The history of refrigeration does not begin with the refrigerator. These things are only
about a hundred years old. People have had ways of keeping food and drink cold for way
longer than that. This is the story of some brilliant ancient engineering and it's a story
with particular relevance to me and my family — Grandpa Ragusea was an ice man.
And "ice man" is an ancient occupation.
"People would take ice off the top of mountains and bring them down to the valleys and use
them to put stuff in their drinks."
This is Dr. Jonathan Rees at Colorado State University — Pueblo: probably the foremost
historian on the subject of refrigeration.
"China, India, Ancient Rome all have ice to that extent."
I mean, think about it — the Alps and the Himeleyas are covered in snow and ice all
year long. It's way colder at high altitudes. It's totally possible to go up there in the
dead of summer, pack up a whole bunch of frozen water, and bring it back down again.
This absolutely would not have been a viable option for your typical family just trying
to avoid food spoilage. They had to make do with the ol' fashioned way of preserving food
with salt and smoke. No — mountaintop ice would have been a hyper-expensive luxury good
for the richest of the rich, and it probably would have been used more for cold beverages
and frozen desserts, less for preserving food.
In the very stupid 2005 movie "Kingdom of Heaven," there is a very cool scene where
the legendary counter-Crusader Saladin produces a box of ice in the middle of the desert.
He's offering the crusader King of Jerusalem a cold drink of water, right after the Muslims
defeated the Christians at the battle of Hattin in the year 1187, present-day Israel. So many
historical inaccuracies in this film, but this is probably a pretty accurate portrayal
of the social context that summer ice would have had in pre-modern life — a substance
precious as gold and far more ephemeral.
Though if the real Saladin actually had ornate little boxes of ice, he might not have gotten
it from mountaintops. The desert actually gets really cold at night — cold enough
that, in winter at least, you can pour a shallow pool of water into a basin and it'll freeze
overnight. First thing in the morning, you pick up all the little pieces and you store
them someplace cool and dark — a cave, or a pit you dig, or an ice house.
This is a Yakhchāl — an ancient Persian ice house. Cold air is more dense, so it sinks
to the bottom of a pit. Warm air floats to the top, and this conical shape here channels
that warm air up and away from the ice. Add in a super clever system of wind catchers,
and as early as 400 BCE, Persians would have been able to make ice in here in the winter
and then store it in here all year long.
To this day in Iran, Yakhchāl is what they call modern refrigerators.
In temperate climates, like Europe, this would have been way easier. When a pond on your
land freezes over in the winter, you simply cut out big blocks of ice and store them in
a nice dark shed. This one is in Scotland. Ice houses were introduced to Britain in the
17th century.
Now you might be wondering, "Wait, wouldn't it still melt in there eventually?" Well,
let's do an experiment. Here's six little blocks of ice. I'll lay them out on my back
driveway — three of them side by side, and three of them stacked on top of each other.
It's July in Macon, Georgia, so these things are gonna melt, but look at how much faster
the ones on the right are melting. They're gone, whereas the stacked ice is still standing.
You stack up the blocks, and the blocks keep each other cold. Sure these are melting fast,
but this insulating effect is compounded the more ice you stack. A minuscule amount of
ice ends up exposed to the air, exchanging heat with the surrounding environment.
This is the same reason why subarctic glaciers don't entirely melt away in the summertime.
This is not a glacier. This is a filthy snow pile in Boston where the city dumped what
they plowed during the particularly brutal winter of 2015. Thanks to Kevin McGurn for
letting me use the time lapse that he shot. That pile lasted until July — out in the
open, no insulation, no cover from the sun.
You get your ice pile out of the sun, and it can last all year long, especially if you
pack it in something insulating like straw or this: sawdust. Sawdust is so effective
at insulating ice that the Brits came up with a plan in WWII to build an aircraft carrier
out of a mixture of ice and sawdust they called pykrete. The plan ended up not happening,
but they built a scale model of the sucker and it worked. It floated in the ocean and
it didn't melt.
Nonetheless, summer ice remained an almost novelty luxury good until the rise of the
modern ice trade, which started in the early 19th century right here in the United States.
And this is where Jonathan Rees' research comes in. Here's his book, "Before the Refrigerator."
"I start my discussion from 1806, which is when a guy named Frederic Tudor started cutting
ice off ponds in New England, packing them onto ships, and literally sending that stuff
all over the world. I call that the beginning of the ice industry, where it becomes a business."
The New England region of the U.S. was perfect for this. It's full of deep, clear, cool ponds
and lakes that freeze up thick every winter. You get a team of guys out there with saws
to cut it into blocks, or a team of horses. It looks like they're dragging a plow, but
they're actually dragging saws. Then you carry the blocks to a giant ice house — this is
a conveyer belt built for that purpose. And from the ice house by the lake, you're just
a short carriage or train ride to Boston and tons other ports.
Tudor first sold his ice in the Caribbean and the American South, but the ice trade
rapidly globalized. The Victorian-era British Empire could not buy enough New England ice.
"Even if you're sending it to India, which they did do, about half of it would still
be around by the time the ship got to India because the outside of the ice protected the
inside of the ice."
