Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (3 page)

A source for those experiments was one of the most popular "books of secrets" of the age, Giambattista della Porta's
Natural Magic,
first published in Italy in 1558 and enlarged—as well as translated into virtually every other European language—in 1589. Della Porta was one of the most famous men in Italy, a friend of German astronomer Johannes Kepler and Galileo, a man so learned in the ways of nature that he was expected at any moment to discover the philosophers' stone. Jailed by the Inquisition for his magic, he continued to write about it. In
Natural Magic,
following sections treating alchemy, invisible writing, the making of cosmetics, gardening, and the accumulation of household goods, della Porta appended a final miscellany, "The Chaos," in which he mentioned mixing snow and nitre to produce a "mighty cold" that was twice as cold as either substance—cold enough to make ice.

With these hints, and some technology of the era, we can finally reconstruct how Drebbel probably accomplished his feat.

At an early hour of the morning, Drebbel and his assistants brought into Westminster Abbey long, watertight troughs and broad, low vats and placed them alongside the walls and in the midst of the limited part of the abbey that they planned to cool, most likely that inner, narrow transept near the portal through which the king and courtiers would enter, an area they knew would be in shade most of the day and especially at that hour. They also brought in snow, which would have been available from those among the nobility who had on their estates underground snow pits to keep un-melted snow and ice in storage after the winter, to use for cooling drinks in summer. Drebbel filled the troughs and vats partway with water, the coolest he could find, which he no doubt had fetched directly from the nearby Thames. For several hours, he infused nitre, salt, and snow into the water, creating ice crystals and a mixture whose temperature—if he could have measured the temperature, which he could not, since no thermometers capable of such accuracy yet existed—was actually reduced
below
the freezing point of water, as della Porta had guessed. Some of the troughs were metal, and the freezing mixture chilled the metal, which aided the refrigerating process by keeping the contents of the troughs cold.

More to the point of the exercise, the freezing mixture cooled the air directly above the troughs and vats. In Drebbel's
Elements
treatise he referred to the frequently observed phenomenon of heated air rising, and he seems also to have understood that cool air is heavier than warm air and tends to stay close to the ground. Now he used this principle to generate a mass of cool air that displaced warmer air in the cathedral up in the direction of the capacious ceiling. He did not need to force the warm air to rise very far—just 10 feet high or so, until it was above the height of the king and courtiers. And he did not need to make the space very cold—a decrease in temperature from, say, 85° to 65°F would have proved sufficient to chill an overheated king. This cooling Drebbel accomplished over the course of several hours, perhaps aiding the process by fanning the cool air so that remaining pockets of warm air thoroughly dispersed, before the court party arrived and experienced the shock of the cold.

I
N THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
, the capital cities of Europe and England were enlarging in size and population relatively slowly, in part because of society's limited ability to provide food to locations that could not grow enough to feed their own residents. A quarter of the grains, fruits, and vegetables would rot in the fields before being harvested, and eggs and milk would quickly spoil. If the destination of the crops or dairy products was more than a day's wagon ride from the farm, another fraction might become inedible during transport. Evidence that farmers knew that cold retards spoilage comes from their general practice of bringing foodstuffs to the city at night, to take advantage of lower evening temperatures. At city markets, animals used for food were generally killed only after customers had bought them, or no more than a few hours before sale, because uncooked or untreated flesh would not remain edible for long. To hold the live animals, butchers required larger premises than other shopkeepers, which raised the cost of their meat.

Owing in large measure to the absence of refrigeration, fresh meats, fish, milk, fruits, and vegetables made up a lower percentage of the diet than bread, pickled vegetables, cheeses, and preserved meats. A great deal of ingenuity went into preserving by pickling in salt or sugar, smoking, drying, or excluding air by submerging foods in oil, all of which substantially altered the character and taste of produce or meat. Vegetables and fruits could not be obtained out of season, except at inordinate cost or under special circumstances, as when a king would dispatch a ship to Morocco to bring back oranges in winter.

