Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold Read online

  Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold

  Tom Shachtman

  * * *

  A Mariner Book

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON • NEW YORK

  * * *

  First Mariner Books edition 2000

  Copyright © 1999 by Tom Shachtman

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York,

  New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shachtman, Tom, date.

  Absolute zero and the conquest of cold / Tom

  Shachtman.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 0-395-93888-0

  ISBN 0-618-08239-5 (pbk.)

  1. Low temperature research. I. Title.

  QC278.S48 1999

  536'.56—dc21 99-33305 CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  * * *

  For Mel Berger

  * * *

  Contents

  1. Winter in Summer [>]

  2. Exploring the Frontiers [>]

  3. Battle of the Thermometers [>]

  4. Adventures in the Ice Trade [>]

  5. The Confraternity of the Overlooked [>]

  6. Through Heat to Cold [>]

  7. Of Explosions and Mysterious Mists [>]

  8. Painting the Map of Frigor [>]

  9. Rare and Common Gases [>]

  10. The Fifth Step [>]

  11. A Sudden and Profound Disappearance [>]

  12. Three Puzzles and a Solution [>]

  13. Mastery of the Cold [>]

  Acknowledgments [>]

  Notes [>]

  Index [>]

  * * *

  1. Winter in Summer

  KING JAMES I OF ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND chose a very warm day in the summer of 1620 for Cornelis Drebbel's newest demonstration and decreed that it be held in the Great Hall of Westminster Abbey. Drebbel had promised to delight the king by making the atmosphere of some building cold enough in summer to mimic the dead of winter, and by choosing the Great Hall the king gave him an enormous challenge, the largest interior space in the British Isles, 332 feet from one end to the other and 102 feet from the floor to the golden bosses of its vaulted white ceiling.

  In 1620 most people considered the likelihood of reversing the seasons inside a building impossible, and many deemed it sacrilege, an attempt to contravene the natural order, to twist the configuration of the world established by God. Early-seventeenth-century Britons and Europeans construed cold only as a facet of nature in winter. Some believed cold had an origin point, far to the north; the most fanciful maps represented Thule, a near-mythical island thought to exist six days' sailing north of the northern end of Britain and supposedly visited only once, by Pytheas in the fourth century B.C.— an unexplored, unknown country of permanent cold.

  Not until the end of the nineteenth century would a true locus of the cold become a more real destination, as Victorian scientists tried to reach absolute zero, a point they sometimes called "Ultima Thule." Likening themselves to contemporary explorers of the uncharted Arctic and Antarctic regions, these laboratory scientists sought a goal so intense, so horrific, yet so marvelous in its ability to transform all matter that in comparison ice was warm.

  In the early seventeenth century, even ordinary winter cold was forbidding enough that the imagination failed when trying to grapple with it. "Natural philosophers" could conceive technological feats that would not be accomplished until hundreds of years later—heavier-than-air flight, ultrarapid ground transportation, the prolongation of life through better medicines, even the construction of skyscrapers and the use of robots—but not a single human being envisioned a society able to utilize intense cold to advantage. Perhaps this was because while the sources of heat were obvious—the sun, the crackle of a fire, the life force of animals and human beings—cold was a mystery without an obvious source, a chill associated with death, inexplicable, too fearsome to investigate.

  Abhorrence of cold was reflected in only sporadic use made of natural refrigeration, an omission that permitted a large percentage of harvested grains, meats, dairy products, vegetables, fruits, and fish to spoil or rot before humans could eat them. And since natural refrigeration was so underutilized, producing refrigeration by artificial means was considered a preposterous idea. No fabulist in 1620 could conceive that there could ever be a connection between artificial cold and improving the effectiveness of medicine, transportation, or communications, or that mastery of the cold might one day extend the range of humanity over the surface of the earth, the sky, and the sea and increase the comfort and efficiency of human lives.

  How did water become snow in the heavens or ice on the earth? What formed the snowflakes? Why was ice so slippery? In 1620 these and dozens of other age-old, obvious questions about the cold were considered not only unanswerable but beyond the reach of investigation. Cold could neither be measured, nor described as other than the absence of heat, nor created when it was not already present—except, perhaps, by a magician.

  On that summer day when the king and his party approached Westminster Abbey—which was in need of some repair, the fabrics torn, the buttresses on the northwest side crumbling in places—James Stuart was getting on in years, having recently passed his fifty-fourth birthday. In middle age he was still short, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested, but his hair, once dark, had thinned to a light brown, and the rickets that had affected his growth in youth had lately made his gait more uneven and erratic, requiring him as he walked to lean on a companion's shoulder or arm. He suffered from sudden attacks of abdominal pain, rheumatism, spasms in his limbs, and melancholy. After the loss of his queen, Anne of Denmark, in 1619, he had begun to do uncharacteristic things: even though the king and queen had been estranged and had lived separately for years, James honored Anne in death by siting her sepulcher in Westminster, near the last resting place of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. Very few sepulchers or honorary statues decorated the abbey just then.

