Jonathan Rees

I’ve written previously here about the good and bad sides of suddenly being able to access the world’s biggest libraries through Google Books when you have a research project that you’d like to finish someday. Another Google experiment that debuted while I was working on Refrigeration Nation was Google Ngrams.

Ngrams, if you don’t know about them, chart the frequency of words or phrases as they appeared in volumes scanned by the Google Books project against the years that those books were published. (See Eric Schultz's post from last month.) Yes, it is incredibly easy to lose several hours playing with this research tool. Luckily for me, I already knew what I wanted to chart as soon as I heard of it:

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That is the chart for “ice box” vs. “refrigerator.” (For what it’s worth, icebox [one word] looks almost identical.) What I really appreciate about that chart is that it basically illustrates something that my research already told me: before the electric household refrigerator came along, “ice boxes” were called “refrigerators.” Before explaining that statement a little better, let me define terms. While often used interchangeably with the word “refrigerator” by people over sixty, an ice box in the historical sense refers to a box with ice in it designed to keep perishable food fresh. The first ice boxes were made by carpenters in the 1840s, designed to take advantage of something new in American life: the regular household delivery of large blocks of ice that could be obtained daily in large cities and even small ones. Now, instead of going to market every day for your vegetables or fresh meats, consumers could buy for more than one day of meals at once, and keep the extra food in their ice box.

While incredibly convenient, ice boxes had their drawbacks. For example, you couldn’t open the door to your ice box all that often, or else the ice in it would melt too fast. Ice boxes were also hell to clean, particularly as ice cut from lakes and ponds in the early days of the ice industry often had natural sediment in it. If the smell of any food permeated the wood inside and got into the insulation, the whole appliance would become worthless. Also, if you kept the wrong products together in an ice box (butter and fish, for example) one would often end up smelling like the other.

Nevertheless, Americans gradually warmed to the ice box.* You can see that in the gradual increase in frequency of the use of the term refrigerator in that Ngram, especially after 1880 as the insulation became better and refrigerator companies began to mass-produce them for the first time. How do I know that they don’t mean “refrigerator” like the one in your kitchen now? They hadn’t been invented yet.

But while the first even remotely successful electric household refrigerator didn't debut until 1915, inventors were working on them at least a decade earlier because of the failings of the ice box as described above. This led to a need to differentiate the electric household refrigerators that they aspired to create from the useful but annoying boxes that so many people had in their kitchens at that time.  Hence, the coining of the word “ice box.”

The prime period for the growth of electric household refrigerators in the United States was the 1920s. That was when refrigerator producers gradually settled on a new refrigerant, Freon, and created a mechanism that was both reliable and quiet enough for household use. Refrigerators were one of the few goods for which sales actually increased during the Great Depression, as their value over the ice box in terms of convenience and effectiveness was just that clear. Based on my research, the ice box essentially disappeared during the 1950s as electric household refrigerators became so cheap and the country so prosperous that basically anybody could afford them. When that happened, the use of the  word “ice box” declined with the appliance that it represented.

Is a Google Ngram scientific?  Of course, not. That’s why I didn’t put it in my book. Is a Google Ngram good enough for a blog post? Of course it is, which is why I just wrote this. Trust me, the actual research squares with this interpretation. If you don’t believe me, then buy my book and see for yourself.

* Yes, bad puns are inevitable when discussing refrigeration of any kind. Why do you ask?

Jonathan Rees

When I titled my book Refrigeration Nation, I had to fight the urge to try out any number of bad puns first. Somehow doing that for blog posts seems more acceptable since they’re more transient. So no, I’m not going to make you watch a Vanilla Ice video (although I’m sorely tempted). Instead, take a look at this:



By the time this amateur film was made in 1919, the practices it documents had largely passed into history. Testing  ice for thickness, cutting a grid pattern on the ice with what looks exactly like horse-drawn plows, moving blocks of ice across a narrow channel cut in a lake and into an ice house – each of these practices began over a century earlier in New England. Even today it seems incredible that New England once sent its ice for sale as far away as India. Other than shipbuilding and fishing, this may have been that region’s largest industry.

Or was it an industry at all? I once knew a retired engineer who told me that anything humans have ever used was either mined or grown. While that’s an interesting way of looking at the world, I’m not sure that statement fits New England’s ice industry. The first ice industry in world history began in 1806 when a Boston merchant named Frederic Tudor sent a shipment of ice cut from Fresh Pond in Cambridge to the island of Martinique. It didn’t go well. While I could name many reasons for this fiasco, the most obvious one was that the people of Martinique had nowhere to put ice to keep it from melting.

