Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold Read Online Free Page A

summer, much as the ancient Romans had done. Seventeenth-century technology for utilizing cold had not advanced one whit over that of ancient times. Pliny ascribed to Emperor Nero the invention of the ice bucket to chill wines, designed to eliminate the need to drink wine diluted by ice that had been stored in straw and cloth. Zimrilim, ruler of the Mari kingdom in northwest Iraq around 1700 B.C., built a
bit shuripin,
or icehouse, near his capital on the banks of the Euphrates. In China, the maintenance of icehouses for the preservation of fruits and vegetables dates to the seventh century B.C.; a book about food written during the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618–907) referred to practices begun during the Eastern Chou dynasty (770–256 B.C.), when an "ice-service" staff of ninety-four people performed the tasks of chilling everything from wine to corpses. In the fourth century A.D., the brother of the Japanese emperor Nintoku offered him ice from a mountain, a gift so charming that the emperor soon designated the first of June as the Day of Ice, on which civil and military officials were invited to his palace and were offered chips, in a ceremony called the Imperial Gift of Ice.
    Night cooling by evaporation of water and heat radiation had been perfected by the peoples of Egypt and India, and several ancient cultures had partially investigated the ability of salts to lower the freezing temperature of water. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans had figured out that previously boiled water will cool more rapidly than unboiled water, but they did not know why; boiling rids the water of carbon dioxide and other gases that otherwise retard the lowering of water temperature, an explanation the Greeks and Romans were unable to reach or understand.
    Progress in the use of cold had been held back by a dearth of basic knowledge about its physics and chemistry. The advance of such knowledge in turn depended on social change, which after a thousand years of stasis had become the order of the day in the seventeenth century. Partly owing to the Protestant challenge to Catholicism, partly to the discovery of the Americas, many thinkers embraced the radical notion that there was more to the world, and to knowledge, than had previously been believed.
    This was no minor shift in emphasis but a sea change in society, writes historian of ideas Barbara Shapiro, in which the practitioners of law, religion, and science all became "more sensitive to issues relating to evidence and proof.... Experience, conjecture, and opinion, which once had little or no role in philosophy or physics, and probability, belief, and credibility ... now became relevant and even crucial categories for natural scientists and philosophers." Christiaan Huygens, the mathematically gifted son of Constantijn and the inventor of the pendulum clock, expressed the new understanding: "'Tis a Glory to arrive at Probability.... But there are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our judgment."

    Cornelis Drebbel cared little for the glory of probability; he wanted to make a living. After demonstrating his power over the cold at Westminster, he made no further public displays of low temperatures, perhaps because he garnered no encouragement for them, in the form of either honor or money. The submarine demonstration did bring him employment, though, and after the death of King James in 1625, Drebbel worked with the military, helping to manufacture explosives, which he took into battle in several Buckinghamled naval expeditions against France. During these forays, he was to be paid at the high rate of £150 a month to set fire to the enemy. The expeditions failed, and Drebbel was unable to collect his pay for the last one. He tried in vain to revive a scheme to distribute heat to the houses of London via underground pipes, and he was part of an unsuccessful attempt to drain fens to make arable land. Desperate