About this item
The refrigerator may seem mundane nowadays, but it is one of the wonders of twentieth-century science--lifesaver, food preserver, social liberator. Part historical narrative, part scientific decoder, Chilled looks at early efforts to harness the cold at the ice pits of Persia (Iranians still call their fridges the "ice pit") and ice harvests on the Regents Canal. As people learned more about what cold actually was, scientists invented machines for producing it on demand. The discovery of refrigeration and its applications features a cast of characters that includes the Ice King of Boston, Galileo, Francis Bacon, an expert on gnomes, a magician who chilled a cathedral, a Renaissance duke addicted to iced eggnog, and a Bavarian nobleman from New England.Refrigeration technology has been crucial in some of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last one hundred years, from the discovery of superconductors to the search for the Higgs boson. Refrigeration is needed to make soap, store penicillin, and without it, in vitro fertilization would be impossible. And the fridge will still be pulling the strings behind the scenes as teleporters and intelligent-computer brains turn our science-fiction vision of the future into fact.
About the Author
"I'm a non-fiction author and project editor (plus I do a bit of journalism) . I'm available for project development, writing, project management and I also work as a packager. Click on the links above to see examples of my work. But first some background: Over the last 20 years, I've written books, magazine and newspaper articles, for online and for television. I get to write about a wide range of subjects, everything from axolotls to zoroastrianism. However, my specialties are natural history, technology and all things scientific. I've worked on projects with Brian May, Patrick Moore, Marcus de Sautoy and Carol Vorderman and for major international publishers, such as Dorling Kindersley, National Geographic, Scholastic, Hachette, Facts on File and BBC Magazines. I spend my days finding fun ways of communicating all kinds of facts, new and old, to every age group and reading ability. I live in Bristol, England, with my wife and three children. I studied zoology at Bristol University and have had spells working at the zoos in Jersey and Surrey. I used to be something of a conservationist, which included planting trees in Somerset, surveying Vietnamese jungle and rescuing buffaloes from drought-ridden Zimbabwe. Writing jobs have also taken me to the Galápagos Islands, the Amazon rainforest, the coral reefs of Indonesia and the Sahara Desert. Nowadays, I can be found mainly in the attic. "
