Jacko Books

Heat and fire have been at humanity’s command for at least 100,000 years, but we’ve been in control of the cold for barely one hundred. Why it took so long is quite a story. Controlling cold would involve gnomes, performing maggots and a fresh chicken bought in a blizzard. And that control has transformed our relationship with food, but it also makes space flight and quantum computers possible - and party balloons. And one day we might use cold to drive a teleportation machine or suspend the moment of death forever. In Chilled, science writer Tom Jackson delivers the cold, hard facts on our battle to keep things refrigerated, from the ice houses of Persia to today, and shows that the whirring box in the kitchen represents a genuine wonder of civilisation.