, the colonial government does two things immediately. It lets the ice be landed after sunset so it's not sitting in the sun, and it declares ice duty free. Any ice from any country under any flag from then on.

Wait. They wrote a tariff exemption for ice on arrival?

On arrival. And then the residents build him an ice house. Mira Landing on the river, Brightman's Gout, north of the Strand Mills, and they raise the money by public subscription. The customers build the infrastructure, and he sells the ice at 4 anas a seer, which works out to about 3p a pound, half the price of the local slush ice from the clay pans.

He undercuts the locals with ice that's been at sea for four months.

Right. Now did you come across the crowd stories?

I did, and I wanna know how much you trust them, the hand and the trees.

So here's the honest version. The stories that came back to Boston repeated for a hundred and fifty years without anybody finding the original are that people on the riverbank pressed their palms to the blocks, and one man pulled his hand away and cried out that he'd been burned, and that somebody asked the captain whether ice grew on trees in America. They're not in the newspaper accounts, but they're the kind of thing that's true even if the specific man didn't exist. Because think about what it means to touch ice for the first time in your life.

Yeah. That's the thing I can't get my head around. Not the shipping, that there were millions of people in a city that size for whom cold was simply not a category. You'd have no way to predict what it feels like.

Right. And the trade is real. The first cargo clears about $10,000 in profit. Regular sailings from 1835, ice houses in Madras and Bombay by the forties. And it saves him because in 1834, he'd blown himself up a second time.

Yeah. This is the part that makes me think he'd fit in Silicon Valley.

Now you're making my argument. He speculated in coffee futures. And by 1834, he has $210,000 in debt, more than 40 of his first ships, and he doesn't default. He pays back every penny with interest. The total is $280,154.59.

Takes him fifteen years. He's finally clear in 1849 at 65, and the thing that dug him out was India.

The 59¢ is what sells me. That's a man who kept a ledger.

Kept a ledger and kept score. By mid century, Boston is calling him the ice king, and Boston ships carry something like a 150,000 tons a year.

So I wanna read you one thing because the trade by now is big enough that it shows up in the most unlikely place. Thoreau, Walden. Winter of eighteen forty six, forty seven, Tudor's crews come to cut Walden Pond, and Thoreau watches from his cabin for sixteen days. A 100 Irishmen with Yankee overseers came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice, a thousand tons a day. And then the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well.

The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. That's beautiful. It is. And his larger point is right. The scale of this thing by the eighteen eighties is genuinely hard to picture.

So let me give you the denominators because the numbers on this trade get thrown around loosely. 1847, 353 ice laden ships clear Boston Harbor in a single year. By 1855, a period estimate has 2,000,000 tons of ice in storage in The United States. And then the Hudson Valley becomes an ice factory. In the eighteen eighties, between New York City and Albany, there are about a 135 big ice houses, employing something like 20,000 men every winter.

New York City alone is eating close to 3,000,000 tons of ice a year by 1890. And the national number? The national numbers everybody quotes, 90,000 people and 25,000 horses, come from an 1893 trade manual, and they include seasonal labor. It's the industry's own estimate, not a census. But even discounted, it's a real industry.

And there's a line from mid century that I love but can't fully source, so I'll say it the way it was said, that Boston ships carried more ice by weight than any cargo except cotton.

Frozen pond water behind only cotton. I want that to be true so badly.

So did I, which is why I'm hedging it. And here's what that industry does to daily life. It teaches whole cities to expect cold every day. By the eighteen nineties, there's a guy, the ice man, who comes down your street with a wagon and a wet sack over his shoulder. You've got a square card in your window with 25, 50, 75, and a 100 printed on the corners, and whichever number you turn upright is how many pounds you want.

He reads it from the street, cuts the block, slides it into the zinc lined icebox in your kitchen. And if you forget to empty the drip pan underneath, you flood the floor.

Every kid in America had that chore.

That's the daily rhythm of an American household for fifty years. Cocktails on the rocks, ice cream as a business, lager brewed all summer. So a huge industry, a daily habit, and a whole country's worth of capital in ponds, ships, and ice houses. And that's exactly the moment somebody shows up with a better idea.

Yeah. And this is the story I think about most from this whole stretch. So that brings us to a doctor in Florida named John Gory. Apalachicola, a big cotton port on the Gulf. Gory is the town's fever doctor, yellow fever.

And he's working from the medical theory of the day, which is that heat and bad air spread disease. So his treatment is to cool the sick room. He hangs pans of ice above the patient's beds and lets the air flow down over them.

Ice he's getting from

From Boston, Tudor's ice. And in summer, when the ships don't come, there isn't any. So this doctor, with fever patients dying in the heat, decides he's going to build a machine that makes it. 1844, he makes ice mechanically. 1845, he gives up medicine to work on the machine full time.

And it actually made ice? What was he doing in there? One line.

One line. Compress air, it gets hot. Dump the heat. Let the air expand, it gets cold. Run that cold air over brine and freeze water.

It's not the cycle that eventually wins, but it makes ice. And here's the scene I love. 07/14/1850, Bastille Day. There's a French cotton buyer in town named Roseanne, who's also the French consul, and he's throwing a dinner for the northern cotton brokers at the Mansion House, the biggest hotel in Florida. The summer ice shipment hasn't come.

And when a guest wishes out loud for ice for his wine, Rozan, who has seen the machine, bets a basket of champagne he can produce it. And at the Toast of the Republic, the waiters walk in carrying champagne buckets full of ice made in a backroom by John Gory's machine.

That is a great party trick.

In Florida, in July, in 1850, a friend remembered Gory being excited and nervous, which of course he was. The next year, 05/06/1851, he gets a United States patent for it.

And this is the detail I flagged, the patent number, 8000 and 80. That is such a young patent number. There are more than 11,000,000 now. Also, the patent lists him as John Gorey of New Orleans, which tells you something.

It tells you he'd gone to New Orleans to raise money, and he finds it. He sells a half interest to a Boston investor who pledges enough capital to build a full scale plant, and then the investor dies. Oh, no. The investor dies, and we don't even know his name. The histories say a man from Boston whose name is not known.

And after that, nobody will fund him. Gordy becomes convinced the natural ice interests are running a press campaign against him. He thought Tudor himself was behind it. There's no document that proves that. But there is a New York paper that sneered, the line has been quoted for a century even if nobody's found the clipping, that there is a crank down in Apalachicola, Florida that thinks he can make ice by his machine as good as God almighty.

And the crank was right.

And he dies in 1855, broke, in seclusion, his health gone. The official description at the capital says, humiliated by criticism, financially ruined, and his health broken. Florida later gave him a marble statue. It stands in The US capital today in the Hall Of Columns.

So here's the structural read because I think it's the important one. Gorey didn't fail because the machine didn't work. It worked. He failed because the incumbent was real. In 1855, there are 2,000,000 tons of ice in storage in this country, 350 ships a year out of Boston, a workforce, wharf rights, ice houses in 20 ports.

Every dollar of that is a reason not to fund a guy who makes ice in a backroom. The technology that wins isn't always the one that works. It's the one with the existing capital on its side.

He was right. Just forty years early, and he died ruined for it.

And I found the receipt on the forty years. In June 1890, the Savannah newspaper lists the city's machine ice makers. One of them is called the Gory Ice Company. Thirty five years after he died broke, Southern ice factories are naming themselves after him.

That's a hard one.

It is. And by the way, the ice trade didn't have to conspire against him. It just had to exist. Tudor solved the problem so well that his solution built the capital that kept the better solution out for a generation. Nobody had to be a villain.

Although, once you have an industry that big It attracts a different kind of capitalist. Yeah. Who? His name is Charles w Morse. He's from Bath, Maine.

His family shipped ice and lumber. And in the eighteen nineties, he starts rolling up New York's ice supply. And in 1899, he forms the American Ice Company, capitalized at $60,000,000, which the papers at the time called grossly overcapitalized. And the key thing he controls isn't the ice. It's the peers.

His company is essentially the only one allowed to land ice at New York stocks. An independent dealer up in Albany told the Tribune, he can ruin any independent dealer in this town, and we all know it.

So he owns the choke point.

And then 05/01/1900, right as the heat is coming. The American Ice Company notifies its customers that the price of ice for the season will be 60¢ per 100 pounds. It had been 25, maybe so the price doubles. And this is the detail that gives it moral weight. The company announces that no small pieces will be sold.

Meaning what?

Meaning the 5¢ piece and the 10¢ piece, which is the only ice a tenement family can buy. No room for a block, no money for one. They buy a nickel's worth every day, it and goes in a pan next to the baby's milk in a room with no crossbreeze in July. So abolishing the nickel piece, that is the price increase for the poor specifically. Everybody else just pays more.

They get cut off.

Okay. And my first reaction reading this was that's surge pricing. Demand spikes, price doubles, that's just Uber on a rainy night. But honestly, when I read the Tribune reporting, it's worse than surge pricing. Surge pricing is one price that goes up for everyone.

Right. So the Tribune goes out in late June and finds the trust selling ice at, quote, as many prices as the Fakirs in Fulton Street, 65¢ to the rich, as low as 33¢ in the tenements once the heat is on them. One ice cart in Harlem sold at four different prices along the length of a single block. And then the kicker, the trust bid to supply the federal buildings downtown at 25¢ a 100 so they could sell at 25 and make money. The paper's line is the trust is practically the supply.

So that's not supply and demand. That's price discrimination by a monopolist who owns the peers. Whatever each customer will bear block by block, you can only do that when you are the supply.

And the press goes to war. Hearst's Journal, Pulitzer's World, The Tribune, The Times. The world goes to court and gets a judge, justice Gaynor in Brooklyn, to open an inquiry and hires the lawyer who prosecuted Boss Tweed to do the questioning. And in the courtroom, alongside Morse and the ice barons, are the city's dock commissioners because the piers were the monopoly and the mayor of New York.

The mayor's in the room?

The mayor is on the stand. 06/09/1900. Robert Van Wick, Tammany's man, first mayor of the consolidated city. And under oath, he admits he owns thousands of shares of American ice stock worth around $680,000 at par on a salary of 15,000 a year. He swears he borrowed the money from a bank, and the bank's president gets up and swears he never lent the mayor a cent.

Under oath, both of them.

Which tells you how nervous the room was. And Richard Croker, the boss of Tammany Hall, whose family holds a pile of the stock in his wife's name, writes a public letter that same week. If it were in my power or in the power of Tammany Hall to give the poor ice for nothing, we would do so. The paper prints it right above the list of his family's shares, and then he sails for England.

As one does.

And here's the part I find genuinely interesting. Charges go to the governor to remove the mayor, and the governor is Theodore Roosevelt, the reformer. And in October, Roosevelt dismisses the charges because owning the stock by itself wasn't legally sufficient cause. The scandal had no legal handle. It got resolved by voters instead.

Van Wyck doesn't run again, and the next year, a reform ticket under Seth Lowe takes city hall. The ICE trust damaged Tammany badly, though Tammany came back two years after that.

They always come back. And Morse?

Morse walks away from ICE with something like $12,000,000, eventually gets fifteen years for bank fraud, and gets pardoned by president Taft after army doctors diagnosed a fatal kidney disease he had faked by drinking soap suds.