  Summer played havoc with the king's delicate skin, described as "soft as taffeta sarsnet," thin, fragile, and subject to frequent outbreaks of itching and to sweating, which exacerbated the itches. He also suffered from a sensitivity to sunlight so severe that undue exposure to the sun overheated him to the point of danger. His susceptibility to heat was worsened by the thick clothing he habitually wore and the doublets specially quilted to resist knife thrusts, an augmentation deemed necessary after several assassination attempts against him. "Look not to find the softness of a down pillow in a crown," the king had written earlier that year, in a small book of meditations on the biblical verse about Jesus crowned with thorns, "but remember that it is a thorny piece of stuff and full of continual cares."

  Aside from obtaining relief from the heat, James's interest in the coming demonstration derived from his lifelong obsession with witchcraft and unnatural matters, given fullest flower in his book Demonologie, published in 1597. In 1605, two years after James had ascended to the throne of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, his fascination with the occult and his continual search for entertainment led him to accede to an entreaty for patronage by the Dutchman Cornelis Drebbel. James installed Drebbel and his family, with room and board and a grant for expenses, in a suite at Eltham Palace so that Drebbel could set up a
laboratory and manufacture, for the particular delight of James's son Henry, such devices as a "perpetual-motion" apparatus, a self-regulating oven, a magic lantern, and a thunder-and-lightning machine.

  That Drebbel billed himself to James as a magician, not a scientist, shines through in a letter the Dutchman sent home in 1608, regarding his magic-lantern display:

  I take my stand in a room and obviously no one is with me. First I change the appearance of my clothing.... I am clad first in black velvet, and in a second, as fast as a man can think, I am clad in green velvet, in red velvet, changing myself into all the colors of the world ... and I present myself as a king, adorned in diamonds, and all sorts of precious stones, and then in a moment become a beggar, all my clothes in rags.

  In front of his audience, Drebbel appeared to change into a lion, a bird, a tree with trembling leaves; he summoned ghosts, first the menacing kind, then heroic spirits such as Richard the Lionhearted. Given Drebbel's apparent ability to produce thunder and lightning at will, and to change shapes, it was no wonder that some in his audience deemed him godlike.

  The precise date of Drebbel's 1620 demonstration of the power of cold, the identities of those present at it, and the efficacy of the cooling went unreported by eyewitnesses. We have only secondhand accounts of it. But reasoned guesses based on other known information may shed additional light on the event. It probably occurred after July 12, the installation date of John Williams as dean of the abbey, replacing a long-serving, more conservative dean. Williams of Salisbury was a progressive of sorts and more likely than his predecessor to have acquiesced to Drebbel's display in the hallowed abbey. Moreover, he had been chosen as dean by George Villiers, then the marquis of Buckingham, King James's last and most influential homosexual lover. Buckingham was likely to have been in the small crowd that day; he and the king shared a fondness for magic, alchemy, and surprising mechanical apparatuses. To arrange his own entertainments, Buckingham employed on his estate a young man from Antwerp named Gerbier, who in all probability was likewise in attendance at Westminster, perhaps as an assistant to Drebbel; two years earlier, Gerbier had praised Drebbel in an elegy on the death of Drebbel's brother-in-law, which suggests a working relationship between the Dutch expatriates. Other guests may have been the astrologer and crystal gazer John Lambe, whose influence at court was considerable, and Salomon de Caus, maker of fantastic fountains and spectacular gardens, who had earlier worked alongside Drebbel in the royal service. Assisting Drebbel were, in all likelihood, Abraham and Jacob Kuffler, Dutch brothers who had come to England that year, begun apprenticeships with him, and concocted a scheme in which one or the other would marry Drebbel's daughter and thereby become privy to his marvelous secrets.

  So: Probably in the afternoon, when the heat of the day was at its height, and between one of the seven daily sessions of monks' devotions, the royal party entered the abbey, presumably through a side, door to the north portal—opening the great north-portal doors would have spoiled everything—and stood in the shadowed edifice, to be welcomed by one of the most mysterious men of his time. Many in England believed, with Ben Jonson, that Drebbel was a mountebank, a charlatan, and possibly a necromancer. Some in Holland called Drebbel pochans or grote ezel, "braggart" or "big jackass," but there were as many others, in both countries, who respected Drebbel as an inventive genius because he had astonished them with some marvelous devices.

  Born at Alkmaar in the north of Holland in 1572 to a landowning family, Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel had little formal schooling. For many years he remained unable to read or write in Latin or English, and even after he had taught himself both languages, he continued to despise books and wrote little. In his teens he apprenticed in nearby Haarlem to Hendrik Goltzius, an engraver who dabbled in alchemy, and later married Goltzius's sister. He also evidently learned some technical matters from two Haarlem brothers who later became well known for innovations in mathematics and optics. In 1598 Drebbel was awarded patents for a water-supply system and for a form of self-winding and self-regulating clockworks. In 1604 he published On the Nature of the Elements, a short treatise confabulating alchemy, pious thoughts, and speculation about the interpenetration of the four elements—earth, fire, air, and water. In 1605 Drebbel wrote to James of England, promising him the greatest invention ever seen, a perpetuum mobile, a perpetual-motion machine, and dedicating to the king the English edition of his book on the elements.

