puzzling, almost anachronistic, about Tudor’s innovation. This was the middle of the nineteenth century, after all, an era of coal-powered factories, with railroads and telegraph wires connecting massive cities. And yet the state of the art in cold technology was still entirely based on cutting chunks of frozen water out of a lake. Humans had been experimenting with the technology of heat for at least a hundred thousand years, since the mastery of fire—arguably Homo sapiens’ first innovation. But the opposite end of the thermal spectrum was much more challenging. A century into the industrial
...more