But Tudor persisted. Over time, he and his associates gradually developed a series of practices that helped turn ice into big business. For example, Tudor learned how to pack ice in ships using sawdust the same way that you’d use mortar in a brick wall. Packed this way, over half the ice would in a cargo hold would remain intact when it reached the other side of the world even in bad weather. Tudor also developed new kinds of ice houses, designed to drain the melted ice away from the intact sections (since melted ice was warmer than frozen water).

By mid-century, when Tudor’s employees reached Walden Pond during Henry David Thoreau’s famous stay there, all of these methods were so well known that Thoreau didn’t feel he had to describe them. Thoreau even joked about how it looked as if the band of men who disturbed his peace there were sowing “a crop of winter rye, or some kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland.” Yet, if you understand exactly what ice harvesters did, this joke doesn’t seem like much of a stretch at all. Rather than simply take their chances with nature, ice harvesters like Tudor developed many methods to goose their ice supply. For example, if the ice had not reached sufficient thickness by harvesting time, they would drill holes through the ice, press the ice down so that water would come up through the holes, then cut their ice the next day after that new water on top froze too. Another way to achieve the same ends was to stack to thin sheets of ice on top of each other so that they would melt together into a block that would stay solid longer.

Like a modern day agricultural marketing board, Tudor also worked diligently to increase demand for his product. When he entered a new market like New Orleans or Savannah, he would instruct his onsite representatives to give away ice to saloons and taverns for free for a year. Many Americans then, like many people around the world even today, assumed that drinking cold drinks was harmful to your health. Tudor’s thinking was that once someone becomes used to cold drinks, there would be no going backwards. Even though this strategy cost him a fortune, he made a fortune too, becoming one of New England’s richest men by the time of his death in 1864.

There would be an ice industry after Tudor. Mechanical ice elevators would make it easier to stack huge volumes of product in huge icehouse along the Hudson and other large, deep northern rivers. Thanks to such improvements, natural ice harvesting lasted through World War I, as large mechanical ice machines were not cheap or efficient enough to compete with even hundred-year old methods of ice extraction in places where bodies of water froze every winter year in and year out. Ice itself would remain a commodity through the 1950s, as ice delivery men would bring the stuff to people’s doors every day so that they could drop them in their iceboxes. That changed when electric household refrigeration became cheap enough for the vast majority of Americans to make their own ice.

Ice remains is certainly an industry now. (If you have any doubts, go buy your local grocery store and pick up a few bags on the way home.) However, it remains an industry with roots in America’s rural, agricultural past. Most of the men who worked in ice harvesting were, in fact, farmers who had nothing else to do in the dead of winter. Like farmers, they were dependent upon the weather, both for it being cold enough in the winter to create marketable ice and for it to be warm enough in summer to drive up demand.

I argue in my book that it is this pre-history of refrigeration (since that’s what so much of the ice cut from New England’s ponds and streams was ultimately used for) that explains why Americans are so refrigeration crazy compared to the rest of the world even today. Unfortunately, it does nothing to explain the brief popularity of Vanilla Ice.

Jonathan Rees

Norge Refrigerator advertisement, 1953.

So I have a new book out.  It’s on the history of the American ice and refrigeration industries and the research and writing only took me thirteen years. Why would anybody work on any subject that long?  Well, to be fair, I have published three other books over that same time.  Still, I developed a few serious problems along the way that really slowed the entire writing process down to a crawl.

The first problem was picking the right level of focus for my work.  The very first documents I looked at were ice and refrigeration industry trade journals.  These are giant periodicals, available bound together in only the largest libraries, and written primarily for the refrigerating engineers who used to make what is now a mostly forgotten industry function.   Being something of a perfectionist, I was determined to understand everything they understood, from how ammonia compression refrigeration works to what the heck “raw water ice” was.  As I no longer live near any of the largest libraries in America, getting time and resources to do this research, let alone understand what I was reading, took an awful lot of time.

The second problem I faced was figuring out how to turn the story of these industries into a coherent narrative.  Biographers have the luxury of beginning at birth and ending with death, or maybe their subject’s legacy.  Describing the history of an entire industry, as well as all of its related industries, proved much tougher.  My solution was to adopt a refrigerating engineering conceit known as a cold chain, which is basically another way of saying that I started at the point of production and ended at the point of consumption.  I didn’t figure that out until 2006.

