Original subtitles

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Imagine what life was like

before we could make anything cold.

Just a few generations ago,

we had no idea how to keep food fresh,

and hot places like Arizona or Dubai

were basically uninhabitable.

And forget about ice cream.

So how did we get to today's refrigerated world?

Two hundred years ago, there would have been

no way to escape the heat.

Well, it took people like the college dropout

who first decided to ship ice around the world...

Everywhere he goes, the ice melts.

But he doesn't give up.

and a guy trying to feed his family in the Arctic...

Imagine trying to live the entire winter

on, like, moose jerky.

who winds up changing the way we eat forever.

Ice fishermen.

These are classic examples of the kind of people

who actually made the modern world.

People you've probably never heard of.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

They are the hobbyists, garage inventors,

and obsessive tinkerers.

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

The thing about these pioneers

is that they didn't just make our world a cooler place,

but they also set in motion an amazing chain reaction of ideas.

From the places we live to the food on our plates,

from politics to Hollywood to mass migrations,

I want to show how these seemingly unconnected worlds

are linked by the unsung heroes of cold.

I'm Steven Johnson.

I write about ideas and innovation.

And this is the untold story of How We Got to Now.

How We Got to Now was made possible in part by

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Fire: man's original innovation.

We've been tinkering with that for over 100,000 years.

But what about the opposite of fire?

What about our relationship with cold?

I don't actually normally sleep like this in my ski gear,

but I'm actually in one of the most extraordinary rooms

I've ever been in.

I'm in Quebec, in a hotel made entirely out of ice.

I mean, not just the structure, but look around me, everything.

This bed is made of ice, that table is made of ice,

this object -- I don't even know what this is,

but it's made of ice.

I mean, normally when you check into your room

and it's 10 below freezing,

you're like calling the front desk to complain,

but people come from all over the world to stay at this hotel.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Apart from an average temperature below freezing

and the fact that it all melts every spring,

this is just like a normal hotel:

dozens of rooms, a front desk, a grand lobby.

It's even got a chapel and, of course, a bar.

Refrigerators are there actually to keep the drinks warm,

because it's actually warmer in the fridge

than it is in the ambient temperature of the hotel.

Otherwise all the drinks would freeze.

For Jacques Desbois, the man who created this palace of ice,

it is a symbol of how far

the French-Canadian settlers of Quebec have come

in their relationship with cold.

Snow and ice, it's just kind of like an inconvenience.

It's getting your car stuck in it or something like that.

But there's so much creativity and innovation here

in this space.

You know, we -- well, in a way, this is an igloo.

- It's a huge igloo. - Right, right.

And we're at a point that that snow shelter,

which was used for survival centuries and centuries ago,

now exists for our own pleasure, for our own amazement.

And in Quebec province here,

our ancestors were Mediterranean people

that have lost their way.

- Right. - They were thinking --

they were looking for tropical places in Asia,

but, more and more, we are becoming real northern people.

- Right, embracing winter. - And this is -- yeah, sure.

And it's a way to make people realize

that snow is not only an inconvenience,

but we can take advantage of it.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

People have been doing imaginative things with ice

in frozen parts of the world forever,

but just 200 years ago,

eons after we first mastered fire,

something profound changed.

We began to realize that we could use ice and cold

as tools to make life better in warmer climates.

And that revolution began with a simple idea,

one of those little pleasures of modern life

that we take for granted:

an ice-cold drink on a hot summer's day.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Meet Frederic Tudor, a wealthy young Bostonian.

[ horse snorts ]

In 1805, aged just 21,

Tudor visits the fine state of South Carolina,

the perfect environment for the fashionable elite.

Or at least it would be the perfect environment

if it weren't so insanely hot.

I mean, it is really humid, and look at me,

I've got like seven layers on.

I mean, it looks good,

but, you know, until you die of heatstroke

in the middle of the afternoon.

But 200 years ago, there would have been no way

to escape the heat of these long summer months in the South.

And Frederic Tudor found it unbearable.

Back then, living in a hot place,

you would never experience anything cold.

I mean, warm lemonade, anyone?

And this gets him thinking about home,

about the cold of the north, and it inspires him

to start taking notes in a journal.

He calls it The Ice House Diary.

In New England there's a resource

that's free and abundant during winter: ice.

Upper class families store it for the summer

and use it to make ice cream, chill drinks,

and preserve food.

Tudor thinks, "What if I could cut ice from frozen lakes

and ship it to people in hot places?"

He writes about

"the transporting of ice to popular climes."

