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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."
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.
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).
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]
You want newness?
I have a 3D ice printer in my kitchen.
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.
What seems to be missing from these accounts (I have not done an exhaustive search of them, though) is that Tudor was clever enough to recognize that waste from one local industry-- the saw mills of New England-- could be used as one of the key raw materials of his distributed ice product. He was one of the first to recognize that a waste stream could be repurposed this way.
New England still had plenty of waterwheel driven lumber mills at the time, and was in a unique position to create an ice distribution network servicing both sides of the Atlantic. Except for Alaska that was milling a lot of lumber for the San Francisco build up, there were few regions with all three components: natural ice, lots of saw dust (or the equivalent lightweight, cheap insulation), and good harbors.
Will
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.
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.