Before the Refrigerator

This survey of the use of ice in refrigeration in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries combines curiosity about minute physical details of obsolete technologies—and about the lives of workers who used them and consumers who benefitted from them—with an understanding of larger economic and social systems they enabled, created, and reflected. Jonathan Rees interprets the ice business that flourished from the 1850s through the 1920s, the only manufacturing and merchandising industry whose product eventually melted away. Before the Refrigerator affords a complete description of ice harvesting, which began in 1806 as an unsuccessful venture to ship ice cut from New England ponds to the tropics and eventually encompassed networks of mechanized icehouses storing an annual production of 4 million pounds used mostly in the brewing of lager beer, in cold drinks for taverns, in the preservation of meat and produce in brine-cooled railroad cars, and for the cold storage of produce. Rees reveals the tools, techniques, and bodily hardships of ice harvesters as well as the design of icehouses and railcars. He traces the development of so-called “ice trusts,” vertically integrated enterprises, whose scope remained regional owing to varied geographical sources of ice (the Hudson River valley, Maine, and the upper Midwest). Early during ice's reign, inefficient systems for mechanically manufacturing the substance were developed in southern states. As these production systems became dependable, northerners adopted them, and their multiplication across the country democratized ice as a universal commodity, delivered several times a week to consumers and stored in so-called iceboxes—forerunners of the mechanized refrigerator. Rees conveys all this in succinct, vigorous prose, with an eye for details both typical and unusual, without losing sight of larger systems and changing trends. The result is an in-depth portrayal of a once-indispensable, life-changing technology, the former existence of which is as unknown to most of us as that of the telegraph or canal is to today's undergraduates

Astrobiology · Physics · Refrigerator car · Thermodynamics · Artistic and Creative Research · Geology · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis