Starred review from June 8, 2015
Jackson (Physics: An Illustrated History of the Foundations of Science) packs an amazing amount of information into this fascinating history of humanity’s ongoing quest for refrigeration. While readers might guess that humans’ first efforts to preserve food through cold occurred with the 19th-century icebox or the 20th-century refrigerator, that’s woefully incorrect. Jackson describes elaborate efforts to preserve ice and use it as a food preservative in ancient Mesopotamia and Persia, as early as 1775 BCE. He works his way forward through the centuries, chronicling first a growing understanding of just what “cold” actually is, and then the ways and means that individuals began to profit from it. Jackson makes it clear that “it’s the fridge that makes the modern city” and that refrigeration makes possible everything from nitrogen fertilizers to the bizarre Bose-Einstein condensate, a fifth state of matter only possible at billionths of a degree above absolute zero. He also looks to the future for further advances that frigidity may make possible, noting that development of a quantum computer will almost certainly depend on scientists’ ability to wield cold and seeing the Bose-Einstein condensate as a potential component of teleportation engineering. Jackson magnificently shows that science is “cool.”
July 1, 2015
Is the refrigerator humankind's greatest invention? Most would balk at such a claim, but Jackson makes a compelling case for how this domestic appliance is our signature achievement. Beginning with Mesopotamian icehouses in 1775 BCE, Jackson traces the failed experiments and thermodynamic discoveries that allowed the fridge to become a fixture in most homes today. Scientific concepts take center stage, with Jackson presenting less of a singular historical narrative and more of an anecdotal retelling of how experts through the ages have attempted to understand the elemental laws that govern our universe and then to allow for the possibility of manipulating temperature. Aristotle, Fahrenheit, Joule, and many lesser-known scientists make appearances, as do the early icebox and refrigeration prospectors who created a global market for preserving food through controlled chilling as opposed to salting, pickling, or canning. Jackson's spirited explanations of centuries-old scientific experiments relating to the transmutation of gases into water, finding absolute zero, and identifying chemical elementsto name a fewwill be most appreciated by readers with a strong interest in the physical sciences.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
Starred review from June 1, 2015
The lively history of refrigeration from British science writer Jackson (Mathematics: An Illustrated History of Numbers, 2012, etc.). In this brightly illuminating narrative about keeping things cold, the author begins with Egyptians and Syrians and their sweating amphorae, as well as the ice pits of the ancient Persians. Humans have conjured and commanded heat and light for 100 millennia, but to have true control over cold, especially its creation, has been a matter of the past 100 years or so. Jackson builds the story brick by brick, from those early cooling systems through the rogues, wizards, alchemists, and scientists who dedicated their work to the cooling trade. It is a marvelous, inventive lot, makers of poisonous iced drinks and supercooled water baths. The author also looks into those who first combined gases to make water and those who oversaw the design of icehouses and their miniaturization into iceboxes. The cast of important personages is huge. On one page, chosen at random, readers encounter Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, Plutarch, and Descartes, all engaged in a lively discourse about the cause of cold. Jackson is aware of the need for entertainment-"As all good mysteries should, the story of how cold came under the purview of science begins with a poisoning"-and his graceful way with hard science is impressive. In his hands, such thorny questions as, "Does squeezing a gas into a smaller volume make it hotter or only raise its pressure?" become truly engrossing. Throughout, the author explores a host of fascinating particulars, including the role of cooling in the Higgs boson cloud chamber, quantum computing, and Clarence Birdseye's fateful trip to Labrador, where he learned flash freezing from the Inuits. And today's "cold chain," the "temperature-controlled network that transports perishable foods"-is simply a wonder. There's much to wonder at in Jackson's captivating book.
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