How people kept stuff cold before refrigerators

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 Raghu Co was an Iceman and Iceman is an ancient occupation people would take off ice off the top of mountains and bring them down to the valleys and use them to put stuff in their drinks this is doctor Jonathan Reese 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 Himalayas 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 old-fashioned way of preserving food with salt and smoke no mountain top 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 Sala Dean 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 hot teen 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 them 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 then you store them someplace cool and a cave or a pit you dig or an Icehouse this is a yak shell 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 Yawk shawl 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 6 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 the insulating effect is compounded the more ice you stack a miniscule 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 World War two 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 at war 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 Reese's 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 on ships and literally sending that stuff all over in the world then that call about the beginning of the the ice industry where it becomes a business the New England region of the US 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 conveyor belt and 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 of 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 iceberg 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 keep your data safe with the sponsor of this video surf shark whom I'll now briefly think surf shark is a suite of tools that offer you security and privacy on the Internet the first thing you've got is the Surf Shack of VPN virtual private network you just pull up the app on your phone or computer you say connect and your data is encrypted and sent through surf shark system of proxy servers all over the world if you're using public Wi-Fi somewhere this provides an extra layer of protection from hackers on that public network it also allows you to get around a government Internet sir ship or geo restrictions on content things you've paid for and want to watch but aren't available in the country you're in you just go through a surf shark server in another 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Rees says you would put it in your refrigerator wait your refrigerator on an ice box isn't really called an ice box until there's an electric household refrigerator and then it becomes a contrast in ice box in the nineteenth 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 have to eat the door shut as long as possible because if you let air into it and it's gonna melt faster now your wants 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 Ragusa 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 and 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 of state 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 it in a nice house and downriver from the dam typically enterprising italian-american immigrant that he was Uncle Willie also had a sawmill and he'd used the sawdust to pack up the ice blocks without it the blocks would actually 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 carry the ice sometimes three four or five stories up the stairs into tenement walk up 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 of ice before grandpa hauled it into your nice clean kitchen and even then things got dirty Oh the cleaning got the cleaning is terrible right and imagine if you up the wood structure and you're putting ice into it mold is a terrible problem scum from the ice if you're using naturalised gets caught in the drain pipe because you have to serve 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 beers 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 East 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 past and Schlitz became America's favorite beers and you could keep them cold in your icebox 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 packing town area becomes the most important need 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 him down and ship them to anywhere in the East Coast went now but you can ice the railway cars then after ice transformed meats 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 vapour 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 becomes very popular because if you use natural ice there's dirt and dead leaves and all sorts of scum on your ice even 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 white father who was Frank Fox working at General Electric at the time Westinghouse I'm sorry Westinghouse at the time Frank C Fox was part of a team inventing and marketing the electric refrigerator so her father put my father out of business yep we came out on top that was okay because by then Uncle Sam needed grandpa ragu SIA in the Army Air Corps 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 realized

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 571,563

Rating: 4.9277749 out of 5

Keywords: ice box, icebox, refrigerator, history of refrigeration, Yakhchāl, ice man, ice delivery, cold chain, Jonathan Rees, ice trade, fridge, cold chain business, cold chain packaging, ice delivery business, Frederic Tudor, Packingtown, Kingdom of Heaven, pykrete, Project Habakkuk, Habakkuk

Id: P5lu-dq7agI

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HashtagUnstoppable]

Down in rural Central America, we used to bury clay jars in the dirt up to their rim, then keep the soil around them wet. The evaporative action of the water pulls heat out of the inside of the jars, so as long as you keep the lids on most of the time, they are like miniature spring cellars.

Also, spring cellars!

Humans are quite clever sometimes.

[u/AboveAndBelowTheLine]

Fascinating how and when it revolutionized the produce and meat industries. Also this host is really likeable.

[u/spitfire451]

There are also rare natural caves called ice mines which through unique wind action produce icicles in spring and summer that can be harvested. There is one like this in Coudersport, Pennsylvania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coudersport_Ice_Mine

[u/FromAshyToClassy]

That's pretty cool

[u/watchingwatchawatch]

this is good

[u/MisterBigDude]

This is how Red Grange, one of the greatest college football players, built his strength. He had a job as an iceman, carrying huge blocks of ice. Nobody gets those iceman muscles any more.

[u/JohnC53]

That was a fun, informative watch.

[u/coolrillaman]

Cape Pond Ice best New England ice company hands down

[u/TheMatt561]

That's why it was called an Ice Box