He faked a fatal disease by drinking soap?

And lived another twenty years. And the nickel piece? It came back within a couple of weeks under the press pressure, but only at the depots and only if you showed a certificate from a charity proving you were poor. The Tribune called it a miserable subterfuge, almost fiendish in the forfeiture of self respect which it inflicts.

So step back. What New York just learned in one summer is that its cold comes from two places. It comes from the weather, and it comes from Tammany Hall.

And both of those had been on display ten years earlier if anybody had been looking because the winter of eighteen eighty nine ninety was one of the warmest on record. The Hudson barely froze. 01/07/1890, the Jersey City Papers front page. An ice famine at hand. None in the storage houses to meet present demands.

It may rise to $20 per ton. Agents are scouring the country and Canada for a supply.

And here's the thing nobody in New York was paying attention to. Same year, June 1890, the Savannah paper runs a story. Ice is wholesaling in New York at $10 a ton. Cincinnati, 20. Savannah, 5 to $7.50.

And the editor is very pleased with himself about it. It is some satisfaction to know when the mercury is up in the nineties that ice is selling lower in Savannah than in the North and West. And then the headline, the natural ice trade gone and machine ice the entire supply now.

Wait. The South is already fully on machine ice in 1890?

Fully. Every corner grocery in Savannah sells it, and that's the natural experiment. Same country, same month, a two to four times price gap, and the entire difference is whether you were making cold or harvesting it. The thing Gory died trying to sell is, by 1890, ordinary. Everywhere it never snowed, And a machine in Munich had been running a brewery cellar since 1876.

So the next part of this isn't about cutting ice at all. It's about making it, and then harder, moving it. Getting cold from a machine to a plate a thousand miles away. So here's what surprised me most about this part. The machine in Munich in 1876, that's not the beginning of the story.

That's the end of forty years of people getting the physics completely right and the business completely wrong.

How far back does it go?

1748, Glasgow. A doctor named William Cullen puts in a jar, pumps the air out so it boils at a low temperature, and the ether pulls heat out of everything around it and makes a little ice. He publishes, he demonstrates it in Edinburgh, and nothing. No commercial use at all.

Because nobody had a problem worth the machine.

Right. Then eighteen o five, an American named Oliver Evans draws a closed cycle on paper, never builds it. And then 1834, a guy named Jacob Perkins actually builds one. Perkins is an American banknote engraver who moved to London. His firm printed the penny black, the world's first postage stamp.

And on 08/14/1834, he gets the first patent for what we'd now call the vapor compression cycle, the one in your kitchen. An engineer builds it and demonstrates it the next year, and it never sells a single unit.

Why not?

Because London can get perfectly good ice by ship, first from a pond in Massachusetts, then from Norway. And there's a distinction IBM used to draw between invention and innovation. Invention is building the new thing. Innovation is making it scalable, practical, and commercially viable. Perkins invented it.

He did not innovate it. And then Gorey, who we just talked about, dies broke in 1855. And then comes the one that gets me. Harrison? James Harrison, a Scottish born printer who emigrates to Australia and founds a newspaper in Geelong near Melbourne and who reportedly got the idea cleaning type with ether and noticing the metal went cold.

By 1854, he has a commercial ice plant, the world's first, and a brewery in Bendigo is running on it. He reportedly blew himself up at least twice doing this.

Of course, did.

Occupational hazard. And in January 1873, by this point, he's editor of the Melbourne Age, he wins the gold medal at the Melbourne exhibition for preserving meat by freezing. The papers say the process costs a farthing a pound. Australia has millions of sheep. Britain has millions of hungry people, and now you can freeze one and ship it to the other.

So that July, he bets everything on it. He loads 20 odd tons of frozen beef and mutton onto a ship called the Norfolk bound for London, and he's on board.

Wait. With a machine?

No. That's the thing. He didn't have the money for a machine, so he used ice and salt tanks, packed the meat in cold rooms with a freezing mixture, and hope it lasts. And the tanks were badly made. The brine leaked, the ice melted faster than he calculated, And on the thirty fourth day out, most of the meat had to be thrown into the sea.

They kept one ton, hoping to land a sample. Off the Azores, the last of the ice gave out, and that went overboard too.

He watched it go over the side.

Standing on the deck. Gold medal in January, meat in the ocean by September. It ruins him, and it ruins public confidence in frozen meat for years. His own explanation was too much hurry in the preparations. And the lesson the trade took from it, which turns out to be exactly right, is that the machine has to travel with the meat.

And meanwhile, there's a whole other path being built, Carre.

Yeah. Ferdinand Carre in France, 1859, builds what's called an absorption machine, ammonia dissolved in water driven by heat instead of a compressor. Hold on to that one because it comes back in a big way. And the list goes on. Twining in New Haven who got the principle adopted everywhere and never made a dime.

Tellier in France who shipped meat from Argentina in 1876 and died poor. Pick Day in Geneva. There are probably 10 more whose names we don't know.

And here's what I think is the actual point of that list. None of them stopped because the last one failed. Every one of these guys could see the same prize, a market that was already paying real money for Boston Ice sitting there. There's a market, there's a problem, and there's a return waiting for whoever cracks it. So the next person tries.

That's capitalism doing what it's supposed to do.

A 100%. And the first place it actually gets cracked at scale is not where you'd expect.

No. It's New Orleans, and the reason is a war. So the civil war. The union blockades the Southern ports. The thing nobody thinks about is that the South had been buying Boston ice for forty years, every hospital, every saloon in New Orleans, and the blockade cuts it off.

So in 1863, two French entrepreneurs, Bourgeaux and Girardet, run Carre's ammonia machines through the union blockade into New Orleans. The Times Picayune goes to look at their test facility in the summer of eighteen sixty four and writes, this was ice made with a thermometer at 93 in the shade. In New Orleans,

in the middle of a war.

One of the machines goes to a confederate hospital in Augusta for fever patients. Same instinct as gory. After the war, a former confederate engineer named Daniel Holden buys it, hauls it to San Antonio, and starts making the ice with distilled water, which means the ice is clear. For the first time, machine ice looks like ice you'd want in your drink. And on 05/18/1868, the Louisiana Ice Manufacturing Company opens on Chupatula Street in New Orleans with six ten ton machines.

It's been called the first industrial ice plant in the world.

So, like, think about what that means structurally. The American machine ice industry is a war baby, not a eureka moment, a naval blockade. The South had no pond ice, so no local incumbent, and the blockade removed the imported one, a market with a real problem and nobody defending the old way. Right? Of course, it adopted the machine twenty years before the North did.

The South got the future first because it got cut off from the past,

which is a strange kind of luck.

It's the only kind there is in these stories. Okay. So now the machine that actually becomes the machine. Because everything so far, Perkins, Harrison, Carre, those worked. What they didn't do was run all summer without breaking.

And the guy who solves that is a professor in Munich, Karl von Linde.

And the customer is beer, which is one

of my favorite details in this whole story. Lager has to ferment and be stored cold. And in Bavaria, there was a law from 1553 until 1850, three hundred years, that made it illegal to brew beer between Saint George's Day in late April Michelmas at the end of September because summer heat spoiled the fermentation.

There was a legal brewing season

for three hundred years. And even after the law went away, summer brewing meant buying ice. So the head of the Spaten brewery in Munich, Gabriel Sielemeyer, gives this young engineering professor money and space in his lagering sellers to build a machine. 1873. Linde's first machine uses dimethyl ether with a mercury seal where the shaft comes out of the compressor, and it works poorly.

The seal leaks. So he goes back, and in 1876, with an engineer named Friedrich Schipper, he redesigns the compressor for ammonia with a better seal.

And the first one

he sells goes to the Brea brewery in Trieste. And how'd that one do? It ran from 1877 to nineteen o eight. Thirty one years. In a brewery basement with nobody babysitting it.

And that's the whole story of Linda in one sentence. His first machine failed on its seal, his second succeeded on its seal, and the second one ran for three decades. He didn't invent the cycle. Perkins did that forty years earlier. He made it reliable.

He quits his professorship in 1879 to start a company with Sedermeija as an investor, and by 1890, there are hundreds of Linde machines running, most of them in breweries. That company is still one of the largest industrial gas companies on earth.

So the brewer didn't want a demonstration. He wanted a machine that ran all summer.

That's it. The seal, not the cycle, was the invention. Okay. So I wanna actually do this properly because the machine humming in your kitchen right now is, in its bones, Linda's machine. And I wanna explain how it works, not hand wave it.

Yeah. And let me start with the thing that took me longest to get my head around, which is that you don't make cold. There's no such thing. You move heat. Heat is energy.

And the first law of thermodynamics says you can't destroy energy, only move it around. And the second law says heat won't flow uphill from a colder thing to a warmer thing on its own. So a refrigerator is a machine that pays with a motor to push heat from a cold box into a warm kitchen uphill. That's why the coils on the back

are warm. That warmth is the inside of your fridge moved outside. Right. And everything else is plumbing. So let me start with the analogy, and then I'm going to correct the analogy because it's a little wrong.

The analogy is a sponge. You soak up water inside the box, carry the sponge outside, squeeze it out, carry it back in empty. The refrigerant soaks up heat inside, gets carried out, gets squeezed, and comes back empty.

Okay. Where does it break?

Here's where. Squeezing doesn't push the heat out. What squeezing actually does is make the heat flow in the right direction. And to see that, you have to know the real thing, which is this. There is a liquid in there, not just a gas.

There's a liquid, and the entire trick is that it keeps changing back and forth between liquid and gas.

So what is it?

It's a fluid chosen for one property above everything else. It boils far below kitchen temperature. Linde's ammonia boils at about minus 33 Celsius, 27 below zero Fahrenheit. The isobutane in a modern fridge boils around minus 12 Celsius. And here's the physics that makes it work.

Boiling absorbs an enormous amount of heat. Think about a kettle. Bringing water from cold to a boil takes a certain amount of energy. Boiling that kettle completely dry takes five or six times as much. Turning a liquid into a gas is where the energy goes.

So the refrigerant is boiling inside my fridge?

Inside the box. Yes. Behind the back wall, there's a coil, the evaporator. Low pressure liquid refrigerant comes into it and boils exactly like water on a stove, except this liquid boils at 25 below zero. So the stove is your leftovers.

The heat to boil it comes out of the food and the air in the box. That's where cold is made, a liquid boiling below freezing and pulling the heat it needs out of your dinner.

Okay. So now you've got a gas that's full of heat, but it's still cold. It's still, what, 20 below?

Right. And that's the problem. Heat won't flow from a 20 below gas into a 70 degree kitchen. Wrong direction. So the compressor.

Physically, it's a welded steel dome, and inside is an electric motor bolted to a small piston in a cylinder. It's a one cylinder engine run backwards, about 3,500 strokes a minute. It sucks in the low pressure gas, squeezes it to a fraction of its volume, and pushes it out. And squeezing a gas heats it. That's the bicycle pump getting hot in your hand.

But that's just heating it more. How does making it hotter get it colder?

Because you've done two things at once. You've made the gas hot, and this is the key, you've raised the pressure. And at high pressure, a fluid condenses back to liquid at a much higher temperature. Isobutane at kitchen pressure boils at 12 below. Squeeze it to about six atmospheres and it condenses at 45 Celsius, a 113 Fahrenheit.

