mower, hacking its engine to squirt a mix-
ture of antifreeze and water into the pis-
ton chambers on each stroke. This brought
ambient heat directly to the place it was
needed most—and the engine’s efficiency
skyrocketed. The same trick worked on the
battered Nova, bought as a guinea pig.
And there things might have ended if
Dearman’s brother, a contractor, hadn’t
mentioned the Nova to a wealthy client, who
put up funding for a patent application. In
2004, the client also introduced Dearman
to Toby Peters, a former war photographer
turned business strategist who had been
working on corporate social-responsibility
initiatives. Peters was skeptical, so he took
the engine to the University of Leeds for a
full workup. The science checked out. The
Dearman engine was about as efficient as
its gas- and diesel-powered counterparts;
roughly a third of the energy in the fuel was
actually put to work, and the rest went to
waste. But no amount of antifreeze would
solve the underlying issue: Gallon for gal-
lon, liquid air contained far less energy
than fossil fuels. It would never supply as
much torque and horsepower as car buy-
ers demanded.
Then, in 2011, Peters had an epiphany of
his own. Thinking of the Dearman engine
purely as a source of locomotive power
missed its unique selling point. Where a typ-
ical engine lets off waste as heat, Dearman’s
vented it as cold. And cold, Peters told me,
is “immensely valuable.” What the newly
formed Dearman Company was trying to
sell, in other words, was not so much an
engine as a mobile cooling unit. That meant
it had plenty of prospective customers wait-
ing behind the wheels of refrigerated trucks.
The sales pitch wrote itself: Rather than
relying on diesel-powered units, which
warm the world with greenhouse gases
and clog pedestrians’ airways with asthma-
inducing particulate matter, customers
could upgrade to a Dearman, which would
emit only nitrogen. What’s more, it would
cost the same to operate as a conventional
system, while being quieter to run, quicker
man unit for a three-month trial, shuttling
goods from its depot in Essex to London-
area supermarkets. A year after that, a
Dearman-cooled truck spent six months
delivering pints of Ben & Jerry’s across the
Netherlands for Unilever, without losing a
single load.
There were 3 million refrigerated trucks
on the road worldwide, and the fleet was
expected to grow to 17 million by 2025.
Peter Dearman’s invention seemed like a
shoo-in replacement for diesel. Before too
long, even the Royal Society, Britain’s most
esteemed scientific body, was inviting him
to pop round for dinner.↙
TO THE MODERN EATER, IT CAN BE
difficult to grasp just how much, and how
quickly, mechanical cooling has trans-
formed both the human diet and the global
climate. The technology made its commer-
cial debut only after the Civil War; its ear-
liest adopters were German-born brewers
in the Midwest, looking to keep their lager
caves chilled in the steamy summer months.
But it wasn’t long before other industries
realized that refrigeration could be used to
manage one of humankind’s oldest anxiet-
ies: food spoilage.
For millennia, people and microbes have
been engaged in a form of interspecies war-
fare. Bacteria and fungi attempt to colo-
nize our food, and we, in response, attempt
to delay their advance using an arsenal of
preservation techniques. In what was likely
a long and slow process, pursued through
trial and error, different communities
developed different methods for stopping
the rot. Some proved quite delicious—stinky
cheese, smoked salmon, salami, miso, mar-
malade, membrillo. Even the gelatinous
pleasures of Scandinavian lutefisk or Chi-
nese century eggs have their devotees.
Most of these preserved foods are incred-
ibly long-lasting, as well as portable. What
they are not, however, is the same as fresh:
The chemical and physical transformationsto refuel, and faster to cool down. Yes, mak-
ing the liquid nitrogen would consume
energy—but even when you factored that
in, the Dearman engine would result in an
emissions savings of about 40 percent over
diesel. If the grid powering the fuel plant
was running on renewable energy, the fig-
ure rose to 95 percent.
The logic was impeccable, but would win-
ning the argument be enough? History is full
of examples of clever new technologies that
never found their market, either because the
timing was wrong or the branding was bad
or a company with deeper pockets flooded
the playing field with a rival product. Cap-
italist economies are generally imagined
to operate according to the laws of natu-
ral selection: The fittest survive, and the
rest go the way of the Betamax. In practice,
though, the outcome is rarely so merito-
cratic. At the dawn of the age of domestic
refrigerators, for instance, there were two
competing designs—one powered by elec-
tricity, the other by gas. Even though gas
fridges were quieter and less expensive to
operate, electricity won out. Big companies
threw their prodigious ad budgets behind
it, and consumers did as they were told. If
Dearman and Peters were going to remake
the cold chain, the temperature-controlled
network through which food travels around
the globe, they’d need more than a really
good idea.
The journey from garage prototype to
commercial appliance was a long one.
Peters focused on fundraising and business
development; Dearman worked alongside
his son and a growing team of engineers
to refine his original design and make it
increasingly efficient, compact, lightweight,
and dependable. By 2015 a truck equipped
with a Dearman refrigeration unit was rack-
ing up miles around Warwickshire, under-
going testing to make sure that what worked
in the controlled conditions of the lab held
together on the rain-slicked, potholed roads
of the real world.
A year later, Sainsbury’s, the UK’s second-
largest grocery chain, borrowed a Dear-_Methane emissions burped out by cows could be cut by 99 percent if farmers changed 2 percent of the ruminants’
diet to seaweed.