[ ♪♪♪ ]

[ birds cawing ]

Tudor thinks that ice is going to make him rich,

but the reality is in 1805,

moving ice long distances is impossible.

And even if you could get it to some faraway hot location,

there's no way it would last.

In one of his first attempts,

Tudor sends a ship full of ice 3,200 kilometers

from Boston to the Caribbean island of Martinique.

It almost all melts, and his attempts to transport ice

lose Tudor the modern equivalent

of nearly $1 million.

Tudor's attempts to bring ice to the South

end up landing him in a debtor's prison.

He loses his friends and his family fortune.

He ultimately has a nervous breakdown.

His basic problem is simple:

back then, no one knows how to keep frozen water frozen...

and everyone thinks his idea is nuts.

Okay, so the way I see it is Tudor's problem

is that his idea is really only half-baked.

And if you think about it,

it's just a fragment of an idea, really,

and it's going to take him decades

to get all the pieces togethe.

It's what I call "the slow hunch."

[ ♪♪♪ ]

If you want to understand

how big ideas truly change the world,

you need to get rid of the myth of the eureka moment.

The truth is there's no such thing

as a light bulb going off in the mind of a lone genius.

Our best ideas start as something else,

a vague sense of possibility, a hint of something bigger.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Trying to turn his hunch into a viable business,

Tudor endures more than a decade of disaster.

At one point, he even writes to himself,

"Had you not better entirely abandon this ice business?"

All the signs suggest

that Tudor's dream is going to come to nothing.

So what does he do next?

He packs up a ship filled with ice and heads south.

Tudor's perseverance might seem crazy to us now,

but the thing is, he's sensing that his slow hunch

is finally going to pay off.

Let me show you why.

Tudor's problem is, how do you move ice around

without it melting?

But now he has his light bulb moment,

except that it's not really a light bulb moment

because it takes him 10 years.

But he realizes that thanks to the lumber trade,

New England is filled with

another abundant and free resource

that will solve his problem:

sawdust.

So let me show you how he would do it.

I feel like I'm actually doing a cooking show here.

But basically he would take these ships

and line them entirely with sawdust,

and he would fill the space between all the blocks of ice,

and then he would put another layer of ice

on top of the sawdust.

And when he did this, he found

that sawdust was the perfect insulator.

The ice wouldn't melt. It was beautifully simple.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Tudor's bigger challenge, though, is how to store ice

once it arrives in sunnier climes.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

But he has a plan.

I'm in the Lowcountry of Sth Carolina.

It's late July, and it's pretty humid.

But imagine what it would have been like 150 years ago.

It's sweltering like this for months on end,

and there's literally no way to escape the heat.

There's no air conditioning, there's no refrigeration.

And then you walk into a space like this.

This may look like an ordinary 19th-century barn,

but if I open up this hatch, we find something miraculous:

it's a giant frozen chunk of Massachusetts.

It may seem like I'm just in a hole

in the bottom of a barn here,

but actually, this was state-of-the-art technology

in the middle of the 19th century.

In fact, you can really feel how effective it is.

I mean, my upper body is still really quite warm and humid,

but my pants are starting to freeze.

And the key thing here is this cavity

on the side of the structure.

This is double-shelled insulation,

and this was the major breakthrough

that helped him take these giant blocks of ice that you see

and keep them cold for long periods of time.

And it was so efficient that a large block of ice like this

would actually last for four to six months

through the hottest time of the year.

Now Tudor can get ice exactly where he wants it,

and a huge new industry is born.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Ice cream, cocktails, chilled food:

America gets hooked.

Soon hundreds of thousands of people work the ice harvest.

In New York, the ice man cometh.

Nearly half the city's population keeps ice at home.

Reports of mild winters create panic,

and something extraordinary happens.

Previously, Americans had only eaten fresh food

produced on their doorstep.

Now trains chilled with ice create a food network.

Produce from the South and West

become staples of Northern meals.

ANNOUNCER: When you realize that about 1,000 food trains

bring perishable food to New York every week,

you'll understand that ice for refrigeration

is something of the first water.

We become much healthier and better nourished,

while our cities, freed from the limits

of their surrounding resources, experience rapid growth.

Cold is shaping a new America.

But what I find incredible

is how primitive our ideas about cold are at this point.

I mean, this is the middle of the 19th century, right?

It's an era of coal-powered factories and railroads

and telegraph wires connecting cities,

and yet the state of the art in cold technology

is cutting chunks of frozen water out of a lake.

Frederic Tudor's slow hunch, his crazy idea,

has become America's second biggest export after cotton.

India, the Caribbean, even Queen Victoria

has New England ice served with dinner.

