Here’s a bit of South Carolina trivia for you to ponder while you blissfully, blessedly bask in air-conditioned comfort: One of the scientists who first successfully experimented with air-conditioning and ice-making had strong ties to our state.
Dr. John Gorrie was born in Charleston (1803), spent most of his childhood in Columbia, and practiced medicine for a short time in Abbeville (1828). He then moved to Apalachicola, Fla., where an outbreak of yellow fever motivated the good doctor to try to find a way to cool down his feverish patients.
I won’t go into the science of it all – compressed air, coils and such – but suffice it to say that Gorrie was on track back in the mid-1800s to rescue folks from the savage heat of Southern summers. He found a financial backer, and designed and built an ice-making machine. It had some flaws, but it worked.
Rather than embracing Gorrie’s invention, however, scientists and businessmen mostly ridiculed it. One writer in a New York newspaper complained of a “crank down in Florida that thinks he can make ice by his machine as good as God Almighty.”
Gorrie was also seriously opposed and undermined by rich and influential men who made big bucks hauling ice southward from the northern regions of the world. For obvious reasons, they didn’t want anyone to cool off apart from their ice.
Although Gorrie received the first U.S. patent for mechanical refrigeration, shortly thereafter, his lone financial backer died and the doctor was never able to market his ice machine or see his air-conditioning experiments come to fruition. He suffered a nervous collapse, devastated by what he perceived as utter failure, and died at the age of 51.
Today, there is a statue of Dr. John Gorrie in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, placed there by the people of Florida to honor this scientific pioneer.
What struck me most when I read about Dr. Gorrie is that this amazing man died feeling like a failure, when, in fact, millions of people have been greatly blessed by the fruits of his labors. It says to me that perhaps we cannot always accurately judge the success or failure of our own lives.
Many great men in the Bible likely felt like failures. Moses died without entering the Promised Land; the prophet Elijah got so depressed that he begged the Lord to take his life; and Jeremiah, the “weeping prophet,” was ridiculed, scorned and even thrown into a cistern by the people he came to speak truth to. John the Baptist lived a short, difficult life in the wilderness, ending with the capricious removal of his head at the whim of a spoiled princess and her evil mother.
While he was being beaten, conspired against, run out of towns, and thrown into jails, do you think the Apostle Paul ever imagined that his personal letters would still impact millions of people 2,000 years later?
How about you? Do you wonder if any of the good things you’re doing in your family, your workplace, your church, or your neighborhood, are making a difference?
Don’t give up. Be faithful. Do good. Trust God, who looks ahead and sees the beautiful gardens that can come from the seeds we humbly plant every day.
“Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” — 1 Corinthians 15:58