Outside of his office though, people saw no practical need for this achievement. It wasn’t until the pipes on Gorrie’s machine unexpectedly froze and began to develop ice that he found a new opportunity. Still, this accomplishment was lampooned as sacrilege in The New York Globe: “There is Dr. Gorrie, a crank ... that thinks he can make ice by his machine as good as God Almighty.”

The use of ice and snow to chill drinks or to help cool a room was nothing new. In the 17th century, the inventor Cornelius Drebbel used snow that had been stored underground during the summer to perform an act he called “turning summer into winter.” In his book Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman speculates that Drebbel achieved his effect by mixing snow with water, salt, and potassium nitrate, which formed ice crystals and significantly cooled the space. King James, who invited Drebbel to demonstrate his innovation, reportedly ran from the demonstration in Westminster Abbey, shivering.

Ice would be used two centuries later to cool another man in power, U.S. President James A. Garfield. On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau fired two shots from his revolver into Garfield’s back. The aftermath inspired naval engineers to develop a method to keep a president cool, as he slowly died that summer.

The astronomer Simon Newcomb oversaw development of the apparatus that struggled to chill Garfield’s sickroom. Newcomb rigged together an engine connected to pipes that powered a fan to blow over a giant bucket of ice. In written reports, Newcomb explained that his apparatus held “some six tons [of ice] in all, through which the air might pass in one direction and return in the other.” The device lowered the room’s temperature from 95 to 75 degrees—and ate up hundreds of pounds of ice an hour.

As news of Newcomb’s machine slowly grabbed the public interest, distrust of cooling the air began to wane. Inventors developed fanciful schemes to beat the heat. One believed he could take a balloon connected to a fire hydrant and a hose and create personal rainstorms. Another came up with the idea of towers with carbon dioxide bombs at the top that would explode above a neighborhood and cool the air upon detonation. Some of these curiosities managed to win patents, but few proved useful in practice.

* * *

Two decades after Garfield’s death, Willis Carrier coined the term “air-conditioning.” Although it wasn’t an overnight sensation, Carrier’s breakthrough came in July 1902, when he designed his Apparatus for Treating Air, first installed in the Sackett Williams Publishing building in Brooklyn, New York. The device blew air over tubes containing a coolant. Its purpose was to reduce humidity more than to reduce air temperature; excess water in the air warped the publishing house’s paper.

In 1899, Alfred R. Wolff had preceded Carrier with an air-cooling device, installed in the dissecting room of Cornell Medical College in New York City. Later, the same year Carrier installed his first apparatus in Brooklyn, Wolff placed his machine at the New York Stock Exchange. Instead of keeping cadavers fresh for study, it brought comfort to the horde of men at work.