But Tudor hasn't just created a global appetite for ice.

He's also created a platform for ideas about cold

which will soon trigger a chain of events

not even Tudor could have imagined.

I read this article the other week

about scientists who discovered this primitive ski

in a Swedish bog, and when they dated it,

it turned out that it was 4,000 years old.

And I thought, "Skiing is really a microcosm

of our whole relationship to cold."

[ ♪♪♪ ]

So we've literally spent eons

taking the natural cold of snow and ice

and figuring out fun ways to do things with it.

But then cold got so fun

that everybody wanted a piece of the action.

And so we started tinkering with making artificial cold.

And that's when things started to get really weird.

Okay, enough television trickery.

I'm not really in the mountains.

This is one of the world's biggest indoor ski resorts.

But it gets even crazier.

Come on, you've got to check this out.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

The modern world of cold does not get any weirder than this.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

I'm standing above the city of Dubai.

We're in the middle of the Arabian Desert.

It's about 100 degrees out, it's 8:00 a.m. in the morning,

which means that I have to take my ski gear off

because it's insane to be out here wearing this.

And here we are in this vast city in the desert,

and yet beneath me...

are skiers, ski lifts, real snow,

a toboggan run, and, get this, penguins.

Now, Ski Dubai might look like

some sort of futuristic spacecraft

that has crashed into a parking garage,

but, in fact, some of the technology

keeping this place cold is 200 years old.

I'm here in the space

between the ceiling of the indoor ski slope

and the roof of the overall structure,

and it's this really strange, a little bit creepy space.

They call it "the void."

And it's an extraordinary space,

because basically this is the primary means of insulation

that they're using here.

It's just the gas of the air

that's keeping the temperature 28 degrees Fahrenheit below me

and 110 right above me.

And what I love about this

is that the principle of using the air in this void

to keep the ski slope cool, it's something

that Frederic Tudor would have recognized in a heartbeat.

It's basically the same design that he used in his ice house.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

And down below on the slopes,

there's another 19th-century innovation

making the snow and maintaining a temperature

just below freezing: artificial cold.

So there's an entire winter wonderland

on the other side of that wall,

and yet we are in the middle of the desert;

it's 110 degrees outside.

How do you pull this off?

There what you need is a really, really big fridge.

It's the same principle as a fridge I've got in my house?

Absolutely, the refrigeration is very much the same

as the fridge in your house,

and even the way the building is constructed and designed

is very similar to a fridge.

Do you worry about the cold escaping

when people are coming in and out?

I mean, is that a big concern?

Yeah. Think of your fridge at home, right?

Every time you get an orange juice out,

you open the door, and all the cold air rushes out.

If you look at your fridge again, and we mimic Ski Dubai,

your fridge, your big American fridge,

would have a door the size of my thumb.

- Really? - And we only have three doors

leading into Ski Dubai from outside,

so we control that airflow in and out very, very well.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

This place, and the fact that I'm hanging out

in the middle of the Arabian Desert

with a bunch of penguins,

is proof of just how sophisticated

the modern use of artificial cold has become.

But the beginnings of manmade refrigeration

were far from being fun.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

It's an innovation born of suffering and war.

Like much of the south, Florida has a subtropical climate.

That means mosquitoes.

[ mosquitoes buzzing ]

And in the 1840s,

mosquitoes mean diseases like malaria are rife.

In 1841, an outbreak of yellow fever

decimates the population of northern Florida.

And in the middle of all of this death and misery,

there's this guy, Dr. John Gorrie,

who is about to start working on an idea that is so big,

it will ultimately transform all of our lives.

But the thing about it is today he's completely unknown.

What I find fascinating about Gorrie's life

is that it's a great reminder of one of the most important things

about innovation, which is that timing is everything.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Gorrie's hospital is filled with patients

burning up with fever.

I mean, just imagine what a hospital

would have been like in the American South in 1842.

Take all the advanced technology

of a modern hospital out,

and you're left basically just with beds

and patients dying in the sweltering heat.

But Gorrie thinks that if he can cool the air

around his feverish patients, he can both ease their suffering

and stop the spread of disease.

So he sets out to build a contraption to do just that.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

This is how Gorrie's design would have worked.

He's got a chimney bringing in air from above the hospital

that flows down over this giant basin.

And he would take these huge blocks of ice

and put them in the basin,

and the result would be perfectly chilled air

flows over the patients in their beds,

reducing their fevers, potentially saving their lives.

It's a brilliant idea, and it's all in the service

of Gorrie being a better physician.