So now relative to that gas, your kitchen is the cold thing.

So you flip which side is cold?

You flip it. Now the hot gas runs through the coil on the back of the fridge, the condenser, and the kitchen air carries the heat away, and the gas condenses back into a warm liquid. Think about steam hitting a cold window and turning into water. Condensing releases exactly the heat that boiling absorbed. So the heat that was in your leftovers comes out the back of the box into your kitchen.

And then?

Then you have to get the pressure back down. So the warm liquid runs through a capillary tube, a very long, very thin tube. It's a controlled leak. The pressure collapses by about 10 to one. Some of the liquid flashes into vapor.

The temperature crashes to 25 below, and it enters the evaporator again as a cold liquid. And around it goes, thousands of times a minute. Low pressure, cold, inside. High pressure, hot, outside. The compressor makes the pressure difference.

The capillary tube lets it back down.

Okay. So hang on. Because if I'm following the accounting here, the heat from inside the box comes out the back. Plus, the compressor is a motor doing work, and that work turns into heat too. So the back of my refrigerator is dumping the heat from inside the fridge plus the heat from running the motor into my kitchen.

My refrigerator is warming my house by more than it's cooling the food.

Yes. Exactly right. And by exactly the size of your electric bill. Heat out equals heat in plus the work you paid for. You can feel it on a hot day.

Stand behind the fridge. And there are two consequences of that. One, an air conditioner is the same machine with the condenser coil hung outside the wall instead of in the room. That's the only difference. Two, cooling is a real line item on the planet's electricity bill, a big one.

But, and this is the part that makes it elegant, the box moves more heat than the electricity it eats, well above one to one, because it's moving heat, not making cold. You're just paying for the pump.

So the sponge was half right.

Exactly half. And here's what sets up the next fifty years. The fluid in that loop has to do five things. Boil at the right temperature, carry a lot of heat per pound. Ammonia carries about six times what the later fluids carry, which is why Linde picked it and why it never left industrial cold storage.

Not eat the metal, not burn, and not kill you if it leaks. Ammonia fails, not kill you. Ether, Harrison's fluid, fails, not burn. That fifth requirement is the next fifty years of this story. Also, Linde's shaft came out of the cylinder, which is why the seal was the whole problem.

Somebody is going to weld the entire thing shut later.

I know who.

I know you know. Don't spoil it.

Okay. So the machine is running in breweries, and beer, not meat, is the first mass customer in America too. Adolphus Busch in Saint Louis pasteurizes his bottled beer in 1872, buys five refrigerated railcars in '76, and has 850 of them by '88. That's how Budweiser becomes the first national beer brand. Beer builds the cold chain

and meat rides on it.

And the meat story is, to me, the most American story of the bunch. Gustavus Swift, born on Cape Cod in 1839 to a family that raised and slaughtered animals. At 14, he's working in his brother's butcher shop. At 16, he opens his own with $400 from an uncle. He moves to Chicago in 1875 where the union stockyards are, and he looks at how the business works.

Buy a live steer in Chicago, ship it to Boston, slaughter it there, and sees the thing only a butcher would see.

Which is how much of the animal nobody eats.

Roughly 40 to 45 of a live steer, Hide, bone, organs, waste never reaches a butcher's counter, and the railroad charges you freight on all of it. Plus, the animals lose weight on the trip. They get bruised. Some of them die. So Swift's answer isn't a better cattle car.

It's don't ship the animal. Slaughter in Chicago, ship the meat. He tries it in winter with 10 boxcars running with their doors taken off. And in 1878, he hires an engineer named Andrew Chase to design a real refrigerator car.

And the design is smart. Ice in compartments at the top of the car, meat packed low. Cold air sinks, so the whole car becomes a convection loop with no fan. Hold on to that idea because it's about to almost kill a man on a ship.

Noted. It's like the whole business is a series of people discovering that cold air sinks. So Swift has the car designed. He goes to the railroads to build them, and every major railroad says no. All of them?

Every one. Because the railroads owned the stockyards along their lines, the cattle pens, the feedlots. Hauling live cattle was a huge business, and a refrigerator car threatened all of that capital. So Swift builds his own cars, finances them himself, and routes them over the one line without a cattle business, the Grand Trunk, up through Michigan and Canada. Within a year, he has nearly 200 cars, and he's moving about 3,000 carcasses a week into Boston.

The founder roots around the incumbent.

And it works. Dressed beef undercuts the local butcher by a wide margin, and retail meat prices in this country fall by roughly a third over the eighteen eighties. By 1890, Swift and three other Chicago packers, Armour, Morris, Hammond, are slaughtering 89% of the cattle that come through Chicago and selling everything but the squeal, lard, soap, glue, buttons, fertilizer.

Which is creative destruction in its purest form. And I have a whole thing about creative destruction that I'll spare you for now.

I've heard the thing. It's a good thing. Okay. But so far, the chain runs Chicago to Boston. And here's the thing about a chain of cold.

It's only as good as its weakest link. And in February 1882, the weakest link was the air inside the hold of a ship called the Dunedin.

So one piece of physics first because it matters in a minute. The Dunedin's machine was not a Linde machine. It was a Bell Coleman machine, which is a cold air machine. Gory's idea, basically, done properly. No liquid refrigerant at all.

You compress air, cool it, let it expand, and it comes out freezing, which means the air itself is the working fluid, and it moves through wooden trunks into the hold, and cold air sinks. If it doesn't circulate, the bottom of the hold freezes and the top warms up while the engine runs perfectly.

Right. So New Zealand, 1881. A Scottish land company decides to try what Harrison failed at nine years earlier on the same ocean, this time with the machine on board. They refit an iron sailing ship called the Dunedin with a Bell Coleman plant and start freezing sheep. And the first thing that happens is the compressor's crankshaft breaks, and they lose 600 odd carcasses, a month to rebuild.

Then on 02/15/1882, the Dunedin sails from Port Chalmers with nearly 5,000 carcasses on board, mutton, lamb, kegs of butter, and for some reason, 2,200 sheep tongues.

Somebody wanted the tongues.

Somebody did. And the engine burns three tons of coal a day. They only need to run it a few hours in cool weather. And then they hit the tropics, and the ship gets becalmed near the Equator. And the company's own report says the heat was hotter than captain Whitson had before experienced.

And here's where the air matters. Because when the ship is moving in rough weather, the cold air gets, their phrase, tumbled about and mixed up. The motion of the ship stirs the hold. Be calmed, nothing stirs it. The cold settles to the bottom, and the moisture in the air freezes out as snow inside the main air trunk and chokes it.

So the temperature between decks starts rising while the engineers are running the machine flat out.

And the captain, John Whitson, goes down himself. An account from some years later says, the main air trunk had got snowed up, and the captain himself crawled down to clear it out and was successful but got so benumbed during the process that he had to be hauled out by the heels with a rope.

By the heels.

Frozen stiff inside his own cargo. And that wasn't even his only problem. On certain attacks, he was in constant dread of the sparks from the refrigeration engine's funnel setting his sails on fire. He's captaining a sailing ship with a coal fired engine bolted to the deck.

Nobody's ever seen this before.

Right. Ninety eight days. London, 05/24/1882. They unload at night so the sheep are still hard frozen when the butchers come to Smithfield in the morning, and the sheep come out, quote, as bright as newly killed mutton. Out of nearly 5,000 carcasses, one is condemned.

One. One out of 5,000? One. And the Times of London runs a leader that starts, today, we have to record such a triumph over physical difficulties as would have been incredible and even unimaginable a very few years ago. 5,000 dead sheep from the other side of the world in as good condition as if they had been slaughtered in some suburban abattoir.

And New Zealand becomes a country that sells lamb and butter to the world. Within a decade, it's shipping about 2,000,000 carcasses a year, 6,000,000 by the first world war.

That's the whole difference between 1873 and 1882. Harrison packed his meat in ice and hoped. Whitson had the machine on board and cleared its throat by hand.

And the Dunedin was lost with all hands in 1890 on that same run. Nobody knows what happened to her.

So here's my question, and it's the one the story turns on. Everything we just described is obviously better. Cheaper meat, more meat, safer meat. Who fought it?

A lot of people, and this is the part that genuinely surprised me. The railroads, we covered, but the big one is the butchers. And you have to understand what a butcher was in 1880. He wasn't a guy who sells you a steak. He bought live animals, slaughtered them himself, and sold the meat, a skilled trade, and in most towns, a local monopoly.

And Chicago beef is an existential threat to him. So the butchers organized nationally in the mid eighteen eighties, and they make three arguments. One, Chicago's dressed beef is diseased, tainted, or otherwise unwholesome.

Was it?

Sometimes. Early on, yes. Some of it was bad. Two, you cannot certify a carcass you never saw alive, which is a real principle. And three, the Chicago packers are a cartel, which was also true.

They sold dressed beef below cost and made it back on the byproducts. So all three arguments have something to them, and what the butchers do is clever. They don't just boycott. In 1889, they lobbied 20 state legislatures for a law that says you can't sell fresh meat in the state unless the animal was inspected alive in the state within twenty four hours of slaughter.

Which is a law that only Chicago beef can fail.

Precisely. Minnesota passes it on 04/16/1889, and the text is remarkable. The sale of any fresh beef, veal, mutton, lamb, or pork for human food in this state, except as hereafter provided is hereby prohibited, and the provided is the live inspection. So here's the story. There's a meat dealer in Saint Paul named Henry Barber, and he sells a 100 pounds of fresh beef from an animal slaughtered in Illinois.

And he gets convicted before a justice of the peace in Ramsey County, and the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Over a 100 pounds of beef?

Minnesota versus Barber, decided 05/19/1890. Justice Harlan writes for a unanimous court, nine to nothing, and he doesn't buy the health argument for a second. A state cannot make a law designed to guard against disease an inspection law within the constitutional meaning of that word by calling it so in the title, and a line that matters for the next hundred years of American commerce. The enactment of a similar statute by each one of the states composing the union would result in the destruction of commerce among the several states.

So the commerce clause makes the national market legal.

Yeah. And the 20 state laws fall with it. A year later, the court strikes down Virginia's version over 18 pounds of beef. And I think this is the general principle in almost every one of these stories. The resistors are right about the specifics of the moment.

Some of the meat was bad. The packers were colluding and wrong about the trend. They lost in the one venue the packers couldn't buy.

And the man at the counter?

Yeah. So here's the honest version of this. The system flourished. Meat got a third cheaper in a decade of deflation. More people ate beef and better beef.

The next generation of butchers grew up cutting Chicago's carcasses and did fine. And the man at the counter in 1885 with thirty years of skill at slaughtering and dressing an animal, that man is done. His craft became a job. He has to find new work. That asymmetry is a real cost, and I don't think you have to apologize for the system to name it.

Both things are true.

And the cattlemen get hit from the other side. Because once Chicago is the only buyer, a rancher in Wyoming is selling into a market priced by four firms, And those four firms did cartelize. The pool met weekly in the offices of their lawyer, Henry Veeder. The senate sends a committee out. Senator Vest, hearings in Saint Louis in 1888.

