When I worked in a restaurant in San Francisco a long, long time ago, it was our job as waiters to prettify every desert that went out, with a bit of whipped cream.
As this wasn't a high-end restaurant, there was no way anybody was going to spend their morning actually whipping up cream, so instead we used Whipped-Cream-in-a-Can. You would give it a quick shake, press the button and instantly create a picturesque, pillowy, fluffy mini-mountain of whipped cream beside the slice of cake.
Except, usually this didn't work. Instead of the light, fluffy texture that we were expecting, what we usually got was a glutinous blob of gelatinous goop. Which wasn't so pretty, and didn't really do the job.
The easiest solution was to reach for a fresh can and a fresh slice of cake and to try again. But sometimes that still didn't work, and when this had happened to me too many times to ignore one day, I moaned to a manager. Who just sighed, looked sad for a moment, and then disappeared into the kitchen - shouting something about 'whippets' and how he was going to fire the next guy he saw hovering anywhere near a tube of whipped cream.
I didn't know that I was witnessing a fascinating link between scientific and culinary history at the time. I only made the link this summer, when reading 'It's a Gas' by Mark Miodownik.
The story goes back to Humphrey Davy who, while working in Bristol in the late 1790s, had administered Nitrous Oxide to TB patients, hoping it might provide a cure. It didn't. But he couldn't help noticing that the patients seemed to enjoy the treatment anyway, often spending several minutes smiling and laughing in apparent euphoria.
Davy’s own use of what he began to call laughing gas is well known and as he used it - repeatedly - he noticed that alongside its other effects, it reduced pain. He shared this news with other scientists, pointing out that the gas could serve as a powerful anaesthetic during surgery. But the surgeons of the time were uninterested. Most just ignored him and others argued that pain was a necessary part of the healing process.
It took decades more, and the development of pressurised containers, before the gas was widely used for pain relief. And soon after that, small versions of those containers - known as whippets - made instant whipped cream a possibility.
The cream I was dispensing in SF had been robbed of its fluffiness by somebody in the kitchen inhaling the Nitrous Oxide from the can before I got to use it. Apparently this was a well known thing in San Francisco at the time - though not to me.
The book excels in tying together disparate aspects of modern life like this with apparently unconnected moments in scientific history.
Another chapter traces the development of musical instruments from ancient battle horns to modern trumpets. The valve which makes these instruments possible was developed in 1818 and led to the creation of the brass instruments - which became the basis of military marching bands. And when a number of those bands were disbanded in the Southern US after the civil war, the out-of-work musicians living in New Orleans gathered together and continued to play - and invented Jazz.
John Dunlop later built on the idea of those valves to invent the Pneumatic tyre. That in turn meant that the riding of bicycles was no longer as excruciatingly uncomfortable as had hitherto been the case. And that didn't just change transport. It changed the world. Ordinary people could, for the first time, move with ease - and some speed - beyond their immediate surroundings. One study showed that between 1907 and 1916 the percentage of English marriages between people from the same parish dropped from 77 to 41 percent - as people started to explore beyond their own villages.
In time, the use of compressed air spread to new industries. The sliding doors on many trains, for example are still controlled by air. And eventually, it was realised that the technology could be adapted to create lightweight, springy soles for shoes - and the trainer was born.
It's a really enjoyable book. Full of stories that we can use in class. To entertain ourselves if nobody else!
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