[ thunder rumbles and wind whistles ]

But Florida isn't done with Gorrie yet.

Shipwrecks along Hurricane Alley

mean delayed ice shipments

from Frederic Tudor's New England,

so one day Gorrie's supply runs dry.

Now Gorrie has the crazy idea to make his own ice.

But how?

Luckily, Gorrie is living at the perfect time

to have this idea.

For all of human history,

you couldn't even conceive of making artificial cold.

But then, somehow, in the middle of the 19th century,

the idea becomes imaginable.

So how do we explain this kind of breakthrough?

I mean, it's not like there's some kind of solitary genius

who's so much more brilliant than everybody else

that they come up with the idea on their own,

and that's because

ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

We take the tools, concepts,

and scientific understanding of our time,

and then remix them into something new.

But if you don't have the right building blocks,

you can't make the breakthrough,

however brilliant you might be.

The smartest mind in the world couldn't invent a refrigerator

in the middle of the 17th century.

But by 1850, the pieces had come together.

The first thing that had to happen

seems almost comical to us now.

We had to discover that air was actually made of something,

that it wasn't just empty space between objects.

That happened in the 1600s,

when scientists used a pump to suck air from a jar

and discovered the vacuum, proving that air was made

from some mysterious invisible elements.

We then found that when air or other gases

are squashed together, they heat up,

and when they are stretched out, they cool down.

The thermometer comes along,

followed by a universal scale or two,

allowing us to measure temperature.

And now amazing machines can be built

that convert the heat from gases into a usable energy.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Gorrie brings all these ideas together

and builds America's first mechanical refrigerator,

a machine that makes ice.

And then Gorrie applies for a patent for his invention.

Listen to the language he uses to describe this thing:

"Artificial cold might better serve mankind.

Fruits and vegetables and meat will be preserved in transit

by my refrigeration system, and thereby enjoyed by all."

He completely nails the modern world of artificial cold.

The rural doctor has created a technology

that's now as ubiquitous as the light bulb.

So why isn't John Gorrie as famous as Thomas Edison?

So he's got a magical artificial ice-making machine in the South,

and one would think that would be a huge financial success.

There's a proven market for ice,

there's a machine that will do it artificially.

That's true, but the problem is

is that there was a lot that had to be done

to perfect the equipment.

John Gorrie had a basic idea, he had a vision,

he had a machine that rudimentally did it,

but it had to be perfected,

and it had to be brought in to a point

where you could afford to use the machine to make ice.

Like any new technological innovation,

Gorrie's working prototype needs development.

The problem is his manmade ice invention

hasn't exactly come along at a great time,

because this is an era dominated

by the now very powerful and ruthless natural ice baron,

Frederic Tudor.

People who were in the business

of harvesting so-called natural ice from rivers and lakes,

they saw a threat to their business

by a machine that could actually make the ice.

And of course, they were the ones

who came up with the term "artificial ice,"

in other words, fake ice.

It's not real ice.

And the thing that's interesting about it

was that the natural ice people said that,

"Well, this artificial ice could make you sick

or it could cause disease" and things like that,

and on the other hand, their natural ice was becoming

progressively more from polluted sources,

and that was causing people to get sick.

I would -- drinking pond water from, like,

a swampy pond in New England, that's not something --

I would much rather have a nice "artificial" ice.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Unable to find backers, John Gorrie dies penniless,

without selling a single machine.

But his vision of manmade refrigeration

is about to inspire a new generation of inventors.

It was an idea that's time had come.

It just needed a trigger to launch it

into the public consciousness.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

[ booms ]

That comes in the shape of the Civil War.

The Union blockades the South

to cripple the Confederate economy.

Suddenly, the Southern states have no ice.

Vital supplies were smuggled past the blockade

into the Southern states.

Blockade runners used to hide out in creeks like this one,

slipping out into the open ocean at night.

But they weren't just smuggling weapons or gunpowder;

sometimes they had an equally precious cargo:

ice-making machines.

Check this out:

this is one of the first ice-making machines ever built.

It's designed by the Frenchman Ferdinand Carré.

It can output about 400 pounds of ice in an hour.

This is one of the world's first refrigerators,

and it was smuggled all the way to the American South

from France.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

In the decades after the Civil War,

artificial refrigeration patents explode

as a network of innovators

adapt and improve on Gorrie's ideas.

In the 20 years following Gorrie's invention,

there are 54 separate refrigeration patents filed.

From now on, the slow decline of the ice trade is inevitable.

Refrigeration becomes a huge industry,

and I do mean huge,

with steam-powered monster machines

soon changing the urban landscape of America,

turning areas like New York's Tribeca neighborhood

into a hub of artificial cold.