And the report finds documented price fixing incidents, but no proof of a formal conspiracy. What it does find is an artificial and abnormal centralization of markets. Cattle prices fell faster than retail beef did, and the difference went to Chicago.

And congress passes the Sherman Antitrust Act that same summer, 07/02/1890,

six weeks after Barber. And it takes fifteen years to actually win a case against the packers. Nineteen o five, Swift versus the United States. But here's the nuance. The beef trust never achieved a monopoly.

The number of slaughterhouses in the country went up in the eighties, not down. What concentrated was the buying end. That's where the cattlemen had zero leverage.

And then there's the last holdout, which

is the British consumer, who was wary.

Deeply wary. In 1867, one Britain in 12 was eating imported meat. By 1887, it's one in four, but they had to be talked into it. There was a real fear that a sheep that had been dead for six months would come out dry and tasteless. And the way the prejudice got overcome, honestly, is price.

A magazine in 1897 just says it. We import them because they are cheap. The working class of London ate it first. The prejudice, one observer said, was mainly a middle class one after all.

And now fresh and local is the high status option again. A hundred and forty years and it flipped completely.

It really did. One more thing because it's too good. In nineteen o three, the United Fruit Company puts its first refrigerated banana ship into service, the Venus, and builds a fleet reportedly painted white to reflect the sun. The very next year, o Henry, who'd been hiding in Honduras from an embezzlement charge, coins the phrase Banana Republic. So that phrase sits on a cold chain.

A fruit that rots in a week can't be a country's economy until you can chill it.

And one number starts moving in here. The steepest fall in infant mortality in American history runs from about 1875 to 1925. That one baby in four figure starts coming down. And I wanna be careful about cold's share of that because pasteurization and sewers do most of the work. But cold is what lets clean milk reach the tenement still clean.

So by 1890, the machine runs at industrial scale, the market is legal, and the chain crosses oceans. And two things are still true. Nobody trusts food that's been stored. Cold storage is about to become a political villain, and nobody has one of these machines in their kitchen. They're the size of a room.

They run on ammonia and sulfur dioxide, and when they leak, they kill you.

So the next part is about making cold something you trust and then something you could own.

So by nineteen o seven, the technology works. What doesn't work is trust. Nobody wants to eat an egg that's been sitting in a warehouse since April. Cold storage is a phrase people spit, and somebody had to write the rules that made stored food something you'd put in your mouth, and the person who did it had to be smuggled into the federal government under her initials.

Her initials?

Yeah. M. E. Pennington. And she's one of my favorite people in this whole story.

Philadelphia Quaker. Fell in love with chemistry from a medical textbook at 12. Goes to the University of Pennsylvania at 18, and in 1892, she finishes every single requirement for a bachelor of science in chemistry. And Penn hands her a certificate of proficiency because the trustees did not give degrees to women.

A certificate for the same coursework?

Same coursework, same exams. And here's the part that makes it almost funny. Three years later, the same university gives her a doctorate. She's one of about a dozen American women with a chemistry doctorate before 1900. And then nobody will hire a woman chemist.

So she starts her own lab in 1898 and sells subscriptions, $50 a year, to Philadelphia doctors and eventually to the city itself. And as the city's bacteriologist, she spends years chasing bad milk and bad ice cream through Philadelphia's dairies. Not a small job given what we said about milk. So she's

the person who knows what's actually in the milk,

which is exactly what gets her noticed. Harvey Wiley runs the Bureau of Chemistry at the Department of Agriculture. He's the guy behind the Pure Food and Drugs Act of nineteen o six, and his next fight is perishables, eggs, poultry, fish, and the new cold storage warehouses nobody trusts. He wants her to run a new lab. Federal hiring goes through a civil service exam and a board, So she takes the exam under her own name and gets the highest score, and then Wiley submits the hiring paperwork as M.

E. Pennington.

So Wiley does the maneuver.

He does. And when the civil service commission figures out M. E. Is a woman, they try to rescind it. And Wiley's argument, which wins, is that the civil service law does not give him the right to refuse the top scorer because she's a woman.

So she's in, the first woman to run a lab there, and by at least one account, the highest paid woman in the federal government. And then she goes and does the work.

Which is what exactly?

She puts thermometers in rail cars. Between nineteen o nine and 1912, her lab tracks a 120 carloads of dressed poultry, a 140,000 miles of track, Iowa and Tennessee to New York, with recording thermographs down by the ice bunker and up at the top of the load. And she and her people ride with them. Her own bulletin has a staffer riding carloads of poultry from Tennessee to New York for days at a stretch reading the instruments. During the war, she personally inspected hundreds of refrigerator cars.

And out of that comes the national standard, keep dressed poultry below 31 degrees on a long haul. She writes the rules for how a refrigerator car has to be built. She solves humidity and cold storage. The press eventually calls her the ice woman.

The ice woman to tutor's ice king.

And she had a voice. 1913, on the public's panic about stored food. A bad egg is blamed on cold storage during the months of April and May when a storage egg is as rare a phenomenon as snow in the tropics. And this one, cold storage cannot improve foods, except perhaps cheese. And my favorite, asked about the suffrage movement, she said chickens in cold storage are more interesting than women's suffrage.

Which is a choice about how to fight.

It's a very deliberate choice about how to fight. She'd been credentialed sideways by every institution she'd passed through, and her answer was to be so good at the work that the institution couldn't look away. And the payoff is that the invisible system, the warehouse you never see, becomes trustworthy because a woman who'd been told she couldn't have a degree wrote the rules for it.

Did the public buy it though? Because there's a version of this where the science is right and nobody cares.

Well, the industry didn't wait to find out. 1911, cold storage is a national villain. It's the high cost of living issue. The story is that warehouses are hoarding eggs to jack up prices and the food's old. And so on 10/23/1911, the poultry, butter, and egg trade association throws a banquet in the Louis The 16th Room of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago.

400 guests, including the mayor and the health commissioner. And every course, the poultry, the eggs, the butter is months out of a cold storage warehouse.

Prove it by eating it.

In front of the mayor. And the trade paper, the egg reporter, writes afterward that the guests learned that one could partake of a cold storage meal and still live. And the funny thing is that the data backed them up. Massachusetts ran a commission on this in 1912 and found that in Boston, nearly 40% of the eggs and butter and 45% of the poultry went through cold storage. And the notion that food sat in there for years was, in their words, refuted by the statistical evidence.

So the industry's answer to fear was theater.

And the legislature's answer was a date stamp. Massachusetts capped cold storage at twelve months and made every store hang a sign. Cold storage goods sold here. New York required every crate to be stamped with the date it went in, in letters at least three eighths of an inch high. Both half worked.

And by the nineteen twenties, the fight over whether you can trust stored food is basically over. The fight that replaces it is whether you can trust the machine in your kitchen.

Right. Because now the machine shrinks. And this is the part I wanna walk through carefully because it's a systems failure, not a villain story. Kelvinator puts a household unit on the market in 1918. Frigidaire gets bought by General Motors in 1919.

And in 1927, only about 40% of American homes have any refrigeration at all, and almost all of that is ice. In April 1929, under 5% of homes have an electric refrigerator. So this is like a tiny rich people product, and the early ones look like this. A wooden cabinet with a compressor either in the basement or bolted on top, driven by a belt with a shaft passing through a wall, and a seal around that shaft.

Which is Lindy's problem again.

In your kitchen this time, seals wear, belts slip, and when the seal leaks, what leaks out is one of three fluids, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, or methyl chloride. And here's the system's failure. Those fluids were chosen for physics, for a boiling point and a pressure a small compressor could handle. Nobody chose them for what happens when they get out. Sulfur dioxide burns your eyes, which at least warns you.

Methyl chloride is nearly odorless, and all three in the quantities inside one refrigerator can kill you. And did. And did. 1929, Chicago. The American Medical Association counted twenty nine methyl chloride poisonings in that one city in that one year.

Ten deaths. And the case everybody remembers is a family named Painter, two parents and their one year old, who died in their sleep in August from a leak in their apartment building's central refrigeration unit. The maintenance man had heard a hiss that sounded like a leak, couldn't find it, and left it for the night.

One night.

And the city immediately called for banning the gas. And I wanna put one more thing in the room because it's the same spring and the same fear. 05/15/1929, the Cleveland Clinic. In the basement, three or four tons of nitrocellulose x-ray films start to decompose From heat off a light bulb or a steam pipe, the accounts differ, and the fumes go up through the building. A hundred and twenty three people die, including one of the clinic's founders.

Now that was not a refrigerant. It was film, but it was poison gas in a building in 1929 on the front page. That is the air the electric refrigerator is trying to sell itself into.

So the box works, and people are afraid of it, and they should be.

Which brings me to the two most famous physicists in Berlin.

Oh, I have been waiting for this one.

So this is reportedly how it starts. Winter of nineteen twenty five twenty six. Albert Einstein in Berlin reads in the newspaper that a family has died in their sleep. Not a fire, not a break in, the refrigerator. Now nobody has ever found that newspaper or that family.

The story comes down through Einstein's collaborator, so I'll say reportedly. But we know what he said because his collaborator told it. There must be a better way. And the collaborator is? Leo Szilard, Hungarian physicist.

22 when they met, Einstein was 41. Szilard's dissertation had extended thermodynamics in a way Einstein had said was impossible, and Einstein loved him for it. Total opposites. Szilard is pushy and self confident. Einstein is quiet.

And by the mid twenties, Szilard is about to become a lecturer with no salary. So honestly, part of the motive is money. Patents could fund his career. And Einstein, who'd spent years in the Swiss patent office and said they were the best years of his life, was happy to draft them himself.

So what's the insight?

The insight is that the problem isn't just the gas. It's the moving parts. Every seal, every bearing, every shaft through a wall is a place a leak can start. So design the moving parts out. And from thermodynamics, they could see several ways to make cold with nothing moving.

By the fall of nineteen twenty six, they've settled on three. One of them, Carre's old idea, absorption driven by heat. Zilard writes his brother, all three machines work without moving parts and are hermetically sealed. They file patents in six countries. The American patent attorney writes back asking whether Albert Einstein is the same person who propounded the theory of relativity.

Reasonable question. And it works,

sort of, and in stages. They sell the absorption design to Electrolux in 1927 for 3,100 Reichsmarks, $750. Electrolux's own files call it very cheap, and they never build it. They bought it to protect their own patents. Then there's a little tap water powered cooler you drop in a glass, Einstein's idea, that dies because German water pressure varied from floor to floor in a building.

And then the one that matters, the electromagnetic pump. No piston. A traveling magnetic field pushes a liquid metal, a potassium sodium alloy, and the metal itself acts as the piston that compresses the refrigerant. Nothing mechanical moves.

Liquid metal in a kitchen appliance?

Yes. And the metal attacks the wire insulation. So Zilard takes it to Einstein, and their engineer, Corodi, says Einstein thought a few minutes and proposed driving it by induction from outside the tube. Corodi ran the numbers and knew it would be much less efficient than a normal compressor, but it would never leak. So the big German electrical company, AEG, funds a department.

They pay Corotty 500 Reichsmarks a month, about $120, which he called a good salary at a time when a car, a Ford, cost $300. And his own summary of working with the most famous physicist alive was, I didn't talk to Einstein about physics. And the prototype pump howled. A physicist friend of theirs said it howled like a jackal. Another said it wailed like a banshee.

