Making Texas Cool

A New History of Old Texas

Brandon Seale

Arts, Cabeza De Vaca, The Alamo, Battle Of Medina, San Antonio Missions, Texas, Mexico, Gutierrez-magee, Education, Comanches, Apaches, Society & Culture, San Antonio, Courses, Philosophy, History

2.4 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 8 of Brandon Seale's podcast on the Engines of Texas History. Texas's first true industrial "cluster" might have been ice-making. In the twentieth century, Texans lead the way in applying the science of refrigeration to human comfort and notched many significant firsts in the history of air conditioning. Most Texans' first experience with air conditioning was in movie theaters, and the movie industry repaid their patronage with an entire genre of films (the "Western") that helped mak...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Engines of Texan.
0:07.0	Episode 8, Making Texas Cool.
0:10.0	I'm Brandon C.
0:16.0	A party was underway at the historic St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans on a humid July evening in 1869.
0:23.7	The partygoers were going to dine that evening on Texas beef, which wasn't necessarily a novelty,
0:29.1	in and of itself. New Orleans had been a regular destination for Tejano Trail drives going back
0:33.6	150 years. Most famously, in 1779, some 2,000 head of Texas cattle had been sent to the Spanish governor
0:41.2	of Louisiana to help support the rebellion of 13 English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard.
0:47.3	And yet the Texas beef that was going to be served that evening in July of 1869 hadn't been
0:51.9	driven to New Orleans.
0:54.0	It had been shipped there in a cold storage
0:56.3	vessel, frozen. The entire affair had been constructed as a contest to see who could get
1:03.0	frozen Texas beef to New Orleans first. And two vessels had arrived from Texas within days of each
1:08.6	other, but each used a different refrigeration
1:10.9	technology. The first relied on dry ice, carbon dioxide frozen via a process developed by a
1:17.9	pioneering balloonist named Thaddeus Lowe from Dallas. And although his vessel arrived first in
1:24.1	New Orleans, it was so heavily laden that it sat too low in the water to enter
1:28.2	New Orleans Harbor. And so Dr. Howard Payton of San Antonio slipped in behind him with a more
1:34.1	modest steamship outfitted with a smaller cold storage locker than he took the prize.
1:40.3	But that the winner of a refrigeration contest had come out of San Antonio in 1869 wasn't
1:45.9	really a surprise, because in the years following the Civil War, San Antonio had become a hotbed
1:50.9	of ice-making innovation. Prior to the Civil War, Texans had relied on New England merchants
	...

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