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How a Massachusetts Man Invented the Global Ice Market
An anonymous reader writes with the story of Frederic Tudor, the man responsible for the modern food industry. "A guy from Boston walks into a bar and offers to sell the owner a chunk of ice. To modern ears, that sounds like the opening line of a joke. But 200 years ago, it would have sounded like science fiction—especially if it was summer, when no one in the bar had seen frozen water in months. In fact, it's history. The ice guy was sent by a 20-something by the name of Frederic Tudor, born in 1783 and known by the mid-19th century as the "Ice King of the World." What he had done was figure out a way to harvest ice from local ponds, and keep it frozen long enough to ship halfway around the world.
Today, the New England ice trade, which Tudor started in Boston's backyard in 1806, sounds cartoonishly old-fashioned. The work of ice-harvesting, which involved cutting massive chunks out of frozen bodies of water, packing them in sawdust for storage and transport, and selling them near and far, seems as archaic as the job of town crier. But scholars in recent years have suggested that we're missing something. In fact, they say, the ice trade was a catalyst for a transformation in daily life so powerful that the mark it left can still be seen on our cultural habits even today. Tudor's big idea ended up altering the course of history, making it possible not only to serve barflies cool mint juleps in the dead of summer, but to dramatically extend the shelf life and reach of food. Suddenly people could eat perishable fruits, vegetables, and meat produced far from their homes. Ice built a new kind of infrastructure that would ultimately become the cold, shiny basis for the entire modern food industry."
Today, the New England ice trade, which Tudor started in Boston's backyard in 1806, sounds cartoonishly old-fashioned. The work of ice-harvesting, which involved cutting massive chunks out of frozen bodies of water, packing them in sawdust for storage and transport, and selling them near and far, seems as archaic as the job of town crier. But scholars in recent years have suggested that we're missing something. In fact, they say, the ice trade was a catalyst for a transformation in daily life so powerful that the mark it left can still be seen on our cultural habits even today. Tudor's big idea ended up altering the course of history, making it possible not only to serve barflies cool mint juleps in the dead of summer, but to dramatically extend the shelf life and reach of food. Suddenly people could eat perishable fruits, vegetables, and meat produced far from their homes. Ice built a new kind of infrastructure that would ultimately become the cold, shiny basis for the entire modern food industry."
Bite my cold, shiny, metal basis!
Yes, I saw How We Got To Now when it was on two months ago too.
What the article neglects to mention is that the ice trade managed to suppress mechanical refrigeration for something like 30 years until the natural ice trade managed to self-destruct by selling increasingly polluted ice. Then it was entirely replaced by what was then decades old technology.
The harvesting and storage of naturally occurring ice was so successful that, for a somewhat surprising amount of time, it made manufactured ice uneconomic and, for an even longer period, on-site refrigeration hardware a very niche item(even after ice manufactured on large scale ammonia based systems replaced harvested ice, it still fed the same local market of that natural ice deliveries had).
If memory serves, the scale and efficiency of the industry was such that Australia ended up with the first adoption of a refrigeration system on a commercial scale because it was one of the few places that had the necessary technology but lacked a frozen pond without about a zillion miles. The thermodynamics and the necessary hardware were more or less familiar to any region with an enthusiasm for steam power; but the economics just didn't work out.
This is history.
The article itself self-identifies as a "story", about a man long dead over a century ago.
And the story isn't even related to modern tech or science in any way, maybe next time make an article on crystal meth - at least we can look at some chemistry.
...
Badly written, and it credits the man with inventing ice storage, a thing done by the vikings, and by natives long before that.
Face it, its Christmas, Boston Globe did a filler piece to stir local pride, and that's fine, but has no place on Slashdot.
....news for nerds, stuff that matters....
i thought the whole point of news was its newness
the wikipedia on this is much more informative though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
how did this story even get accepted?
Congratulations, someone watched the How We Got to Now episode, Cold.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Frederic Tudor may have invented the ice trade, but Walter White perfected it!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Nova did an episode following human mastery of cold a few years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The Tudor part starts at 27:50, but the entire documentary is an excellent watch that follows the advances (and setbacks) in science through the history of this single subject (but it also glosses over the end of the ice trade).
The 90s Disney show 'Dinosaurs' had Refrigerator Day instead of Christmas day. The fridge allowed the fictional dinosaurs to build villages.