It was cavitation in the liquid metal, and they eventually got it down to acceptable.

A refrigerator that screams.

Briefly. And by 07/31/1931, there is an Einstein Zielard refrigerator running continuously in the AEG Research Institute, mounted in a general electric cabinet drawing a 136 watts. It worked. And then three things happen at once. The depression guts AEG's budget.

In 1930, the Nazis take nearly 20% of the Reichstag, and Szilard writes Einstein, I don't know if it will be possible to build our refrigerator in Europe. And from America, a chemist demonstrates a gas that can't burn and can't poison you, which in one stroke erases the entire reason to build a refrigerator with no moving parts. Because the selling point was safety. The only one. Their engineer wrote the final report in August 1932, a 104 pages, and it went in a filing cabinet.

A few months later, Hitler is chancellor. More than 45 patent filings in six countries and no product. Two postscripts, though. The pump later found a job cooling breeder reactors, where never leaks matters more than efficiency. And the patent money carried Zilar to England, where in 1933, he worked out the nuclear chain reaction.

In July 1939, he drove out to Long Island to convince Einstein to sign a letter to president Roosevelt about the atomic bomb, and the two of them spent part of that afternoon reminiscing about the refrigerators.

That's remarkable. And I think the honest reading of that story is that nobody chose wrong because the road they didn't take had real costs too.

A gas absorption fridge needs a gas line and a flame in your kitchen. The prototype drew roughly twice the electricity of a compressor box. Servo sold gas absorption refrigerators in America for thirty years right up to 1956, and they carried their own hazard, carbon monoxide. The better answer wasn't free. A 100%.

Absorption lost on two fronts at once. The grid made a motor cheap. By 1929, two out of three American homes have a wire, and the safe gas took away its only argument. So the compressor wins. And the compressor gets fixed two ways in three years, one mechanical, one chemical.

The mechanical fix is a Danish born GE engineer named Christian Steenstrup, who in 1927 puts the motor and the compressor together inside one welded steel dome on top of the cabinet. No belt, no shaft through a wall, no seal to wear, nothing to leak. So Lindy kept

the ammonia in with a sealed gland, and GE just welded the box shut.

Same problem, finished. It's called the monitor top because it looks like the turret on the civil war ironclad, and it's the first refrigerator that really sells, over a million of them. $525 at launch, which is a lot. A refrigerator in 1920 cost about $600, more than a Model t runabout. By 1929, the average advertised price is under 300.

By 1940, about 150.

Okay. But here's the thing I wanna spend a minute on because it's the part I genuinely couldn't get my head around going in. The refrigerator goes from a rich person's toy to nearly half of American homes during the nineteen thirties, during the depression. Who's paying for it? Because the family with a wire to the house in 1933 doesn't have a $150 sitting around.

So this is my favorite business model story in this whole thing, and the answer is the electric company. And I wanna actually do the math because when I first read that the utilities were financing refrigerators, I assumed it was some kind of public service thing. It is not. Start with what a house used. In the mid nineteen thirties, a home with lights and a radio and a few small appliances draws something like 15 to 40 kilowatt hours a month.

A refrigerator of that era draws 30 to 45 kilowatt hours a month by itself.

So it doubles the load.

It doubles or triples the household's consumption forever. At the marginal rates of the time, four to six cents a kilowatt hour, that's a dollar 20 to $2.70 a month in new revenue from one appliance for as long as it runs. Over a ten year life, that's a 150 to $300, which is what the box cost. So the utility that helps you buy a refrigerator gets the price of the refrigerator back in electricity and then keeps collecting.

So they'd happily eat the cost of the box.

They would happily give away the razor to sell you the blades. Except in this case, the customer pays for the razor too on installments on the same bill as the blades. Commonwealth Edison's Refrigeration Sales Supervisor in Chicago says it in his own words in 1935. For Commonwealth Edison Company, it is the terms that close the deal. Thirty five months to pay with charges coming on the electric bill.

And a Montana utilities appliance ad. $1 down and $1 per month to be paid with your electric light bill. A Chicago department store had even spent three years selling refrigerators with a coin meter on the box. You fed it nickels the way you'd paid the iceman. Meter ice.

And the trade press worried the terms were getting too easy. A 1934 editorial frets that the housewife will begin to regard 10¢ a day for refrigeration as a gross extravagance.

That is the free market being genuinely clever. The incentive is perfectly aligned. It reminds me of every software company that rediscovered this eighty years later, where the box is just the onboarding cost, and it's not the government doing it.

Well, the government showed them how. 1934, the new deal sets up a thing called the Electric Home and Farm Authority. The dealer sells you the box, hands the contract to your utility, and the utility pays the dealer and collects from you on the light bill. They launched it in Tupelo, Mississippi with an $80 refrigerator and sold a 137 of them in two weeks. The federal program itself stayed small, a few thousand contracts.

What mattered is that every utility in the country saw the model. And the sales pitch? The sales pitch is the best part. The salesman worked evenings, three nights a week, because that's when both husband and wife were home. The trade press says the husband and wife factor is essential.

And they carried a worksheet to do the family's arithmetic. And the first line on the worksheet, the very first thing the salesman crosses out is ice formerly purchased. So the ice man is on the worksheet as a savings. Line one, then food spoilage prevented, Then savings from buying a week supply instead of one day or one meal at a time. Minus operating cost equals net savings per month versus your monthly payment.

So let's talk about the iceman for a second because this is the pattern in this story. Right? The winner of the last round is the resistor in the next one, and the machine ice industry in 1919 is at its all time peak. The census that year counts nearly 3,000 ice plants, about 38,000 people, making 28,000,000 tons of ice, six and a half times what they'd made twenty years earlier. Machine ice had finally beaten the ponds.

And at that exact moment, Kelvinator and Frigidaire are shipping their first few thousand units.

And the ice industry fights.

It does, and every argument it makes is true. Electric boxes are dangerous, true, until 1930. They're expensive, true. They're unreliable. Commonwealth Edison tried selling them in 1923 and installed 279 in two years.

The product wasn't ready. And ice keeps food better, moist air, no drying out. And here's the detail I found delicious. The Ice Industries Trade Association underwrote the government's former cold chain authority. Mary Engel Pennington spent the nineteen twenties writing consumer pamphlets with the ice industry's backing.

The ice woman worked for the ice men.

Right about every specific. Wrong about the trend. In 1940, twenty seven percent of American homes still ran on ice. Within about a decade of the war, big city home ice delivery was gone.

So the curve. Let me read it because I still don't think you believe it.

I don't. I read it three times.

In 1930, roughly one American home in 12 has a refrigerator. The 1940 census, this is the census, not an estimate, 44% mechanical, 27% still on ice, and 27% nothing. Nothing? Nothing. In 1940, more than one American home in four had no refrigeration of any kind.

Not a refrigerator, not an icebox. In the South, it's 40% with nothing. Among black households, half. And by 1950, the national number is about four homes in five with a refrigerator.

See, and this is what doesn't fit my mental model of the depression. One in twelve to nearly one in two in the ten worst years in American economic history. That doesn't seem possible. And the anchor makes it believable,

I think. Radio went from about 40% of homes in 1930 to 83% in 1940, the same pace a decade earlier. Television was faster, 2% in 1949, fifty nine percent five years later. And the telephone was way slower. It didn't reach half of American homes until after the second world war, seventy years after Bell.

So the fridge is radio speed, not a miracle.

But radio didn't cost $600.

Neither did the fridge by 1935. That's the answer to your question. Four things stacked. Deflation, the price of the box fell from $600 to 150, faster than wages fell. The sealed dome, no more service calls.

The safe gas, no more dead families. And thirty five months on the light bill. Any one of those, and it's a luxury. All four, and it's in half the country's kitchens in a decade.

Yeah. And I wanna name the cost of that plainly because I think we owe it to the guy. The iceman had a root. He had a horse, later a truck. He had customers who knew his name and kids who knew the sound of his wagon.

And the electric company sold the box that ended him and profited on both ends of it, the installment and the kilowatt hours. A real person lost his living. And the system flourished. Cheaper food, safer milk, the weekly shop instead of buying one meal at a time. Both of those are true.

I don't think you apologize for the second to say the first.

No. And you don't skip the first to celebrate the second. And the shape of the kitchen changes with him, by the way. Daily marketing becomes the weekly shop. The first supermarket, King Cullen in Queens, opens in August 1930, 10 times the size of an A and P with a parking lot.

And that same year in March in Springfield, Massachusetts, a man named Clarence Birdseye put 27 frozen products into a grocery store for the first time.

Which is a whole other story for another day. Okay. So the safe gas. We've been walking around it for twenty minutes.

So General Motors owns Frigidaire, and Frigidaire has a problem, which is that its product occasionally kills its customers. Charles Kettering, who runs GM Research, has a chemist named Thomas Midgely, and Midgely is a character. Cornell mechanical engineer, not a chemist by training. As a high school pitcher, he went looking for a substance to make his spitball break harder and found slippery elm bark. His prep school chemistry teacher gave him a periodic table, and he carried a copy for the rest of his life.

And in 1921, he'd already given the world leaded gasoline.

So one for one on the environment so far.

We'll come to that. Kettering says it took a whole Saturday afternoon to sell Midge on the idea that this was quite an important project. Fall of nineteen twenty eight, Midgley and a chemist named Albert Hen are in a lab at Ohio State, and Midgley starts from the table. Flammability drops as you move to the right across the periodic table. Toxicity drops as you move up, and the two arrows cross at one element, fluorine, which everybody knew was hideously dangerous.

Kettering says he went ahead in spite of warnings about the hazardous nature of fluorine. And within days, they've made a compound called dichlorodifluoromethane, which nobody can say, so it becomes Freon. And it just worked? It nearly didn't. This is the part that gives me chills.

They made three or four small batches with the raw material they had and tested them on animals. Only the first batch was nontoxic. Every animal exposed to the others died exactly the way everyone expected a fluorine compound to behave. It turned out to be an impurity in the ingredients, not the Freon. Kettering's line is, fortunately though, it was the first batch which turned out well.

If they'd made batch two first, they walk away.

That is truly nuts. I can't believe that's real.

And then the demonstration. 1930, American Chemical Society meeting. Midgely presents the first paper on fluorine refrigerants. And to prove the two properties at once, Kettering's words, he demonstrated both their nontoxic and their non inflammable properties in one breath, so to speak. He takes a lungful of Freon vapor and softly exhales it onto a candle burning in front of him, and the flame goes out.

He breathed it in and blew out a candle with it?

Nontoxic and nonflammable in one breath, the two things every earlier refrigerant wasn't. Kettering called them the only such compounds known which are stable, non inflammable, and completely nontoxic. GM and DuPont form a joint company to make it, and within five years, the makers using Freon have sold something like 8,000,000 refrigerators. Before long, essentially every new box in America.

So after a century of fluids that burned or poisoned, you finally have one that does nothing. It boils at the right temperature. It carries heat. It doesn't eat the metal. It doesn't burn.

It doesn't kill you. It passed every test the engineers wrote.

