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.