Albert Einstein designed his own refrigerator..... "The Einstein–Szilard or Einstein refrigerator is an absorption refrigerator which has no moving parts, operates at constant pressure, and requires only a heat source to operate. It was jointly invented in 1926 by Albert Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd and patented in the US on November 11, 1930 (U.S. Patent 1,781,541). This is an alternative design from the original invention of 1922 by the Swedish inventors Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
You guys should first check
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_%28building%29
Ice houses or icehouses (Persian: "ice pit"; yakh meaning "ice" and chl meaning "pit") are buildings used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.
During the winter, ice and snow would be taken into the ice house and packed with insulation, often straw or sawdust. It would remain frozen for many months, often until the following winter, and could be used as a source of ice during summer months. The main application of the ice was the storage of perishable foods, but it could also be used simply to cool drinks, or allow ice-cream and sorbet desserts to be prepared. During its heyday a typical commercial ice house would store 30,000 tons in a 30 feet by 100 feet by 45 feet high building.[1
A cuneiform tablet from c. 1780 BC records the construction of an icehouse in the northern Mesopotamian town of Terqa by Zimri-Lim, the King of Mari, "which never before had any king built."[2] In China, archaeologists have found remains of ice pits from the seventh century BC, and references suggest they were in use before 1100 BC. Alexander the Great around 300 BC stored snow in pits dug for that purpose. In Rome in the third century AD, snow was imported from the mountains, stored in straw-covered pits, and sold from snow shops. The ice formed in the bottom of the pits sold at a higher price than the snow on top.[3]
If pallets and ice were so revolutionary, just think of the synergy that could be created by combining the two! Pallets of ice!
Tim Hunken's The Secret Life of Machine's series did a great job of illustrating the history of refrigeration, from the ancient Roman times to a detailed look at how modern refrigerators work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Here in Hong Kong, I routinely see freezer trucks delivering bags of ice cubes to bars and restaurants. No isolation, presumably they're stored cold in the establishment, still it's ice trade.
I've even seen large freezers full of such bags of ice cubes for sale at 7-11, especially in summer, for people to bring a bag or two of ice cubes for their boat or beach party. Probably kept in a isolated container, or it'd melt in the >30 heat in an instant.
For sure it's not what it used to be, and not natural ice - it is a trade that's still alive. As a further statement to its historical importance, there are two streets in Hong Kong named for the former ice factory: Ice House Street in Central, and Ping Chong Road (lit: ice factory road) on Cheung Chau.
This would have been News for Nerds 180 years ago.
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
Local politicians in India have this predilection to rename everything. Costs very little financially and works as a kind of vote bank politics. Madras to Chennai, Bangalore to Bengalooru, Bombay to Mumbai, Calcutta to Kolkatta, Orissa to Odisha what the hell? There was guy named A Brito who was well known for his Letters to the Editor, Indian Express, Bangalore. When the local mayor renamed yet another road (which had been named for a British officer) after some local politician he wrote: "... To celebrate his grand achievement of renaming $road, I hereby propose we rename the Queen Victoria statue in the $park Mayor Butte Gowda statue. The resemblance is, after all, so striking that ..."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
One ton of AC is equivalent to what one ton of ice melting would provide over a day.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
there haven't been any Adventure Time jokes yet.
... that he did this back then. Imagine if the industry were founded recently. They'd sue anyone who tried to make a refrigerator or air conditioner to protect their outdated business. And they'd win, because they'd pay off -- excuse me, "support the campaigns of" -- all the right politicians.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Currency of the Future". - Karl Hevacheck
Seriously? Is this you again Bennett. An Algorithm to End the Lines for Ice at Burning Man
There was an experiment at Princeton after WWII involving a snowmaking machine, that created an ice pond. That's a pond that's frozen all the way down. Much more efficient. You could cool entire cities with this technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pond
From "Ice Pond", pg. 192, John McPhee's "Table of Contents", 1985
People have been harvesting ice since the times of the Romans and storing it for the warmer months. The business of shipping it long distances and commercializing the harvesting is what Tudor appears to have perfected.
Lol, that is a good one.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Combustion engine driven compressors are similar to electric motor driven ones, but are more complicated and certainly have plenty of moving parts. Adsorption/absorption refrigeration systems have fewer moving parts, as they use heat as the main driving force and so don't have compressors. But they still have moving parts like pumps and fans, and they are completely dissimilar in design to mechanical compressor driven refrigeration.
