Air conditioning pioneer first dismissed as a crank

Residents of hot, mosquito-infested Florida know that life there sans air conditioning would be unbearable. Yet the state’s 19th-century pioneer in the field was dismissed during his lifetime as a crank. John Gorrie, a medical doctor who moved to steamy north Florida in 1833 determined to alleviate yellow fever outbreaks, was once described by a New York Globe writer as a crank “who thinks he can make ice by his machine as good as God Almighty.”

Naturally, he died scorned and penniless. Gorrie’s unrecognized feat, however, lives on in a museum in the Florida panhandle town of Apalachicola, nestled between heavily-forested swamps, debris left over from the last hurricane to hit the region, and spires of the town’s many churches.

Gorrie was a respected member of the community when he first moved to Apalachicola. He founded its first Episcopal church, “the oldest church today still very valuable to us,” said Jeremy Roundtree, a Florida Park Services ranger at the tiny John Gorrie Museum, the pride of Apalachicola.

“He ran the very first bank out of Pensacola, Florida, he was a postmaster, which was a very lucrative job, he was a mayor here in town.” But after he made an ice machine and got it patented in 1851, the verdict was: “he’s crazy,” Roundtree told AFP.