  The device Drebbel made at Eltham did not produce perpetual motion, of course, since that is impossible, but according to the contemporary account of Thomas Tymme, a professor of divinity who thought it wondrous, this was a clock with a globe, girdled with a crystal belt in which water was contained, accompanied by various indicators that told the day, month, year, zodiac sign of the month, phases of the moon, and rise and fall of the tides. In Tymme's eyes, Drebbel's machine reflected the perpetual movement of the universe, set in motion by the Creator. Tymme reported in a book that when King James had seemed unwilling to believe in its perpetual motion, Drebbel, that "cunning Bezaleel, in secret manner disclosed to his maiestie the secret, whereupon he applauded the rare invention." Though Tymme said the machine was operated by "a fierie spirit, out of the mineral matter," most likely it was powered either by variations in atmospheric air pressure or by the expansion and contraction of heated and cooled air.

  By 1610 the fame of "the philosopher of Alkmaar" had reached the court of Rudolf II, emperor of Bohemia, who invited Drebbel and his family to Prague, where Drebbel would have opportunity to replace the former wizard of the castle, the noted English alchemist Dr. John Dee. Rudolf had earlier lured Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe to the castle at Hradschin, but by this era the emperor had gone beyond such true scientists and was neglecting the affairs of state to work alongside his invited artificers in an effort to find the elusive philosophers' stone, a substance that alchemists believed would transmute base metal into gold. Drebbel's adventure in Prague ended in disaster: Rudolf died in 1612 and his successor imprisoned the Dutchman, either for his loyalty to the wrong faction or for his alleged involvement in a scheme to embezzle money and jewels. Drebbel wrote an impassioned letter to King James in 1613, promising not only a new and improved self-regulating clockwork but also "an instrument by which letters can be read at a distance of an English mile" as well as an elaborate fountain featuring curtains and doors that opened at the touch of the sun, water flowing on cue, and music playing automatically on small frameless keyboards, while "Neptune would appear from a grotto of rocks accompanied by Tritons and sea-goddesses." The king forthwith sent Drebbel instructions to return to England and money for the journey.

  Drebbel made that fountain for King James, along with a camera obscura and a crude telescope. As time went on, pressure grew on him to continue to produce magically ingenious if not miraculous devices in exchange for his supper, especially after 1618, when circumstances combined to spur James to submit to a new regime of austerity and curb his prodigious household spending.

  In 1620 Cornelis Drebbel was forty-eight, and although his beard had turned gray he was still the "fair and handsome man ... of gentle manners" that a visiting courtier had described years earlier; the Dutch poet and scientist Constantijn Huygens, a recent acquaintance, thought he looked like a "Dutch farmer" but one full of "learned talk ... reminiscent of the sages of Samos and Sicily." Drebbel's genteel reputation was often contrasted with that of his wife, Sophia, who according to another account spent all of Drebbel's income "on the entertainment of sundry lovers." Huygens's parents warned him against associating with this "magician" and "sorcerer"—but still asked their son to find out about lens-grinding techniques from him.

  At the time of the cold demonstration, according to Drebbel's assistants, the inventor lived "like a philosopher," oblivious to fashion, despising the world and especially its great men, caring for naught but his work, willing to talk only to those who shared his fondness for tobacco, often neglecting to eat because he was lost in scienti
fic thought. These were the circumstances that led him to devise a triumph of man over nature, the reversal of the seasons, the creation of winter in summer.

  When the king and his followers entered the abbey that summer day, probably through a door beneath the great rose stained-glass window, they were likely ushered to a section near the center, the sacrarium, a relatively narrow and shorter enclosure within the larger hall. There the air was, as Drebbel had promised, quite cool. All would have felt the chill to one degree or another. Guests would have looked askance at certain troughs and other devices they could not fathom, placed near the bases of the walls, and perhaps for guidance up to the white ceiling, partially blackened with soot from the tens of thousands of candles burned in the chamber over the centuries. Shortly, because of James's overheated condition and near-continual sweating, the king began to shiver and he retreated outside, followed by the rest of his party. The demonstration was a success.

  How did Drebbel do it? Since he left no written description, and the few accounts of the event are secondhand, answering the question requires some lateral analyses. Years before the incident at Westminster Abbey, the engineer and dramatist Giambattista della Porta had produced ice fantasy gardens, intricate ice sculptures, and iced drinks for Medici banquets in Florence; the excited reports by the nobility about these feats spread through Europe and can be found today in letters and memoirs. Of the more reliable reporters of Drebbels's feat, only Francis Bacon made reference in a 1620 book to "the late experiment of artificiall freezing" at Westminster, so there is a decided lack of detail about the demonstration of mechanical air conditioning, though it was stark evidence that people could exert mastery over a condition of nature.

  The lack of notice was consistent with a general failure to take Drebbel's remarkable demonstration seriously. To contemporaries, this must have seemed just another piece of magic at a time when the elite of society were struggling to free themselves from a fascination with the more-than-natural that had held the world in thrall for a thousand years. Magic and "natural science" then coexisted uneasily, and it was far from certain that science would eventually prevail. Drebbel's "experiment" may also have failed to attract more attention because of its lack of immediate practical application.