Every test they'd thought to write. And by 1950, four out of five American kitchens have a sealed steel box humming in the corner, and the gas inside it is the safest chemical anyone has ever put in a home.

It failed one test. Nobody had written it yet.

Don't last a century, and don't reach the sky.

11/02/1944, Worthington, Ohio. Thomas Midgely is 55. Four years earlier, he'd caught polio. At 51, which almost never happens, and it left him severely disabled. So being an engineer, he designed a system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed.

And that morning, he was found strangled in it, tangled in the harness he'd built.

In his own machine.

Yeah. He'd been elected president of the American Chemical Society that same year. He wrote his own epitaph in his last address to them. This one did a lot of living in a mighty little while. He died believing he'd made the world safer twice, leaded gasoline and Freon.

And an environmental historian named JR McNeil would later write that Midgley had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history.

That is a remarkable sentence to have written about you.

It is. And to understand why it's true, you have to jump thirty years to a chemistry lab in Southern California.

So here's the question that nobody had asked in forty five years of making this stuff. Where does it go? A molecule of Freon doesn't burn, doesn't react with anything, doesn't dissolve in water. That's the whole point of it. That's why Midgely blew out a candle with it.

So when it leaks out of your fridge or you spray it out of a can of hairspray, it just stays. And in 1972, a chemistry professor at UC Irvine named Sherwood Roland, everybody called him Sherry, is at a meeting where he hears a British scientist named Jim Lovelock present measurements. Lovelock had gone looking for these molecules in the air and found them everywhere, at levels suggesting that essentially every molecule of the stuff ever made was still up there. All of it? Essentially all of it.

And Roland's reaction was, his words, I knew that such a molecule could not remain inert in the atmosphere forever. Something eventually breaks it. So he puts it on his list of possible projects for a new postdoc, and the postdoc who picks it is Mario Molina. 30 years old, born in Mexico City, fresh Berkeley doctorate in chemical lasers, and he'd walked away from lasers on purpose. He wrote later that he was dismayed by the fact that high power chemical lasers were being developed elsewhere as weapons.

He wanted to work on something useful. And off Roland's list, he picks the boring one, finding out the environmental fate of these very inert industrial chemicals.

Where do they go? And how long does it take?

Three months. Molina's own line about it later was, we really sort of stumbled onto a problem of global proportions. Here's the chemistry. In the lower atmosphere, nothing touches these molecules, so they drift upward for years. Eventually, they get above most of the ozone layer into the stratosphere, where for the first time, they meet ultraviolet light hard enough to knock a chlorine atom loose.

And that chlorine atom hits an ozone molecule and breaks it, takes one of its oxygens. Then it hits a free oxygen atom and gives that oxygen back. And now the chlorine is exactly as it was, ready to go again.

Wait. So it's not used up?

No. It's a catalyst. That's the whole horror of it. The EPA's figure is that one chlorine atom can destroy over a 100,000 ozone molecules before something finally removes it. And the paper's own estimate for how long a CFC molecule lasts in the atmosphere was forty to a hundred and fifty years, which means the sky is a cumulative account.

A few thousand Freon fridges in 1932 never mattered. 80% of American kitchens plus every car air conditioner plus every spray can for forty years, that mattered, and the bill was still arriving decades after the last can. Scale. And that winter, Roland comes home from the lab and, as his wife Joan later remembered it, tells her, the work is going well, but it looks like the end of the world.

That's... He said that at the dinner table?

At home to his wife. And Joan went through the house and threw out every spray can. That's the first policy response to ozone depletion. One woman in a kitchen in Orange County throwing out the hairspray.

And then the world catches up.

Slowly. They publish in Nature in June of nineteen seventy September, at the American Chemical Society, they call for a complete ban on releasing the stuff, which was not what chemists did. You published and you stopped. Roland's answer years later was, is it enough for a scientist simply to publish a paper? If not us, who?

If not now, when? And the response is he doesn't get invited to give a talk for a decade. Industry is furious. DuPont's chairman calls the theory a science fiction tale, utter nonsense. And this

is where I wanna slow down because I think it's easy to make DuPont the villain here, and I think that's the wrong read, at least in 1975. DuPont takes out a full page ad, and the sentence in it that I think is the important one is this. Should reputable evidence show that some fluorocarbons cause a health hazard through depletion of the ozone layer, we are prepared to stop production of the offending compounds. Now in 1975, nobody had measured any ozone loss anywhere. The theory rested on lab rate constants and a model.

The National Academy of Sciences looked at it in 1976, said the theory was probably right, and recommended waiting two more years for data before regulating. So DuPont's position was show us the evidence, and that's not a lie. That's honestly what science is supposed to sound like.

Except they also spent the next decade lobbying against regulating it.

Yeah. They did, and they were wrong about the trend. But here's the thing I keep coming back to on this. When science turns out to have been incomplete, people read that as science being wrong or corrupt, and that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. It's a continual iteration on incomplete information.

Too early to draw conclusions wasn't a cop out in 1975. It was accurate. The question is what you do when the evidence changes. And hold on to that pledge because we're gonna find out whether they kept it.

So here's who moved first, and it wasn't governments, consumers. Before there was any ban at all, aerosol sales fell sharply. People just stopped buying spray cans. The industry, in the words of one historian, feeling invulnerable was not prepared for such a strong public and political reaction. And the structural reason it could happen so fast is that hairspray is nonessential, and there was a pump bottle on the shelf right next to it.

Substitutes on the shelf. Right? Culture moved faster than regulation. And the regulation followed. The United States banned nonessential aerosol CFCs in 1978, less than five years from the paper.

Canada and the Scandinavians did the same, and then it stalled because a refrigerator is not hairspray. Nobody was going to give up the box. There was no substitute on the shelf, and the chemical industry argued, persuasively, that it needed time to develop one. And Europe balked. France and Britain were major producers, and they'd just watched The United States kill its own supersonic transport partly on ozone grounds and then fight Concorde's landing rights.

So they suspected an American trick. One historian's phrase is that they saw it as environmental neocolonialism.

Which from where they sat was not a crazy read.

No. It wasn't. And DuPont's position in 1979 was no ozone depletion has ever been detected, which was true. So by March 1985, you get the Vienna Convention. '43 countries agree that the ozone layer is important and that they should do something with no actual controls, a framework with nothing in it.

And two months later, three men on an ice shelf publish a paper.

This is your favorite part, isn't it?

This is one of my favorite stories in the history of science. Okay. Haley Research Station, British Antarctic Survey. It's on the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica, and since 1957, a physicist named Joe Farman has been running an instrument there called a Dobson spectrophotometer, a nineteen twenties design that measures how much ozone is in the column of air overhead. And I need you to understand why it was there.

It was not there to look for ozone depletion. It was set up to help with weather forecasting. And in the early nineteen eighties, the survey was looking for things to cut, and the Haley ozone program was, Shanklin's phrase, in the frame to be cut. Nothing seemed to be changing. Why keep paying for it?

Who's Shanklin?

Jonathan Shanklin. In 1977, the survey posts a job ad. Wanted, physicist with an interest in meteorology and programming skills. And he answers it, fresh out of Cambridge. And he writes later, I had no background in meteorology and no preconceived ideas of how the atmosphere behaved.

His job is to clear a backlog. The Dobson readings were on handwritten sheets, and until then, converting them into ozone numbers meant slide rules and log tables. So there's a decade of sheets nobody's processed. He supervises the digitizing and writes the code. And, his words, by chance, the backlog covered the crucial decade when ozone levels began to drop.

Nobody's looking for it.

And this is the part. In 1983, the survey has a public open day, and Shanklin is asked to help because he has a teaching qualification. And the newspapers at the time are full of stories about spray cans and Concord destroying the ozone layer. So he decides to make a graph to reassure the public, to show that the ozone over Halley that year is no different from twenty years earlier. And the graph does show that overall, but he writes, it seemed that the springtime values did look lower from one year to the next.

His own line about it now is, being an ignorant physicist, I thought this unlikely.

He's trying to calm everybody down, and the data won't let him.

And there's no eureka. He says that explicitly. There was no real eureka moment in the discovery, more a combination of pieces falling into place. The theory said springtime Antarctic values were noisy, weather dependent, don't read anything into them. Farman himself thought the instrument must be broken until a replacement Dobson gave the same numbers.

Shanklin, looking back on it recently, the problem was the points were starting to fall off the top of the graph, quite unusual in science, really. What finally convinced them was a plot of the lowest eleven day average for each spring, which showed the decline was systematic. Farman worked out the chemistry connecting it to CFCS. Brian Gardner did the data quality, and they published in Nature in May 1985. Springtime ozone over Antarctica down about 40% from the nineteen seventies, where the models had predicted a few percent globally, maybe.

Okay. So here's the question I actually wrote down when I read this, because I've seen the version of this story where NASA's satellite had been seeing the hole for years and the software was throwing the data away. Is that true? And if it is, why was nobody following up on all those errors?

So I chased this because I'd heard that version too, and it's the kind of story that's too good. Here's what actually happened. NASA's satellite instrument did have a quality flag. Any reading below a certain level got flagged as probably out of calibration. Flagged.

Not deleted. The data was all still there. And in August 1984, the team at Goddard processing the October eighty three data noticed a huge spike in flagged readings over Antarctica, and they investigated. The obvious check was to compare against the ground readings from the South Pole station, and that ground data turned out to be bad because the wrong channels had been read on the instrument. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looked normal, so they had a puzzle they couldn't confirm.

By December eighty four, they were confident enough to submit an abstract to for the following August, and Farman's paper came out in May.

So they were more than a year behind, three guys with an instrument designed in the nineteen twenties. And no theory to protect.

That's the real difference. The guy who wrote the best account of this called it a tale of poor communications and siloed researchers. Silos, not stupidity. And NASA then confirmed it, bigger. Their satellite map in 1986 showed the hole was the size of a continent.

Meanwhile, Shanklin, after that 1983 open day, had written a letter to the satellite data center asking whether they were seeing low values too, and I love his line about it. I never received a reply. Perhaps another lucky break for our team.

Nobody on the satellite side answered the mail.

And one more piece because it answers the obvious question, why Antarctica? Susan Solomon, a 30 year old chemist at NOAA worked out in 1986 that the answer was the clouds. Polar stratospheric clouds form only in the extreme cold of the Antarctic winter, and chemistry on the surface of those ice particles converts the safe stored forms of chlorine into the active form. So when the sun comes back in spring, the chlorine is primed and it goes through the ozone like a scythe. She led the expedition to McMurdo to measure it and found chlorine oxide a 100 times higher than expected.

Shanklin's own line about all this is that it is humbling to think that industry across the world has had to change because of what seemed to be a small discovery over an obscure part of Antarctic.

And then it moves fast, which is the part I find genuinely astonishing. Because two years, two years after that paper, there's a treaty, and it very nearly wasn't a strong one. Spring of nineteen eighty seven, inside the Reagan administration, there's a revolt. Interior, commerce, energy, the budget office, they wanna freeze on production and nothing more. And the interior secretary, Donald Hoddle, floats what he calls a personal protection plan.

Instead of a treaty, hats, sunglasses, sunscreen.

He said that out loud in a cabinet meeting?

