Nature makes ice by dropping the temperature. The farther north you go, the thicker the ice that forms naturally on freshwater lakes. Ice farmers harvested huge blocks of frozen lake with huge saws and dragged them to the cool, dark areas where they’d be stored in inventory. And there they’d sit, in well-insulated warehouses huge layers of blocks separated by layers of burlap and sawdust, Nature’s great insulator against the cold. Articles on using sawdust as a natural insulator are all over the place, another example of things well-known to millions but unknown to me. I’ll resist the temptation to go down that rabbit hole and get back to the point: Long before we made the machines that chilled our air and manufactured our ice, we learned that goods lasted longer in cooler places.
How Did Boston Ice King Frederic Tudor’s Frozen Water Empire Change the World?
The millions of Americans who lived in apartments in the city didn’t have root cellars
Not like their prairie cousins we met last week, but they did have a place to store perishables. Ice, as in ice, and box as in a place to keep the ice. Early iceboxes were cabinets made of wood and lined with sheets of zinc for insulation. They had a lift-the-lid-and-drop-it-in compartment on top to hold the blocks of ice delivered to your home when the Iceman cameth (if I hadn’t done it, you’d’ve wondered why, so there you go). Just beneath the block of ice were small compartments for keeping perishable foods because as sure at heat rises, cool air sinks. The ice lasted only a few days and drip trays caught the steady melt-off. Some collected the still-cold water and dispensed it from a tap.
Ice was sold on the street by vendors from wagons pulled by horses
The standard unit of measurement was a block. Not an exact size or weight or dimensions (about yea so) but a big chunk of ice. The practical limit was what a man (period-correct) was able to grasp with large iron tongs, sling over his shoulder, and schlep up several flights of stairs. There were no small icemen, only big fellas who could handle 100-pound blocks with ease. Those gigantic ice cubes were about the same size as a keg of beer or an over-the-stove microwave.
Every house and apartment had an ice pick
The industry standard was a short wooden-handled sharp metal spike. The ice pick was held in a closed fist, pointy bit down. People would hack at the block of ice as many times as they had to to get the smaller pieces of ice they wanted. Back in the days before all inner-city residents had guns, everyone had an icepick and it was always handy. It became a staple of noir murder mysteries.
Ice was big business in the summer
In more than a few cities, the supply of ice ran out long before summer was over, so they – get this – imported ice from 4,000 miles away. One hundred years ago, Norway, the world’s largest exporter of frozen water, shipped more than a million tons a year of ice to the United States. Today, China is the world’s largest exporter of ice, controlling over half of the total ice shipped outside the country.
In the industry, they call it the frozen water trade
In 1806, a guy named Fredrick Tudor shipped his New England ice to Martinique, a French island where wealthy land-grabbing slave-owning people liked their adult beverages cold, unlike the starched-shirt Brit crowd over in Barbados whose notion of the ideal temperature for beer was about the same as that of a urine sample. From there, Tudor went global with his product, Wenham Ice. Londoners bought tons of it, and so did India and the world. Historians talk about 30,000 tons a year. That’s sixty million pounds.
And then the iceman wenteth because the refrigerator cometh
Come back next week and I’ll I’ll answer the answer to the question that’s got the locals abuzz, What’s the Difference Between Original NWA Members Dr. Dre and Ice Cube?
How did Boston Ice King Frederic Tudor’s frozen water empire change the world?
By making it possible for even the hottest of places to keep perishable goods for long periods of time, changing the world’s diets of meat, vegetables, and fruits forever.
