l ice is being used, even in localities where ice
is formed naturally during parts of the year.

Many of the modern hotels are equipped with refrigerating plants where
they make their own ice, cool their own storage-rooms, freeze the water
in glass carafes for the use of their guests, and even cool the air that
is circulated through the ventilating system in hot weather. In many
large apartment-houses the refrigerators built in the various separate
suites are kept at a freezing temperature by pipes leading to a
refrigerating plant in the cellar. The convenience and neatness of this
plan over the method of carrying dripping cakes from floor to floor in a
dumb-waiter is evident.

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

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES OF INVENTORS ***

***** This file should be named 11368.txt or 11368.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/3/6/11368/

Produced by Dave Morgan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

Updated editions will repla