This building, for instance, behind me.

Today it's a fancy condo, it's filled with

your Robert De Niros and your supermodels,

but 100 years ago, it was filled with eggs and milk and produce,

feeding a growing city.

It was a giant high-rise refrigerator.

But as with much new technology,

the machinery of manmade cold is destined to get smaller

as the idea of a once-ridiculed amateur inventor

becomes an essential part of the modern home.

TV ANNOUNCER: Here she comes,

the lucky woman who owns a new refrigerator!

Between 1945 and 1949,

Americans purchased 20 million

of these revolutionary machines.

Now ideas about how to fill these new refrigerators

will have an even greater impact on our lives.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Clarence Birdseye -- yes, he was a real person --

grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

But the story of his big idea doesn't start here.

In fact, he couldn't wait to get away from this place.

Birdseye had displayed

an insatiable scientific curiosity,

a streak of eccentricity, and a longing for adventure.

At 21 years old, he becomes a naturalist

with the U.S. Biological Survey,

studying animal populations on the American frontier.

He keeps a journal during this period,

and it's clear if you read it now

that he's not just interested

in scientifically assessing these critters.

He's also obsessed with eating them as well.

[ growls ]

And the weirder, the better.

I mean, listen to this passage:

"For Sunday dinner, we had horned owl.

Does that sound good?

Well, it was good, no matter how it sounds."

And he goes on to eat, over the course of his adventures,

a beaver, a hawk, mice,

gopher, rattlesnake, porcupine, chipmunk,

even skunk.

Although apparently only the front half.

And it all leads up to what he calls

the "pièce de résistance,"

"one of the most scrumptious meals I ever ate,"

which was a dish of sherry marinated lynx.

[ growls ]

Birdseye's diet may sound crazy,

but this is common-sense eating and valuable training

for the ultimate survival challenge to come.

[ dogs barking ]

[ ♪♪♪ ]

In 1916, Birdseye brings his wife and newborn son

to Labrador, a remote, frozen wilderness

in Canada's subarctic north.

It must have been quite a shock.

I mean, besides having to be dragged through the snow

by, like, a pack of maniacal dogs,

Birdseye had moved his family

to one of the most extreme environments on the planet.

[ dogs barking ]

But this is an adventure

that will change Birdseye's life, and ours, forever.

We have this cliché about innovation

that it just happens in Silicon Valley garages

and corporate research development labs,

not in an environment like this.

I mean, I've got like 30-mile-an-hour winds blowing,

ice pellets hitting me in the face.

It's hard enough just to stand upright and talk,

much less, like, have a brilliant idea.

But, in a way, it's the severity of this landscape

that's kind of the point.

Because it's here, in the frozen Canadian winter,

that Clarence Birdseye will have

the beginning of an idea that will turn out to be

one of the most transformative ones of the 20th century.

And as always with Birdseye,

this new idea will revolve around food.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Birdseye is among a handful of settlers

in a region the size of Britain

that has no modern food network --

no stores, no livestock -- and which, during the winter,

is effectively cut off from the rest of the world.

Everything people ate during the winter

was preserved and cured and stockpiled.

There was nothing fresh.

I mean, imagine trying to live the entire winter

on, like, moose jerky, right?

But like John Gorrie before him,

Birdseye is motivated by basic human concerns.

He just wants to feed good, healthy, fresh food

to his family.

[ wind whistling ]

But Birdseye is about to get some culinary inspiration

from Labrador's indigenous Inuit.

I'm standing out here on top of a frozen fjord.

I've got 600 feet of water beneath me.

We've got whiteout conditions.

I can't feel my toes anymore.

Apparently the water beneath this layer of ice

is actually shark-infested, I'm told,

so, all in all, it's a perfect day for fishing.

And Jerri Thrasher, an Inuit

from Canada's Northwest Territories,

is going to show me how...

once we've dug a hole through the ice.

Would you like to try?

Yeah, give me a chance at this.

Okay, so I just kind of hack around the side?

Yep, you want to hit the ice a little hard,

so the harder you hit, the bigger the chunks.

Right.

And the less time it'll take to make your fishing hole.

So if this ice is three feet thick,

I think it'll probably take us about three days

- to cut through this. - It would take you three days.

It would take me three days, really?

Spending time fishing with the Inuit,

Birdseye notices that they use the extreme weather

to their advantage.

They freeze their fish in the open air

so they can store it.

So how important is ice fishing

to Inuit culture?

Fresh meats and fresh fish are very important.

