Before fridges, New England ice was shipped to Havana and sold at a profit
In the early 1800s Frederic Tudor had an idea people thought mad: cut frozen lake ice in New England and sail it to the Caribbean. He lost thousands at first. Then better insulation cut the melt from two-thirds of each cargo to a twelfth, and ice became a cheap everyday commodity.
Keeping things cold is ancient. A Chinese song collection from before 1000 BC describes rites for filling and emptying ice cellars, Greeks and Romans packed snow into pits insulated with straw and branches, and Tang dynasty China made summer ice using saltpetre scraped from walls. But for most of history people in warm climates preserved food by salting and drying instead.
Tudor's trade transformed America. He built icehouses in Charleston and Havana, then New Orleans and Savannah, and when his supplier Nathaniel Wyeth came up with a cutter pulled by horses in 1825, harvesting got faster and cheaper. By the early 1830s the price had fallen from six cents a pound to half a cent. New York's consumption rose from 12,000 tons in 1843 to 100,000 in 1856, and households adopted the icebox.
Machines were already on the way. In 1755 William Cullen pumped the air from over a dish of ether, which boiled, drew in heat and even made a little ice. In 1758 Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley chilled a thermometer bulb well below freezing by speeding the evaporation of volatile liquids with bellows. Michael Faraday liquefied ammonia under pressure in 1820, and in 1834 Jacob Perkins built the first continuously working vapour-compression system, the principle inside most fridges today.
Turning that into business took several false starts. The physician John Gorrie built a prototype in 1842 hoping to cool hospital air against tropical disease, but it failed commercially. The Australian journalist James Harrison made the first practical system, building an ice machine at Geelong in 1851 and supplying breweries and meatpackers. Brewers wanting lager all year pushed Carl von Linde to improve gas liquefaction, patented in 1876, and refrigerated shipping eventually let fresh food cross oceans, reshaping cities around supermarkets and cold supply chains.
Source: Refrigeration
