The Fever Physician

Working alone in the little town of Apalachicola, Dr. John Gorrie gained everlasting fame as one of the inventors of air-conditioning.

by Michael Finger
photography by Courtland William Richards

“We know of no want of mankind more urgent than the cheap means of producing an abundance of artificial cold … The discovery and invention which our correspondent proposes to apply to this object are calculated to alter and extend the face of civilization.”

So began an editorial in response to a series of articles titled “On the Prevention of Malarial Diseases” that ran from April to June 1844 in the Commercial Advertiser, the newspaper published in Apalachicola. Although the articles were written under a pseudonym, historians later concluded these columns were penned by Dr. John Gorrie, the town’s young physician. They prove that Gorrie was already working on a device—the first American machine that would produce artificial ice—to cool the rooms of  patients suffering from malaria and yellow fever. In fact, just a few weeks later, the newspaper carried another column announcing, “A powerful machine … has already been made.” Gorrie may not have profited from his invention, but his work on behalf of his patients helped set in motion a course of discovery that would reverberate far beyond this busy town on Florida’s northern coast.

Gorrie’s early history is as murky as the swamps that once surrounded Apalachicola and served as breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that caused countless deaths during the 1800s. It is generally accepted that Gorrie was born in 1802 on the island of Nevis in the West Indies and came to Charleston, South Carolina, with his family the following year. He grew up in nearby Columbia, South Carolina, and entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Fairfield, New York, at the age of twenty-three. After earning his medical degree in 1827, he first practiced in Abbeville, South Carolina. Six years later, he moved to the growing town of Apalachicola, at that time the third largest port along the Gulf Coast. Working at the U.S. Marine Hospital in town, Gorrie began treating victims of yellow fever.

Unlike malaria, which was a chronic disease, yellow fever “came in mysterious, vicious waves, killing up to 70 percent of its victims,” wrote George L. Chapel with the Apalachicola Area Historical Society. “It started with high fever, insatiable thirst, savage headaches.” The skin also would turn yellow, hence the name of the affliction, and patients frequently died within twelve hours. Throughout the 1800s, the dreaded “yellow jack” decimated communities throughout the South.

Shortly after arriving in 1833, Gorrie, whom biographer Vivian Sherlock would  describe as “soft spoken” and “a man of quiet habits” with “dark, serious eyes” and “a thoughtful expression,” took on many civic roles to supplement the meager pay of a small-town doctor. Over the years, he served as the Apalachicola postmaster, notary public, city intendant (or mayor), president of the Apalachicola branch of the Bank of Pensacola, justice of the peace, and trustee of  Trinity Episcopal Church. He also found time to marry Caroline Beman, the widowed proprietor of the town’s Florida Hotel, where Gorrie lived and later maintained his practice.

His main focus, however, was his patients, who each summer were afflicted with “malarial diseases,” which no doctor at the time could prevent, much less cure. Gorrie thought climate played a role. “Nature,” he observed, “would terminate the fevers by changing the seasons.”

Gorrie began attempting to make his patients comfortable by exploring ways of cooling the rooms of his fever victims in Apalachicola’s tropical climate. He cut a hole in the wall near the floor of his sickroom and also opened up the chimney. Then, by hanging a bucket filled with ice near the ceiling, the cooler air—being denser—moved to the floor, and the hotter air was forced out the chimney.

There was one problem. This process required ice—something not readily available in the South—and lots of it. At the time, ice was an expensive commodity, cut from frozen lakes as far away as Lake Erie, and then transported by steamer to southern cities, where it was packed in insulating sawdust and stored in warehouses.

So Gorrie decided that if he needed ice, he would make it himself and at his own expense.

He had little access to medical and scientific journals in Apalachicola, so he traveled to New York to study the work of other scientists who’d made an important discovery: Certain materials, including air and water, heat up when they are compressed and cool when they expand. Using that as the basic principle, Gorrie returned to Apalachicola and, after months of tinkering, succeeded in producing the first machine for the artificial production of ice.

Signed only “J. C. C.,” an article in the September 22, 1849, issue of Scientific American explained Gorrie’s invention in this way: “Essentially it consists of two simple agents—a force pump in which air is divested of latent heat by mechanical compression, and an engine in which the same air is made to operate expansively and, in the process, absorb from water to be frozen, the heat due to its increase in volume.” On May 6, 1851, Gorrie was granted U.S. Patent 8080 for his ice-making machine.

However, his new invention had its shortcomings. Willie McNair, curator at  the John Gorrie State Museum located in Apalachicola (which displays a model of the original machine) says, “It took about eight hours to produce an eight-by-ten-inch block of ice,” hardly enough to cool one roomful of patients, much less an entire hospital.

Gorrie, too, was well aware of its shortcomings. Determined to perfect his ice-making machine, he resigned all his civic posts in Apalachicola and, according to some accounts, even gave up his medical practice to devote his full attention to ice. He traveled to Ohio, where he had the Cincinnati Iron Works build a better-working machine, though it was still far from perfect. Short on money, he sought financial backing from a Boston banker, who died before any contract could be signed.

It didn’t help that other scientists, reading about Gorrie’s claims in the newspapers, simply refused to believe them. The New York Globe openly mocked him, perhaps influenced by opposition from the northern ice companies that would see their profits disappear in the face of an ice-making machine. It called him a “crank down in Apalachicola, Florida,” who thinks he can make ice by his machine “as good as God Almighty.”

On June 29, 1855, Gorrie died of natural causes, lamenting that his hard work “had been found in advance of the wants of the country.” Part of the lore surrounding his travails tells that he was humiliated and brokenhearted. Over the years, other inventors took up where he left off. In 1902, Willis Carrier, an engineer in Buffalo, New York, finally perfected a device that successfully cooled the air and removed the humidity from it—the world’s first true “air conditioner.”

Gorrie would achieve posthumous fame, however. A square in Apalachicola carries his name, as does the state museum there. In 1893, the Journal of the American Medical Association noted “the distinction he deserves as a scientific student of medical problems, working for the benefit of his patients and devising a great sanitary invention calculated to be of ever-increasing benefit to humanity.” In 1899, the Southern Ice Exchange, acknowledging the advances Gorrie made to the ice industry, constructed an impressive monument in Apalachicola. Two Florida high schools—in Jacksonville and Tampa—are named after him. Farther away, a marble statue of Gorrie, unveiled in 1914, stands as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.—he is one of only two Floridians so honored.

To this day, scholars continue to debate the significance of Gorrie’s discoveries.

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology’s “Exploring Florida” Web  site states, “Florida would not be what it is today without air conditioning. Dr. John Gorrie is considered the father of air-conditioning and refrigeration ... and a humanitarian.” In 1972, biographer Raymond Becker published John Gorrie, M.D.: Father of Air Conditioning and Mechanical Refrigeration.

Twenty years earlier, however, Margaret Ingels bestowed that same title on someone else, calling her book Willis Haviland Carrier: Father of Air Conditioning. And Ray Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida and an expert on the role of air-conditioning in southern culture, says, “Gorrie was among the first to develop an ice-making machine, but Willis Carrier is really the father of air-conditioning as we know it. Gorrie is a good-hearted soul who tried to make his patients feel better, but that was only one step of many toward real air-conditioning.”

Gorrie or Carrier? Who deserves the credit for bringing cool air into theaters, stores, and homes across the country? Perhaps they both do.

Bern Nagengast, past chairman of the historical committee of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, may have the right idea: “If Willis Carrier is indeed the father of air-conditioning, then John Gorrie is certainly the grandfather.”