Fish coming out of the water in -20 or -30,

you can lay the fish on the side,

and within the hour it'll be completely frozen.

They would dig like caches under the ground

in the permafrost where it would stay cold

during the entire winter, and there they would store

their winter supply of fish and meat.

That's amazing.

So basically for thousands of years, there's frozen food

that the Inuit culture has kind of figured out how to do.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

For Birdseye, this is a revelation.

Freshly caught fish, frozen in the Arctic air,

could be kept for weeks or even months,

and once thawed and eaten, it would still taste delicious.

He wonders if freezing can help other types of food

stay fresh for longer, so he experiments with vegetables.

He begins to notice a pattern:

food frozen in the coldest depths of mid-winter

tastes better when it's thawed

than food frozen earlier or later in the season.

And that's because slower freezing

creates larger ice crystals,

which damage the cellular structure of the food.

Birdseye realized something

that the Inuits had almost instinctively understood

for thousands of years:

that if you wanted to have really fresh frozen food,

you had to have the smallest possible ice crystals,

and for that, you needed the fastest possible freezing time.

This is the point where you might expect me to say,

"And now Birdseye has an idea that changes the world

and introduces the universe of frozen convenience

that all of us enjoy today."

But actually, that's not what happened at all.

Because, you see, like Frederic Tudor,

Birdseye's hunch will take decades to finally pay off,

but unlike Tudor,

Birdseye basically just forgets about his hunch.

In 1917, Birdseye moves his family

back to the United States.

He basically stops thinking about frozen food altogether.

Back in the city, he's got all the fresh produce

he could possibly eat.

For the next few years,

Birdseye searches for a new career direction,

and he ends up at the U.S. Fisheries Association.

Here, he studies the fishing industry.

He watches how produce makes its way

from the docks to the consumer

and notices that too many fish get spoiled

and lose their value on the way to market.

So Birdseye wonders, "What's the best way

to get fish to the kitchen in the freshest way possible?"

And this is where, finally, his slow hunch resurfaces.

Birdseye decides that flash freezing is the key.

Birdseye develops a practical process

for fast freezing food quickly on a commercial scale.

It's called "multi-plate flash freezing,"

an idea upon which an entire industry will be founded.

But of course, no matter how brilliant Birdseye's idea,

he can't change the world all on his own.

Ideas don't really work that way.

For frozen food to reach today's ubiquity,

it will take a convergence of other ideas about cold.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

And that is where we meet Frederick McKinley Jones.

Jones was born in 1893,

and he was orphaned at the age of 9.

By the time he was 11, he had his first full-time job,

and by the time he was 16,

he was working in an auto repair shop.

He didn't come from the world of privilege

like Frederic Tudor,

and he didn't have the advanced degrees of Dr. John Gorrie.

But he was destined to change the world

every bit as much as those other pioneers

in the story of cold.

Jones was a natural tinkerer

with a gift for innovative ideas.

This ability would lead him to tackle

the thorny problem of food transportation.

Ice-chilled food delivery had changed the world,

but it was far from perfect.

It was always a race against time.

Freight trains had to stop at regular intervals

to replace ice from trackside ice houses.

It wasn't a perfect system,

and it was even tougher in a truck

because any delays meant melted ice and a spoiled cargo.

And so, like Birdseye before him,

Jones began to wonder if there was a better way.

Jones designed a small, durable refrigerated unit

that mounted on a truck to keep its contents chilled.

Although he lived in a time

when African-American inventors were rarely recognized

or given opportunities,

he managed to convince his white boss

to pay for its development.

It was a success.

After World War II,

he developed refrigerated containers

that could be moved from train to ship to truck,

perfecting America's food distribution network.

For nearly a century, our food networks

had relied on these two parallel systems:

the older system of natural ice

and the new technology of artificial refrigeration.

But Fred Jones' mobile refrigerated truck

marked a turning point.

It was the end of Frederic Tudor's ice trade.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

New ideas and inventions

for making things cold come together

and begin to transform the way we eat.

Freezer trucks, refrigerated warehouses,

supermarkets with freezer units,

an electrical grid powering new suburban homes

with electric refrigerators in every kitchen.

By 1944, 300,000 tons of frozen food

are being sold in America in a single year.

By the time of his death, the company founded by Jones,

Thermo King, is worth the modern equivalent

of a quarter of a billion dollars.

His maverick invention not only makes him

one of the richest black men in the country,

it also enables frozen foods

to become a part of all of our lives.

Now, flash freezing is just the beginning of the story.