In the Temperate Zone, even when ice was available, it was not extensively used for food preservation, the nobility employing their ice facilities mainly to provide chips to cool their wine in 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 for income, he started a brewery and alehouse near London Bridge, attracting attention with an underwater contraption that appeared to be a monster. Drebbel died in 1633, and the secrets of his marvelous devices perished with him.

For Francis Bacon, the glory of arriving at probability became the touchstone of his later life. Shorn of his political responsibilities, he turned his mind again toward natural science, writing several seminal works during his last five years of life, from 1621 to 1626. It was in these natural science books, perhaps more than in his earlier political tracts, that Bacon did what Robert Hooke later admired: he countered "the receiv'd philosophy" and in so doing made possible many subsequent steps in science, in particular those leading to the greater understanding of the cold that this book chronicles.

The most formidable barrier to comprehending cold was established belief, and Bacon's intellectual leadership was crucial to piercing this barrier. His lifelong aim was to be "like a bell-ringer, which is first up to call others to church." Whether exampled by the parish of law or the parish of natural philosophy, for Bacon the goal was "the study of Truth," pursued through the "desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order." He applied these virtues in the service of the inductive method, the making of proper observations and experiments as a basis for drawing conclusions about the workings of the natural world. His
Instauratio Magna
announced a "trial" of the "commerce" or correspondence between what humankind believed it knew about the natural world and the true "nature of things," because the goal of bringing the two into congruence was "more precious than anything on earth." To properly contemplate the natural world, he contended, required the rejection of error-riddled previous natural philosophies, particularly that of Aristotle, whose natural philosophy Bacon thought overly based on deductive logic. "I seem to have my conversation among the ancients more than among those with whom I live," Bacon explained in a letter to a friend in Paris, the chemist Isaac Casaubon.

In Aristotle's view, if one knew the significant "facts" about nature—such as that all things were combinations of the four elements, air, fire, earth, and water—one could deduce whatever humanity needed to know about the world. Aristotle's seventeenth-century followers refused to consider as valid the contemporary experiments investigating or manipulating nature to determine previously hidden properties and causes. Bacon supported such experiments, arguing that "nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art [forced experimentation] than when left to herself," since nature was like Proteus, the mythical creature who could conceal his identity in myriad shapes until bound in chains, whereupon his true identity was revealed. While Bacon's main target was Aristotle, he also sought to refute artificers such as Drebbel, whose dabblings were based on inconsistent observations and on an absence of rigorous, documented experimentation. "My great desire is to draw the sciences out of their hiding-places into the light," Bacon also told Casaubon. The public considered things to be "marvelous" only so long as their causes remained unknown, he wrote, but "an explanation of the causes removes the marvel," and the business of science must be to identify and explain those causes.

For the mind to pursue a better understanding of nature, Bacon believed that it must first be purged of preconceptions. Identifying four "idols" of preconception, he railed against them as though he were Jehovah warning his chosen people against the worship of false gods. These were the Idols of the Theatre, a reliance on received philosophical systems, which had perverted the rule of demonstration—that was Aristotle's failing; the Idols of the Tribe, which distorted truth by stressing the correctness of one's own tribe's ideas over those of others; the Idols of the Cave, which prevented individuals from seeing their own defects (principally produced by poor education), so that they looked for sciences "in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world"; and the Idols of the Marketplace, which used words to deceive the mind, to trick it into thinking that night was day. All these stood in the way of proper research on the cold.

As antidote to the Idols, a year before his death, Bacon put aside other writings to inscribe, almost in one sitting, a fable of the scientific ivory tower of the future.
The New Atlantis
was Bensalem, a city on a tropical island that was an unmistakable contrast to Augustine's faith-based "city on a hill." The "lanthorn" (lantern) of this civilization was Salomon's House, run by an "Order ... dedicated to the study of the Works and Creatures of God," an institution alternatively known as the College of the Six Days' Work. The college was organized along the lines of houses of higher learning that Bacon had wished to establish in England, but its laboratories and the attempts of the Bensalemites to command nature bore a distinct resemblance to the facilities and constructions of Cornelis Drebbel and to those of Salomon de Caus, who had designed fantastic gardens for King James.