Chapter 11

Another use of refrigerating plants that is greatly appreciated is the making of artificial ice for skating-rinks. An artificial ice skating-rink is simply an ice machine on a grand scale--the ice being made in a great, thin, flat cake. Through the shallow tanks containing the fresh water coils of pipe through which flows the ammonia vapour or the cold brine are run from end to end or from side to side so that the whole bottom of the tank is gridironed with pipes, the water covering the pipes is speedily frozen, and a smooth surface formed. When the skaters cut up the surface it is flooded and frozen over again.

So efficient and common have refrigerating plants become that artificially cooled water is on tap in many public places in the great cities. Theatres are cooled during hot weather by a portion of the same machinery that supplies the heat in winter, and it is not improbable that every large establishment, private, or public, will in the near future have its own refrigerating plant.

Inventors are now at work on cold-air stoves that draw in warm air, extract the heat from it, and deliver it purified and cooled by many degrees.

Even the people of this generation, therefore, may expect to see their furnaces turned into cooling machines in summer. Then the ice-man will cease from troubling and the ice-cart be at rest.

End of Project Gutenberg's Stories of Inventors, by Russell Doubleday