Yet, however much we may celebrate the start-up culture of today’s tech world, essential innovations don’t always come out of private-sector exploration. New ideas are not always motivated, like Tudor’s, by dreams of “fortunes larger than we shall know what to do with.” The art of human invention has more than one muse. While the ice trade began with a young man’s dream of untold riches, the story of artificial cold began with a more urgent and humanitarian need: a doctor trying to keep his patients alive.