Because once they get into circulation,

good ideas like this have a way

of opening up new doors of possibility.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

And today, fast and flash freezing

is shaping our world in profound ways

that even a visionary like Birdseye

could have never expected.

We freeze sperm, eggs, and embryos,

creating millions of new human lives.

So this is Eamon.

Now, tell me the story of how this guy came into the world.

Sure. Well, we were lucky enough to use IVF.

We have a 5-year-old at home who was conceived that day

and was never frozen,

and then we were lucky enough to freeze the extra embryos.

Hopefully we'll come back.

And so to store them, you have to freeze them?

Freeze them, yeah.

Two days later they froze them and, you know,

then they thawed them out, and it's like, all right,

they're still good, and like, great.

And we were able to have him implanted,

and here he is, 18 months old.

Because it's extraordinary to think -- I mean,

there are so many different scientific breakthroughs,

technological breakthroughs that make IVF possible,

but if you think about it, Eamon, without artificial cold,

without the ability to kind of flash freeze something,

- he wouldn't be here. - He wouldn't exist.

It's an extraordinary, extraordinary thing.

- We'd be a smaller family. - We're so glad it worked out!

- We're blessed. - We are very lucky.

From the idea that ice could cool a drink on a summer's day

to Clarence Birdseye's innovation,

the journey of cold helped shape how we live now.

But perhaps the biggest impact of all

would come as ideas about cold

start to define not just how we live, but where.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

In the summer of 1925, a man with a big idea

takes a seat in a packed New York movie theater.

It's the first golden age of Hollywood,

but the crowds that are there that day

are not there for the usual movie escapism.

The man with the big idea has just invented something

that will revolutionize the movies.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

The roots of this story go back to 1902,

when on a roasting hot summer's day, the same man,

a young engineer called Willis Carrier,

is called out to a Brooklyn printworks with a big problem.

The humid air inside the building

is causing the ink to smear on their prints.

So they need, somehow, a way to make the air

consistently dry.

Carrier starts trying to solve the humidity problem

by taking notes in this actual journal.

Check this out.

It's filled with all these physics equations,

so I literally have no idea what it means.

I mean, it's just amazingly detailed,

and he's doing this before computers.

I mean, this is a guy who clearly needed a spreadsheet.

But out of all this amazing work,

he comes up with a new invention,

and he calls it "an apparatus for treating air."

[ ♪♪♪ ]

It's basically a giant dehumidifier.

Air goes into a refrigerated chamber,

moisture condenses over metal coils,

and dry, cool air comes out the other end,

which is then pumped into the print rooms.

It stops the ink from smearin,

but Carrier notices something interesting:

people enjoy the cool air-conditioned air, too.

And that's how, a few years later,

Willis Carrier came to be sitting nervously

in a movie theater in New York City.

You see, Hollywood had a problem.

Nobody in their right mind

would go see a movie in the summer.

It was just too hot.

But Carrier hoped that was about to change

thanks to a prototype AC system he'd installed

in the theater's basement,

a monster machine similar to the one

sitting in the basement of this Jersey City cinema

built in 1929 to bring a new world of comfort cooling

to the audience sitting above.

So now we're in front of this massive structure.

What is this part?

Well, this is the big blower that pulls air in off the street

to be conditioned and then ventilates it out the building.

And that huge fan over there

is kind of powering the whole thing.

- That's it, yep. - That's amazing.

Well, what do you think, should we try and actually turn it on?

There's a little switch here. If you want to --

I'm going to just hide behind this pillar over here,

- because it seems very scary. - All right, you ready?

Okay, duck and cover, here we go.

[ loud thrumming ]

Oh, my God!

- Wow. - It works!

That's extraordinary.

God, I feel like a jet is about to take off.

This is from 1929, this is the original.

And it's still working.

Right now upstairs in that giant auditorium

people are beginning to feel cool.

I'm beginning to feel a little cool.

It's kind of incredible when you have a machine

that's, you know, almost 100 years old,

and it's still working.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Once the AC unit starts up, cool air is transported

aroundhe building via a series of enormous ducts...

reaching the customers

via these beautifully camouflaged grills.

You can really feel--

I mean, the air is really circulating here,

it's just kind of pouring in through this doorway.

Yeah, I think this is why they call it a house fan.

It really ventilates the entire house.

It's amazing.

I've got dust in my eye

from like the Roosevelt administration.

Carrier's idea, AC in a cinema, is revolutionary,

but what will the cinemagoers think?

Carrier takes a massive risk on this one demonstration,

even inviting Paramount Pictures' chief Adolph Zukor,

one of Hollywood's most powerful men.