This new year-round supply of relatively affordable ice was simply revolutionary. People in hot
climates used to die of food poisoning all the time, and now they had a cool place where
they could keep their fresh food, like milk and meat, nice and safe — just as you can
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Now, once people got a block of natural New England ice, what exactly did they do with
it? Well, Dr. Rees says you'd put it in your refrigerator. Wait, the refrigerator?
"An ice box isn't really called an ice box until there's an electric household refrigerator,
and then it becomes a contrast. An ice box in the 19th century is generally known as
a refrigerator even though it's an ice box, and that's some sort of wood contraption,
usually two compartments — one is where the ice goes, one is where the food goes,
and air circulates between the two. My favorite ice box fact is that you had to keep the door
shut as long as possible because if you let air into it then it's gonna melt faster."
Now, your once-giant ice block would melt eventually, and so at some point you would
need to get a new one delivered, and this is where Grandpa comes in. The grandfather
on my Italian side, Anthony Ragusea, was born in New York City in 1912, and by then there
was a major domestic ice market in the U.S. Most families had an ice box. And when he
was about 14 years old, grandpa got work delivering fresh ice door-to-door.
The iron tool that he used to push around the blocks is hanging right now in my mom
and dad's house in Pennsylvania.
"And he had an uncle. His name was Willie, and you look a lot like him, actually. Willie
had bought some land in upstate New York, near Newburgh, New York, and he built a dam
across a stream and created a lake."
That's the lake upstate, right behind my grandparents there. It would freeze in the winter, Uncle
Willie and his guys would cut the ice and store in an ice house down-river from the
dam. Typically enterprising Italian-American immigrant that he was, Uncle Willie also had
a saw mill, and he'd use the saw dust to pack the ice blocks. Without it, the blocks would
freeze together.
"And my father would sell that ice in New York City. He would bring it down in a horse
and wagon, and then he'd carry the ice, sometimes 4-5 stories up the stairs into tenement walk-ups,
and put it in people's ice boxes."
One purpose of that iron tool might have been to scrape the dirty, sawdusty surface off
the block before grandpa hauled it into your nice clean kitchen. And even then, things
got dirty.
"Oh, the cleaning. God, the cleaning is terrible. Imagine if you have a wood structure and you're
putting ice into it, mold is a terrible problem, scum from the ice — if you're using natural
ice — get's caught in the drain pipe, because you have to drain the water out."
The fact that people put up with that is an indication of just how revolutionary the ice
trade was for domestic life. It was even more revolutionary for the food industry. The first
industry to get transformed was the beer industry.
"Lager beer is a German import. Immigrants knew how to do it. You could only do it during
the winter until there's an ice industry.
Lager-style beers are made with a different kind of yeast than ale-style beers, and these
yeast need cold. So in the late 19th-century, ice cut from lakes in the upper-Midwest allowed
the lager industry in Milwaukee to brew year-round. Coors and Miller and Pabst and Schlitz became
America's favorite beers, and you could keep them cold in your ice box.
The next industry to be revolutionized was meat. Until the late 19th century, if you
were a rancher in the American west, the way that you got beef to market was to put a cow
on a train to New York City. Once the ice trade happened, Chicago became America's butcher.
"South side of Chicago, the whole Packingtown area, becomes the most important meat exporter
in the entire country because there's this path that's taken where the cows are driven
up to the railroad by the cowboys, the railroads all go through Chicago, the cows are slaughtered
in Chicago, then you can break them down and ship them to anywhere in the east coast now
that you can ice the railway cars."
Then, after ice transformed meat, it transformed produce. California had the climate to grow
beautiful fruits and vegetables year round, but it was across the continent from where
most American consumers were concentrated. No problem when you can load your fruit in
an ice car. Pretty soon, industry started to exceed America's capacity to produce natural
ice. No pond was safe. Thoreau's Walden Pond in Massachusetts was harvested for ice.
So around the turn of the 20th century begins the transition from natural ice to plant ice
— not ice from plants, but plant as in factory — factory-made ice. The basic vapor-compression
technology of modern electrical refrigerators had already been around for decades, and by
the late 19th century, industrialists had figured out how to do it on a commercial scale.
These machines were far too big to fit in home kitchens, but they could fit in a factory
which could manufacture ice year-round.
"It's the first thing that mechanical refrigeration is really used for, and it becomes very popular
because if you use natural ice, there'll be dirt and dead leaves and all sorts of scum
on your ice, no matter how often you clean it, and the artificial ice is relatively clear."
But the old ice business really started to chill around 1930 with the introduction of
the first home refrigerators. This is, again, a story with particular family resonance for
me, because over here on my mother's side...
"My wife's father, who was Frank Fox, working for General Electric at the time..."
"No no, Westinghouse."
"Westinghouse, I'm sorry. Westinghouse at the time. Frank C. Fox was part of the team
inventing and marketing the electric refrigerator. So her father put my father out of business."
"Yep. We came out on top."
But that was OK, because by then, Uncle Sam needed Grandpa Ragusea in the Army Air Corpse,
where he was, wait for it ... a cook. And he was stationed, wait for it ... in Iceland.
Apparently he had a great time ice fishing. Cold comfort, I realize.