Now I wanna give him his due for one second because adaptation is a real policy category, and his economists weren't wrong that a 50% cut would cost money. But the LA Times gets hold of it in May, and the press christens it the Ray Ban plan, and it dies on the dread test. Nobody wants to be told the sky is the problem, and the answer is a hat. And the other side had a number. The EPA's own worst case model, assuming no controls and sixty more years of growth, projected well over a hundred million extra skin cancers in The United States alone.

That's a model, not a forecast, but it's the world the hat was supposed to fix. The senate passes a resolution for a 50% cut almost unanimously, and the secretary of state, George Shultz, takes it to Reagan directly. And on 06/25/1987, Reagan decides. Freeze at 1986 levels, 20% cut, then a further 30% cut against four of his own cabinet departments. Do we know why?

We know the decision memo is in Reagan's own handwriting. Beyond that, he'd had skin cancer cut off his nose twice in '85 and '87, and historians have wondered whether that mattered. Nobody in the room wrote it down, but he did it. 09/16/1987, two dozen nations signed the Montreal Protocol. Europe came along in part because they feared American trade sanctions if they didn't.

Reagan later called it a model of cooperation, a monumental achievement. And in 2009, the Montreal Protocol became the first treaty in the history of the United Nations to be ratified by every single country on Earth.

Which has never happened for anything else. And Shanklin, of all people, has the best analysis of why that worked. I wanna read it because it's a scientist, not a pundit. He says the manufacturers were able and willing, after some initial resistance, to produce substitutes. The evidence was clear.

The hole sounded threatening. There was a link to cancer. And then this, the public did not feel bullied or threatened. No one was telling them to radically change their way of life. There was a problem, and something could be done about it.

And elsewhere, he puts it even more simply. With the ozone hole, you could show politicians a picture.

And that last one is the whole game. Nobody had to give up their refrigerator. Nobody had to change how they lived. The fix asks nothing of you. And the other piece, no substitute, no treaty.

DuPont had said in '86 that alternatives could be ready within five years given the right market conditions, and the treaty was the market condition. It created the demand for the substitute, which is a genuinely elegant thing, a regulation that makes the market for the thing that makes the regulation possible. And now your pledge. Now my pledge, March 1988, twenty days that I think are one of the best corporate stories I know. March 4, DuPont's chairman Richard Heckert writes to three senators, quote, scientific evidence does not point to the need for dramatic CFC emission reductions.

March 15, a NASA panel, the Ozone Trends Panel, an international team of scientists, reports that it's not just Antarctica. Ozone over the Northern Mid Latitudes where the people live is down two to 3% since 1969, up to 6% in winter, and it cannot be explained by anything natural, where the models had said essentially zero.

And DuPont has a guy on that panel.

They do. Mac McFarland, their own atmospheric scientist, the only industry scientist on it. He's read the draft, and he tells the company the link is now real. March 24, nine days later, DuPont, the world's largest producer of CFCs, announces it will phase them out entirely. Total phase out.

Twenty days from the evidence doesn't point to the need to we're getting out of the business.

Nine days after the report? That's not a corporate timeline. That's a memo.

And here's why I love it. That's not a confession. That's an update. The 1975 pledge, should reputable evidence show we are prepared to stop production? They kept it.

On the first day, the evidence was reputable enough for their own scientist. Thirteen years late by one reading, exactly on time by another. And then they sold the substitutes. Creative destruction run inside one company in one corporate calendar.

And the substitutes are where the pattern comes back. Because the replacement, the fourth fluid, HFC one thirty four a, was designed to break down before it reaches the stratosphere. No chlorine, no ozone problem, solved. It's just that it's a greenhouse gas 1,400 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. Now a home fridge holds only a few ounces.

One leak is nothing. But hundreds of millions of boxes and cars and supermarket racks leaking a few percent a year for decades, that's a climate line item. Scale again. Of course, it is. So in October 2016 in Kigali, Rwanda, a 197 countries amend the Montreal Protocol to phase down the replacement.

And the scientific assessment says that amendment alone is expected to avoid somewhere between a third and half a degree Celsius of warming by 2100. A treaty about what's inside your refrigerator is one of the largest single climate actions anyone has ever taken, and it ran on the ozone treaty's machinery because that machinery worked. The US Senate ratified it in twenty twenty two, sixty nine to '27.

69 votes? I did not expect that.

Neither did I. And here's where the fluids have landed. A new home refrigerator today runs on isobutane, which is flammable, so the safety standard caps the charge at a 150 grams, a few ounces, and which is one of the fluids Freon displaced in the nineteen thirties. Supermarkets are going to carbon dioxide at very high pressure, and industrial cold storage never left ammonia. Linde's fluid, a hundred and fifty years on.

Four fluids in a century, and the fourth one is the first one. And the sky? Healing slowly. The CFCS are gone, phased out in the rich world by '96, everywhere by 2010. The ozone layer is projected to be back to 1980 levels around 2040 globally, and over Antarctica around 2066, which is after most of the people listening to this are dead.

And it's not tidy. The latest assessment found emissions of one byproduct gas, HFC 23, running up to eight times higher than expected, and somebody had to go find out where an outlawed CFC was still coming from. But Shanklin's line is that perhaps the most startling lesson from the ozone hole is just how quickly our planet can change in both directions.

So there's one more thing I wanna put on the table before we step back because I think it's the thing we'd be most embarrassed to skip. Everything we've described is the rich world. America, Europe, Japan, where's everybody else? So this is the part

I keep coming back to. If you picture the map filling in with color, The United States goes from one home in 12 to four in five between 1930 and 1950. Then Europe, a generation later. Then Japan, which is incredible. One home in 10 in 1960, nine in 10 by 1970.

America's twenty year curve, run-in 10. Then China's cities, single digits in the mid eighties, nine in 10 by the late two thousands. And then it slows way down. India today is about 38%, but that's 63% in the cities and 25% in the villages. India's cities are where America was in 1950.

Its villages are where America was in 1935, and rural Sub Saharan Africa is at about 4%. Four? Four homes in a 100 with a refrigerator. And the aid organizations put it this way. Just over a billion people, roughly one in eight, are at high risk from lacking access to cooling.

And I wanna say that carefully because a billion sounds like hype. It means no reliable cold for food, for medicine, or for your body in a hot place, not no fridge. And nobody is resisting cold. This is not resistance. It's the same gates America hit in the nineteen thirties.

Price, a wire to the house, financing a century later.

And I'd add that it's their framing, not ours. India's government wrote the first national cooling plan in the world in 2019, and the phrase it uses is that cooling is a developmental need. The Nigerian who runs the UN sustainable energy effort puts it more bluntly. Cooling is a make or break issue for development.

Which is their word, not an aid agency's. And the Kigali schedule encodes that, by the way. India and The Gulf States don't have to finish phasing down until 2047 because the rich world built its cold on Freon first. So a billion people are where New York's tenements were in 1900. Their governments call cold a developmental need.

Montreal worked. Kigali is the encore, and the machine in your kitchen has been through four fluids in a hundred years.

Four fluids. And every single one of them was the safe one the day it was chosen. So we've walked two hundred years, and I think this is the moment to pull back and look at what that story built. Because you've got a page of numbers in front of you, and I think every one of them lands differently now than it would have an hour and a half ago.

I checked each of them three times because there are a lot of bad refrigerator statistics floating around out there, and I didn't wanna be the guy who read one.

I appreciate that.

So start with the curve since we just lived through it. 1930, roughly one American home in 12 has a refrigerator. 1940 census, 44% with 27% still on ice and 27% with nothing. 1950, about four in five. That's radio's pace, slower than television and much faster than the telephone, which took about seventy years to reach half of homes.

And it happened during the depression.

Which we've established, I still find hard to believe.

Now here's the one that changes how you look at your kitchen. Nicola Twilley, who wrote the best modern book on this, puts it this way. Roughly three quarters of the food consumed in The United States is processed, shipped, stored, or sold under refrigeration. Three quarters of everything on your plate has been cold somewhere you've never seen, and the somewhere is enormous. Three and a half to five and a half billion cubic feet of refrigerated warehouse space in this country, depending on who counts.

That's 11 to 16 cubic feet per person. Roughly one home refrigerator's worth of industrial cold for every man, woman, and child in America sitting in a building you've never been inside.

A fridge per person in warehouses.

Right. And in your own house, one in three American homes has two or more refrigerators. About one home in 200 has none. And then flip it over. Just over a billion people on Earth, roughly one in eight, are at high risk from lacking access to cooling.

In rural Sub Saharan Africa, four homes in a 100 have a refrigerator.

So the nickel piece didn't go away. It moved.

And here's the one you asked me to double check. The International Energy Agency worked out that The United States uses about as much energy cooling its buildings as the entire Continent Of Africa uses in electricity for everything. Three hundred and twenty eight million Americans versus 1,200,000,000 people. All their lights, all their factories, all their everything. And it's true in that specific form.

There's a version of that stat that's about global air conditioning versus Africa that I don't trust, so I'm not gonna say it.

Which... Good. And that's the cost side. How big is the whole thing as an industry?

Roughly 5,000,000,000 refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pump systems running on Earth. One machine for every one and a half people alive, and something like 15,000,000 people employed keeping them running. The Hudson Valley's 20,000 ice cutters times 750.

And is there a number on the other side of the ledger?

There is, and it's the paradox I keep coming back to. The food cold chain, the trucks, the warehouses, the supermarket cases, is about 4% of global greenhouse emissions. And the food that rots because there isn't a cold chain, the UN puts it at 12% of everything grown on Earth, about 500,000,000 tons a year. That rotting is about 2% of global emissions. So the machine is a major emitter and a major preventer at the same time.

And the last number, the twenty sixteen amendment that phases down the replacement for Freon is expected to avoid somewhere between a third and half a degree Celsius of warming by the end of the century, a treaty about what's inside your fridge.

Okay. So here's the whole thing in one breath. In eighteen o six, a Boston newspaper laughs at a kid shipping pond ice to the tropics. By 1900, a whole city is in the streets over the price of that ice, and the mayor's name is on the shareholder list. By 1954, out of five American homes have a sealed steel box humming in the kitchen, and the gas inside it is the safest chemical ever invented until it isn't, and the world fixes that by treaty in about two years.

And today, three quarters of what an American eats pass through cold to get there, and a billion people are where New York's tenements were in 1900.

And the thing I'd add, the pattern I didn't see until we'd told the whole thing is that every round's winners fought the next round. Tudor's ice trade laughed at Gory. The ice plants that killed pond ice fought the electric box. The company that made the kitchen safe fought the ozone science. And every single one of them was right about the specifics of the moment and wrong about where it was going.

That's the shape of it. Okay. So here's the question I wanna ask about every one of these. Is it invisible? Has it become the kind of thing you only notice when it fails?

Completely. You notice it the moment the power goes out and you start doing math about the milk. The rest of the time, think about what Twilio describes. Orange juice. There are tank farms in Florida with tanks holding a million gallons of juice chilled to 32 degrees, stripped of oxygen, where the juice sits for up to a year from one harvest to the next.

One company's indoor tank farm holds 25,000,000 gallons. A supply chain professor who toured it said it looked like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Your orange juice is a year old.