So what explains the extra seven years?  Part of it was information overload.  Sometime around the time I figured out how to organize everything, Google Books went from being a pet project to a research revolution.  All of a sudden, it was like being back at the University of Wisconsin again.  I could get any obscure tome I wanted faster than it used to take to walk to campus and hit the fourth floor of the Engineering Library for my precious trade journals.  With so much more to see, I felt obliged to read everything I could get my hands on.  I know it sounds like I’m whining, but the final book really is much better because of that effort.

The main reason for that was a choice I made in 2009.  I decided to make the book global in scope.  Yes, it’s called Refrigeration Nation (which is a reference to the United States) but to prove that America has always been refrigeration crazy I had to at least make a pass at what was going on throughout the world, which I did mostly (but not exclusively) through American sources.  That took more time still because even though I had more information at that point than I knew what to do with, I hadn’t been collecting the foreign evidence I needed to adopt this approach until very late in the game.

Research is fun.  That’s why I don’t regret a moment I’ve spent working on this thing.  However, I’m also convinced I’ll never write another book this same way again.  In an age when nearly every published source is both searchable and right
there at your fingertips, there is much less incentive to read everything available because whatever breadth of knowledge you develop will be far less impressive than it once was.  While some people might think this development a sad one, I look forward to reading history books that devote more time to organization, analysis and just plain old good writing.

Whether I just managed to produce such an animal is up to my readers to decide. 

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  Refrigeration Nation:  a History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise is making its way to distributors now.  If you can’t buy one immediately at your local bookseller or favorite online book store, it will be available very, very soon.

Jonathan Rees

As a good liberal, I’ve always claimed that my favorite President ever is/was Franklin D. Roosevelt.  After all, his legacy STILL defines what liberalism means and what government does down to this day.  However, as I’ve gotten older, my opinion of Franklin Roosevelt has grown steadily worse.  First, there’s how he treated Eleanor.  Second, there’s the fact that the New Deal didn’t go further.  Lastly, like making batches of wine, some bits of the New Deal have aged better than others.

As a historian, I’ve been drawn to an entirely different, somewhat less liberal President—Franklin Roosevelt’s distant relation, Theodore.  Sure, there’s the whole warmonger thing.  That’s not too appealing.  And as a liberal, Teddy’s presidency was not nearly as charged as his unsuccessful campaign’s platform in 1912.  But as a personality, Teddy Roosevelt has every other President beaten hands down (with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, but I’d still give the nod to Teddy there by a smidge).

Let’s look at the biographies.  When I read biographies, the part I usually hate comes right the beginning.  How many historical figures are more interesting in their youth than they are when they’re adults?  If you’ve ever read David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback you’ll know he stopped that book in Roosevelt’s early twenties and it still made me cry.  (I’m not telling why if you don’t already know.  You should read the book.)  I’m not a huge fan of Edmund Morris’ three-part TR biography, but unlike say Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson, where the research is the best trait it’s Morris’ subject that makes all three of those books worth reading.

Now, there’s even a subgenre of books that cover only short periods of Teddy’s life.  Candace Millard’s River of Doubt is one of the best books that I’ve ever read, and it only spans a very short period of the man’s life AFTER he left office as President, namely his trip to Brazil.  Other than John Quincy Adams, which President deserves a book-length treatment for any part of his post-presidential career?  A few months ago, I read Richard Zacks’ Island of Vice.  The book only covers TR’s two years as New York City’s Police Commissioner, but it’s absolutely superb—not just because of the

Robin Williams as TR in Night at the Museum (2006)

vice, but because the prude who wanted to stop it was just so darned interesting.  I hope nobody does the inevitable “TR in the Badlands” book before I can get around to it, because I want a good excuse to visit Harvard and rummage through his papers someday.  They must be marvelous to read.

While I think I’m still closer to FDR politically, Theodore Roosevelt would definitely now be my answer to the old chestnut, “Which historical figure would you like to eat dinner with if you had the chance?”  Barring that, he’s also the President whose biography I’d most like to see come to the screen.  Even now, I’d pick Robin Williams in “Night at the Museum” over Bill Murray in “Hyde Park on Hudson” any day of the week.  Williams can be serious and funny at the same time, while Murray just looks uncomfortable.