Iceberg Ships
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Iceberg Ships For most of history, ice was found, not made. Sir Francis Bacon outlined the essential problem in 1631 in his treatise Sylva Sylvarum, “Heat we have in readiness in respect of the fire, but for cold we must stay till it cometh or seek it in deep caves or high mountains.” As an early exception to this rule, the inventive ancient Egyptians were able to manufacture ice in small quantities by letting the night winds cool water set out in porous trays on a bed of straw. In the morning the thin layer of ice formed by evaporative cooling was skimmed from the surface. The Roman Emperor Nero, when he was not fiddling to accompany citywide conflagrations, frequently sent his slaves into the mountains to retrieve snow and ice to cool his wine. Wealthy gourmands from Italy and France enjoyed ice cream made from natural sources during the Renaissance. In the United States, ice was treated as a crop that was harvested annually and transported by sled, boat, and train to municipal ice depots or privately owned ice houses for use during the summers. For several winters in the 1880s, the citizens of Montreal, Quebec, and St. Paul, Minnesota built magnificent palaces using blocks of lake ice to enliven their winter revelries. When the warm winter of 1890 yielded the poorest ice crop on record, interest rapidly turned to mechanical means of manufacturing ice that had been demonstrated on a small scale in the previous century. In 1755, William Cullen was the first to produce ice using purely mechanical methods. A cold stream of vapor produced by pumping air across the surface of an open container of ether (the refrigerant) caused ice to form in a pan of water. Later, Nairne and Leslie experimented with sulfuric acid as a refrigerant, while Carre used ammonia, which would become the dominant technology. The benefits to the public health achieved through the ready availability of ice as a food preserver cannot be underestimated. It allowed fruits and vegetables to be transported long distances without spoiling, and preserved eggs, milk, and meat for consuming at a later date. But ice could also be put to other uses. In the winter of 1943, it was investigated as an instrument of war. In October of 1942, Geoffrey Pyke, a scientific advisor to Lord Louis Mountbatten (then Chief of Combined Operations for Great Britain) conceived the idea of constructing ships of ice as a means to dominate the seas and to take the air power of the Allies closer to the fields of battle. In a MRS BULLETIN/AUGUST 2000
35,000-word memo to Mountbatten outlining his ideas, Pyke spoke of a fleet of hundreds of unsinkable floating airfields of ice that could be made cheaply out of readily available seawater. These “bergships,” as he called them, could dominate the shipping lanes and provide launching sites for air raids in the Mid Atlantic. Given sufficient wall thickness, the bergships would be impervious to the bombs and torpedoes of the enemy. Internal cooling systems and insulation could keep them from melting, and small engines could propel them
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