Your orange juice may be a year old. There's a Kraft cheese warehouse in a disused limestone mine under Springfield, Missouri held at 58 degrees, 400,000 square feet. American warehouses hold something like a billion and a half pounds of cheese at any moment. Bananas arrive green and go into ripening rooms where they're gassed with ethylene for five days at 62 degrees. Twilly says the gas smells like a pub carpet, and a ripener speeds that up or slows it down by a degree or two to hit the day the supermarket wants them.

The apple you bought last week may have been picked a year ago and held in a low oxygen room, essentially asleep.

And the one place it's not invisible

is the back of the fridge. The coils are warm. And now everybody listening knows why. That warmth is your leftovers moved outside. And the other thing about that box is the sealed dome on the compressor, welded shut in 1927, and nobody who owns one has ever opened it.

There's a machine in your house that runs for fifteen years, and you have never seen the inside of it.

Which I'm going to think about every time now. Okay. What depends on it? Because this is where the list gets long fast.

The plate, first, three quarters of it. And then medicine, the COVID vaccines. Pfizer's had to be held at minus 70 Celsius. It shipped in boxes packed with dry ice that had to be replenished within twenty four hours and then every five days. And the ultra cold freezers cost 10 to $15,000 each, which a lot of small hospitals didn't have.

That's Mary Pennington's problem, a hundred and ten years later. The thing works, but only if every link in the chain holds temperature.

And whole economies. New Zealand, the Dunedin's country. Today, about 80% of its goods exports are agricultural. 95% of its sheet meat leaves the country. One refrigerated voyage in 1882, and a hundred and forty years later, four fifths of a nation's exports depend on it.

Chicago, the Banana Republic, the supermarket, the weekly shop, and one line because it's its own episode someday, the cities that exist because of air conditioning, which is the same machine with the condenser hung outside. Willis Carrier, 1902, Brooklyn.

Same machine, different episode.

Okay. Hidden cost. And this is the one where I wanna hear you first because you've been building a ledger this whole time.

I have. And if you're listening, this is the part I'd ask you to sit with for a minute because it's not simple. So the ledger. Cooling's carbon emissions have tripled since 1990 to roughly the total emissions of Japan. On the current path, they nearly double again by 2050 to roughly the total emissions of Africa today.

Refrigerant leakage from an installed base that lasts decades is a line item all its own. There's a food system optimized for shelf life over flavor, that year old apple. There's the iceman, the 40,000 people in the machine ice industry, the Norwegian ice cutters, the local butcher, and there's who got it and who didn't. In the 1940 census, a quarter of white households had no refrigeration, half of black households. In the South, six in 10 black households had nothing.

The nickel piece in the census.

And here's my honest read. The demand for cold is a structural fact. There are a billion plus people about to buy their first refrigerator. And by the IEA's count, something like 2,000,000,000 air conditioners going into China and India alone by 2050. India's cooling demand grows 15 fold.

In Saudi Arabia, on a hot day, air conditioning can already be 70% of electricity demand. No treaty constrains that to a climate safe envelope because you can't tell a billion people they don't get what New York got in 1900. And the fluid treadmill, four fluids in a century, each one solving the last one's problem and carrying a new one, that treadmill is permanent because the demand is permanent.

Yeah. So here's where I land. I think we can invent our way out of it, and I don't think that's naive because we have the receipt. Montreal is a treaty every country on Earth ratified. The sky is healing.

Kigali is the same mechanism working again, a third to half a degree from a treaty about refrigerants that the US senate ratified 69 to 27 in 2022. The IEA's numbers say the efficiency of the world's air conditioners could more than double by 2050. And if it does, the growth in cooling energy is less than half of what it would otherwise be. 75 countries have signed a global cooling pledge launched at the Dubai Climate Summit. The tools exist.

A pledge is not a protocol.

No. It isn't. That's exactly my caveat. What it needs is smart national and international coordination, governance. And I'll be honest, that's very hard to imagine in the current environment, but the mechanism exists.

We've done this twice.

And I'll give you Montreal. Montreal was real. Shanklin himself points out it did more to cut greenhouse gases than the Kyoto treaty, almost by accident because the CFCs were potent greenhouse gases too. But here's what I'd push on. Montreal worked because it asked nobody to change how they lived and because there was a substitute on the shelf.

The cooling problem isn't a substitute problem. It's a demand problem. The IEA's baseline with every policy already on the books still has cooling emissions nearly doubling. Efficiency is a scenario. Demand is a fact.

Yeah. And I think that's fair. And I'll concede the structural point. The demand isn't going anywhere, and it shouldn't. Adding a cold chain to the billion people who don't have one is a humanitarian necessity.

It's also a climate cost, both.

And that's the paradox I hold. The same machine is the emitter and the preventer. I don't think you get to resolve that. You get to manage it.

And I think managing it is a thing institutions can actually do, which is, I suspect, where you and I will always land a little differently.

A little. Okay. Could we go back?

On the specific chemical, we already did. That's the remarkable part. We took the safest chemical ever invented out of every kitchen on Earth, and the sky is healing. On cold itself, no. And I think the honest way to say why is the FDA's guidance.

An unopened refrigerator keeps food safe for about four hours in a power outage. A full freezer, about 48. That's it. The entire American food supply is one long afternoon from spoiling.

And the outages are the moment the whole thing shows itself. Texas, February 2021, more than 4,000,000 homes without power, some for more than three days. The two thousand three Northeast blackout, 55,000,000 people. And in New York, the restaurants just cooked everything they had and handed it out on the sidewalk because it was gonna spoil anyway. But the one that actually scares me is heat.

On a hot afternoon, air conditioning can be most of a city's electricity demand. Philadelphia hit seventy four percent one July afternoon. So a blackout during a heat wave isn't an inconvenience anymore. There's a modeling study out of Georgia Tech that looked at a multi day blackout during a heat wave in three cities, and in Phoenix, it had half the city seeking emergency care.

In a city that only exists at

that size because of the machine. It's a model, but that's the shape of it. Water and electricity are the only two things I can think of that we depend on this deeply. Cold is the third.

So what's next? Because this is the story that doesn't end. A few things.

There are well over one and a half billion air conditioners in the world. And by the IEA's count, something like 10 new ones are sold every second and will be for the next thirty years. So the machine that's the same as the fridge is about to be everywhere the fridge is. The fluids are going backwards in a good way. Carbon dioxide, propane, and Linde's ammonia are all coming back because we finally care about the property the engineers weren't measuring.

There are off grid solar refrigerators going into villages in Sub Saharan Africa, a few 100,000 off grid appliances so far, not all of them fridges, against a billion people. So the scale problem is enormous. The ozone hole closes around 2066. And one line, because it's your world, the data centers running the models we've all been using this year are, by the IEA's count, about one and a half percent of global electricity, and cooling is a real fraction of that. Same machine.

And here's the thing I actually think about since we're talking about the models. The arc of this story bends toward more human flourishing. Fewer dead babies, cheaper food, a healing sky. And every technology we've talked about displaced people and then created more for the next generation to do. But for the first time, there's a technology that can plausibly do both the thing the human brain does and, with the robots, the thing the human body does.

In that world, what's left for the humans? I don't know that the pattern holds.

And I'm not sure we know enough yet to make that comparison. I really don't. It might be the ice trade. It might not. I'd rather tell the refrigerator story straight and let people draw their own line.

Fair. I'm not resolving it. I'm just not gonna pretend the arc is guaranteed.

Okay. I've got a question I genuinely can't answer, and it's the one I wrote down first. Refrigeration punched a hole in the sky and the world fixed it by treaty in about a decade. What did 1987 have that we don't? And Shanklin, one of the sharpest observers in this whole story, gave the list.

Substitutes on the shelf, evidence you could put in a picture, a dread factor, cancer, and a fix that asked nobody to change how they lived. And the honest answer to my question is, I don't know if we have those four things for the problems in front of us now. Kigali says the mechanism still works. 69 votes in 2022. The cooling pledge says people still want to.

But Shanklin's own conclusion was, it is unclear, and I think that's where I am.

And mine is the mirror image. A billion people are where New York was in 1900, and America closed that gap in one generation with a grid, a price collapse, and utilities that finance the box on the light bill. So what's the 2026 version of thirty five months on the electric bill? Who's the utility? Because a few 100,000 solar appliances against a billion people is the whole scale problem in one comparison.

And do we give them the cold chain, and what does the planet pay for it? I don't think there's a policy that constrains that. I think it just happens, and the question is what fluid it happens with.

Which is the fourth fluid question.

Right. Three times the safe fluid turned out not to be. And there's already a fifth one, a new class of refrigerants going into car air conditioners with a warming potential of basically zero. Solved. Except it breaks down in the

air into an acid, a so called forever chemical that's now turning up in rain and groundwater at several times the level of the nineties, and Europe's chemicals agency recently concluded it meets the bar for a reproductive toxin. The industry says it's naturally present in the oceans and the levels are low. It's the same shape as 1930, smaller and caught earlier, but the same shape. So let me try to say the thing I think you carry out of this because I've been circling it the whole time. The fix that spreads is the fix that hides its cost.

Not because anybody's lying, because the cost only shows up at scale. And by the time you're at scale, the fix is infrastructure. Three times in this story, engineers chose a fluid, honestly, to solve the problem in front of them. Ammonia works and kills. Freon doesn't kill and lasts a century and reaches the sky.

The replacement doesn't touch the ozone and warms the planet. Nobody could see the next problem because a few thousand Freon fridges in 1932 were genuinely harmless. 80% of American kitchens wasn't. These are complex systems, and the interaction effects are really hard to forecast.

So what's the portable version?

The portable version is for anything that's spreading fast, the question isn't what's wrong with it today. It's what's harmless at a thousand and dangerous at a billion, and who is keeping the boring long record that will catch it? Because the ozone hole was caught by a monitoring program that was about to be cut for budget reasons. Shanklin says it directly. In periods of economic decline, there is always a temptation to suspend long term monitoring programs that don't have any obvious immediate utility.

But it is programs such as these that provide the crucial evidence for political decisions governing the future of our planet. Somebody has to keep the graph.

And I'll add one thing. The unforeseen goes both ways. Nobody building the beef trade in 1880 was thinking about vaccines. And in 1974, when the WHO started its immunization program, five percent of children in low income countries were vaccinated. Every gain since rode on a cold chain built for steak.

Same scale that made the problem made it findable and fixable. Seen and unforeseen, good and bad, every big technology hits all four. This one hit all four in a hundred years.

Yeah. And if you've been listening to this and you're now looking at your kitchen a little differently, that's the point of the whole show. It's why we're doing this.

Go touch the coils. I'm making my kids listen to this one, by the way. They're going to hate it, and then they're going to touch the coils.

Before we wrap. If you like this, follow the show wherever you're listening and send it to the one friend who'd wanna know that Einstein built a refrigerator. And check the show notes. Every source, every name we mentioned, Tudor's diary, Shanklin's essay, Pennington's bulletin is linked there.

And the 59¢.

Especially the 59¢. That's it for this episode of Backbone. We'll be back in a few weeks to dig into another hidden technology that makes the modern world run, one you've probably never thought about and won't be able to stop thinking about after. And in the meantime, in the words of a man who spent a decade being laughed at, let those laugh who win.

Until then, stay curious and mind the Backbone.