The Roman emperor Elagabalus began his reign in the year 218 at age 12 but he was assassinated only 4 years later.
History has not been so kind to the young man as some evidence shows that he may have been a nice candidate for gender-reassignment surgery based on his offers of “vast sums to any physician” who could change him into a guy.
The seasoned Romans were known for wonderful feats of engineering. One was their remarkable aqueduct system that some wealthier folks tapped to circulate cool water through the walls of their homes in an early attempt at beating the summer time heat, emperor Elagabalus took things a step further, he built a mountain of snow hauled in from the mountains via donkey trains. The snow sat in the garden next to his villa plus a breeze passing over the snow might have kept things cool for a while. Sixteen centuries later, in 1872, the 20th President of the U.S, and james Garfield was shot in an assassination attempt that proved to be successful 75 mornings later. To keep the dying president cool, the same technology that Elagabalus used was evident in a machine featuring sheets, a manual fan, plus lots of ice. An estimated ½ million pounds of ice was used before Garfield succumbed to his injuries. It finally took the discovery of alternating modern by Nicolas Tesla to enable the first wonderful way to stay cool, the electric fan. In 1902, a 25-year-old engineer from NY named Willis Carrier invented the first modern air-conditioning system that passed air over pipes filled with chilled water. It was actually a wonderful improvement over a pile of snow plus having to feed plus wipe up after a sagacity of donkeys.