My old 1975-era RV fridge had no moving parts at all, no pump, no fan. Just a propane driven pilot light which switched off & on as it heated the ammonia in a sealed system. The ammonia circulated passively. The fridge had to be kept in a more or less vertical orientation for the circulation to work properly. Too much off level, it wouldn't work. When the RV was rolling down the road, the orientation of the fridge was less important, the constant shifting back & forth of the fridge would allow the refrigerant to circulate quite well. Its main point of breakdown was the pilot light / thermocouple mechanism, kept either getting dirty or corroded, otherwise it was extremely reliable. The propane supply could be switched off and the fridge could run on "shore power" - 110VAC when the RV was plugged in. The 110VAC was simply used as a heat source, again, no pumps, no fan, electricity was solely used as a heat source.
A lawyer, an illegal alien, a pathological liar, a Muslim, a communist, and a black guy walk into a bar.
Bartender asks, "What'll it be, Mr. President?"
I wasn't aware that Obama was accused of being an illegal alien. Obama has been accused of being a Muslim, but he belonged to a Christian congregation lead by Jeremiah Wright (until Wright's anti-American preachings came to light); he's since moved to a more mainstream congregation. Obama's policies line up more with Socialism than with Communism. As for race / ethnicity, Obama is 25% Black African, 25% Arab, and 50% White. Obama has chosen to emphasize his 25% Black.
Those sneaky bastages! If I got my hands on a man who would farg another man's icehole, why I'd take his dwork, and nail it the farging wall.
More formally, the rate of heat absorption of ice melting at a rate of one short (i.e., not metric) ton per day. It's about 12,000 Btu's per hour or 3517 watts.
Note that this does not include any heat required to bring colder ice up to the melting point, or any heat added after the melting takes place. The power required to drive an air conditioner equals the number of tons, times 3517 watts, divided by the coefficient of performance of the unit (which is in the neighborhood of 3 for most AC installations). So a one-ton unit with COP 3 will draw a bit over a kilowatt while it's cooling; what you see on your electric bill will be that, times the fraction of the time that the thermostat commands cooling on.
Too bad there's no "Johnny Dangerously" bonus mod point. Perhaps there should be
My dad had zero engineering or technical ability, which I can attest to through the two lawn mowers "inspected" for problems that ended up being thrown away after too many parts were removed for inspection to reassemble, and all the shit that never got fixed around the house.
But that man could level a parked motorhome like he was Apollodorus of Damascus so we could run the refrigerator. I was always impressed with the newer motorhomes we saw on our trips that had hydraulic jacking systems built-in and could self-level, but dad always felt all you needed were a stack of 2x scraps and a fine accelerator touch. I'd swear he would occasionally use stacks of 2x4s and I'm not quite sure how he managed to get a 26' Winnebago on a stack of 2x4s.
My 2011-era RV fridge is similar (no moving parts except for the fluid going around), except that instead of using a pilot light, it uses electronic ignition (which means it not just needs propane, but battery power to keep your stuff cooled.) I would prefer the 1975-era style of a pilot light, but I guess times change.
It has two disadvantages: It does cool, but relatively slowly, because the refrigerator part doesn't have any air circulating in it. A small fan in there (Valterra sells on that runs 4-6 weeks on two "D" cells) works wonders. The second is as described above. The newer fridge requires being within three degrees of level when stopped as well.
For a house, with fridge prices going up, it used to be that a gas fridge was just too expensive unless someone just had no access to power, such as a backwoods cabin and a propane tank. Now, one can buy a decent gas fridge which uses no electric (except for the option of having the light inside the fridge come on) for a decent price. It may not have a TV on the front or allow one to Twitter what veggies are stashed in the crisper, but it keeps stuff cold regardless if the power is on or not.
Aside from the fact that Obama is neither an illegal alien, a Muslim, or a communist, or a pathological liar (which is not to say he's been 100% truthful--hey, he's a politician) it's very funny indeed.
Good lord, how could you miss all the birthers? Some of them just claim Obama's not a native-born citizen, but some are willing to go all the way to illegal alien. None of which is true, but it hasn't stopped people from claiming it.
I thought it was specifically funny because if those facts.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If Obama is not a native-born citizen (at least one US parent or born in US) and he's not naturalized or here on a valid visa, then he's an illegal alien. I've never even heard a suggestion that he's naturalized or here on a visa.
Given that it was YEARS from the time his citizenship was first challenged until valid-looking papers were provided, there's good reason to believe those papers are forgeries.
I'm making no claims with regard to whether he is legally qualified to be president, I'm just pointing out that it looks suspicious.
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