Speaker 1: On today's episode. If I didn't know, maybe you didn't either.
Speaker 1: We are bringing that heat literally because I want to
Speaker 1: introduce to you someone who doesn't get nearly enough credit,
Speaker 1: Alice H. Parker. Don't know her, well you should because
Speaker 1: if you enjoyed not freezing your butt off every winter,
Speaker 1: she's the reason for it. I didn't know, Maybe you didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. Maybe I didn't know. Maybe I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I didn't know. Alice Parker was this
Speaker 1: brilliant black woman born way back in eighteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: so already, you know, life wasn't handing out participation trophies
Speaker 1: to folks like her. But Alice looked around at how
Speaker 1: people were heating their homes using wood and cold and thought,
Speaker 1: this is trash. I mean, imagine chopping wood and freezing
Speaker 1: cold weather just so you cannot freeze in your house.
Speaker 1: Alice had the genius idea of using natural gas for
Speaker 1: central heating. Hey, right, She basically said, what do we
Speaker 1: stopped pretending we're on the Oregon Trail and brought some
Speaker 1: twentieth century energy to the situation. How about that? Anybody
Speaker 1: in agreement with that? And she didn't just dream it up.
Speaker 1: She didn't just talk about it. She patented the design
Speaker 1: in nineteen nineteen. That's like inventing wildfire before anybody had
Speaker 1: ever seen a computer. And be clear, her design wasn't perfect,
Speaker 1: it wasn't what we used today, but it was revolutionary.
Speaker 1: It laid the groundwork for modern central heating systems. Without Alice,
Speaker 1: a lot of us will still be huddled up around
Speaker 1: space heaters arguing about who gets to stand the closest
Speaker 1: or them kerosene heaters and go to school smell like
Speaker 1: Pumpy Levin And let's be real, there's only so many
Speaker 1: toes you can lose the frostbite before you start saying,
Speaker 1: maybe there's a better way, y'all. Now here's the kicker.
Speaker 1: Why don't we know her name? Why are you today,
Speaker 1: years old, just finding out about Alice Parker And she
Speaker 1: did this over one hundred years ago, barely a footnote
Speaker 1: in history. Meanwhile, Thomas Edison farts out of light bulb
Speaker 1: and we all act like he invented the sun and
Speaker 1: he didn't even invent the light bulb. But that's a
Speaker 1: whole nother conversation for a whole another episode. It's wild
Speaker 1: how black women like Alice were out here quietly saving
Speaker 1: the world while getting none of the credit. But her
Speaker 1: story should inspire us. She didn't let the fact that
Speaker 1: she was a black woman in nineteen nineteen, when the
Speaker 1: world wasn't exactly rooting for her stop her. She had
Speaker 1: an idea and she made it happen. So the next
Speaker 1: time you cozy in your warm house, remember Alice Parker.
Speaker 1: She's the reason you're not out chopping wood like a lumberjack.
Speaker 1: And if that's not worth a round of applause, or
Speaker 1: at least a thermostat adjustment in her honor, I don't
Speaker 1: know what it is. Thank you, Alice Parker, for making
Speaker 1: winter survivable and for proven that sometimes the warmest ideas
Speaker 1: come from the coldest challenges. And I didn't know. Maybe
Speaker 1: you didn't either, I didn't know.