Carrier stayed up all the night before

trying to get the equipment ready.

Now it was time to crank up the AC.

He wrote later about what happened:

"Final adjustments delayed us in starting up

the air-conditioning system.

From the wings we watched in dismay

as 2,000 fans fluttered.

But gradually the fans dropped into laps

as the effects of the air conditioning became evident.

We had stopped them cold

and breathed a great sigh of relief.

Afterwards, when Mr. Zukor saw us, he said tersely,

'Yes, the people are going to like it.'"

[ applause ]

[ ♪♪♪ ]

And that was the understatement of the century.

Basically you start air conditioning theaters,

and what happens to the kind of American love of cinema?

If you had stopped the average person in the street

in, say, 1900 or 1910 and said, "I have a system

where if you push a button, you'll get cool air,"

they would have thought you were joking.

It would have been science fiction.

So for people to actually enter a movie theater in the 1920s

and experience comfort cool for the first time,

it changed the whole way they thought about their environment.

All of a sudden now with modern air conditioning,

on the hottest days of the year,

people are starting to come to the movies.

In 1930, 80 million Americans go to the movies every week.

That's 65% of the entire population.

So you would say every 12 days on average,

the entire country goes to the movies.

You can't pick a better venue

to expose a great new innovation like this than the movies.

So air conditioning actually ends up

inventing the summer blockbuster?

Air conditioning and movies go hand-in-hand

throughout their entire history.

Willis Carrier's invention,

a machine for cooling air in a print shop,

has changed Hollywood.

But the idea of air conditioning

proves irresistible, and soon it will trigger

chain reactions more dramatic

than any other innovation in the story of cold.

AC is about to redraw the map of the world.

Okay, so take a look at a map of the United States

at the beginning of the 20th century.

Everyone lives in the growing and prosperous cities

of the North.

The South and the West, meanwhile,

are economic backwaters.

Towns like Phoenix and Miami are tiny.

Las Vegas in 1910 has just 937 inhabitants.

Why? Because this is the Sun Belt.

It's too hot, and no one wants to live here.

In 1951, Carrier's company

introduces an air conditioning unit that is miniaturized

and affordable for a mass market.

And that's when AC starts to go crazy.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s,

AC becomes ubiquitous in people's homes and cars

across America.

And just see what this does to where people are living.

Tucson, Arizona, grows 400% in 10 years.

Phoenix 300%.

Tampa, Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta:

populations double, triple,

and it's the same story everywhere you look.

TV ANNOUNCER: By 1960, 30,000 people will live

in Broomfield Heights, making it the fifth largest city...

Carrier's invention is circulating people

as well as air,

changing lives, changing America.

But then something even more interesting happens.

You see, people moving to the hot states are older

and tend to vote Republican,

and the growing population in the conservative South

means more electoral college votes there.

So check out what happens to the political map of America.

Between 1940 and 1980, northern states

lose an incredible 31 electoral college votes,

while the southern states gain 29, doubling the number

in California, Arizona, and Florida,

the vast majority voting Republican.

This is long-zoom history.

Less than a century after Willis Carrier

started to tinker with stopping the ink

from smearing on a page in Brooklyn,

our mastery of molecules of air and moisture

have helped put Ronald Reagan into the White House.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Today, many of the world's fastest growing cities,

like Dubai, are in hot countries.

It's the first mass migration in human history

to be made possible by a home appliance.

And all this started with a half-baked idea,

a hunch in the mind of a maverick dreamer.

When you think about inventions,

we tend to be constrained by the scale of the original idea.

So we assume that if we invent artificial cold,

our rooms will be cooler and we'll have ice cubes

in our drink on a hot summer day.

But if you tell the story of cold that way,

you miss the majesty of it.

We make our ideas, and they make us in return.

And when you look at the story from that angle,

you can't help feel that cold isn't done with us yet.

[ strumming rock tune ]

In the next episode, I'm looking at the strange

and surprising story of sound.

[ throat singing ]

From mavericks to movie stars...

She'd rather spend the night at home

reading Scientific American than going out

to some glamorous party.

these are the men and women who transformed sound...

So they're sending out a sound wave through the water,

and it's going to bounce off of me.

and change the world in ways you'd never imagine.

How We Got to Now was made possible in part by

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by contributions to your PBS station from...

[ ♪♪♪ ]

To learn more about How We Got to Now,

visit us on the web at...

How We Got to Now is available on DVD.

A companion book is also available.

To order, visit shoppbs.org, or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

Captions by LNS Captioning Portland, Oregon www.LNScaptioning.com