Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold

Historical Timeline

1592 Galileo invents the thermoscope -- a precursor to the thermometer, it could not measure specific temperatures, but could indicate that temperatures changed.
1620 Cornelius Drebbel attempts to air-condition Westminster Abbey.
1657 Grand Duke Ferdinand de Medici develops the first accurate liquid-in-glass thermometer.
1665 Robert Boyle publishes New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, which dispels ancient myths and reveals many facts about the cold.
1703 Guillaume Amontons derives the idea of an "absolute zero."
1720 Daniel Fahrenheit invents the thermometric scale still named after him.
1741 Anders Celsius develops the centigrade scale (though it’s possible it was in use before he perfected it).
1748 William Cullen produces artificial refrigeration in the laboratory – but uses it for no practical purpose.
1787 Martinus van Marum liquefies ammonia at a temperature well below freezing.
1800 Michael Faraday liquefies chlorine and ammonia and recognizes that the chemical change from gas to liquid state radically lowers temperature. (This research caused a rift between Farday and his mentor, Sir Humphrey Davy, who always felt he should have gotten more credit for this work that his student did . . . )
1824 Sadi Carnot publishes Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire, which introduces the first concepts of thermodynamics – though the book still presents the incorrect notion that heat is due to a material substance, caloric, which transmutes from object to object.
1834 Dr. John Gorrie of Apalachicola, Florida, built a machine to make ice to cool the air for yellow fever patients.
The first practical refrigerating machine was built by Jacob Perkins. It was not dissimilar to current refrigerators, but it used ether instead of the modern Freon. The ether cooled food as it evaporated, and then re-condensed to be used again.
Charles Saint-Ange Thilorier makes "dry ice" -- which is frozen carbon dioxide -- and reaches -110° C.
Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier discovers that current between two dissimilar metals will produce heat or cold depending on the direction of current flow – beginning the field of thermoelectricity. The Peltier effect is still used in devices for measuring temperature and in refrigeration units.
1848 William Thomson (later knighted Lord Kelvin) develops a new “absolute” temperature scale that sets as zero the coldest anything can be – which came to be known as absolute zero.
1850 - 1860 William Thomson and Rudolf Clausius separately articulate the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
1850 - 1875 Heyday of the natural-ice trade
1859 Ferdinand Carré produces a commercial artificial-ice-making machine
1877 Louis-Paul Cailletet liquefies oxygen and nitrogen, setting the stage for the descent toward absolute zero.
1883 Measureable quantity of liquid oxygen is made by Syzgmunt von Wróblewski & Karol Olszewski in Kraków, at 90 K.
1886 Oxygen is solidified by James Dewar, Robert Lennox & James Heath, London, reaching temperatures of 54 K.
1892 James Dewar develops a vacuum-insulated, silver-plated glass flask -- essentially the first thermos bottle.
1898 Dewar liquefies hydrogen at -250° C (23 K)
1899 Hydrogen turned into a solid by James Dewar, Robert Lennox & James Heath, London bringing the coldest temperature record down to 14 K.
1900 - 1915 Alfred Wolff, Stuart Cramer, and willis carrier invent commercial air conditioning.
1905 Walther Ernst articulates the third law of thermodynamics, which shows that absolute zero is unreachable.
1908 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes liquefies hlium at below 5 K
1911 Onnes discovers superconductivity in mercury at 4.19 K.
1923 Clarence Birdseye begins mass marketing of frozen foods.
1925 Albert Einstein and Sat yenda Bose predict a new state of matter at ultra-low temperatures.
1926 Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd invent the "Einstein refrigerator."
Willem Henrik Keesom solidifies helium
1937 Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, John F. Allen, and Don Misener discover superfluidity using helium 4 at 2.2 K
1951 H. London invents the principle of the dilution refrigerator
1957 John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer explain superconductivity (for which they won a Nobel Prize in 1972).
1980's Coolants become essential in the production and use of microchips and other electronics.
1985 Steven Chu invents laser cooling (for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1997).
1986 Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz produce "high-temperature" superconductivity.
1995 A Bose-Einstein condensate is created at 170-billionths of a degree above absolute zero. (Carl Weiman, Eric Cornell, and Wolfgang Ketterle won the Nobel Prize for this achievement in 2001.)
2000 Peter Toennies demonstrates superfluidity of hydrogen at 0.15 K
2003 The first fermionic condensate created by Deborah Jin.

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