It's hard to believe that creating something as simple as ice was seen as blasphemy in America in the 1800's, but it was inconceivable back then that somebody could actually think they were 'God Almighty' and create something that up until then had only been found in nature.
This is exactly the mentality and criticism Dr. John Gorrie had to face when he developed an ice machine in those years. In his attempts to help his patients suffering from yellow fever he worked tirelessly to find a way to make ice, since it was not something that was always in supply. When he took his idea north to the Cincinnati Iron Works the New York Globe complained of a 'crank that thinks he can make ice by his machine as well as God Almighty.'
At that time Frederic Tudor supplied everybody with ice that he harvested from the frozen ponds of New England and he was known as the 'Ice King'. By 1846, Tudor was shipping tens of thousands of tons of ice from Boston to everywhere in the world, and nobody challenged his monopoly until Gorrie patented his ice machine in 1851.
Gorrie was faced with so much resistance and a smear campaign from Tudor that nobody was willing to invest in his innovation. He was so devastated that he suffered a nervous breakdown and died in 1855 at the age of 51.
