How a Massachusetts Man Invented the Global Ice Market 83
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."
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Aside from the fact that Obama is neither an illegal alien, a Muslim, or a communist, or a pathological liar (which is not to say he's been 100% truthful--hey, he's a politician) it's very funny indeed.
Re: Bar joke (Score:2)
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Good lord, how could you miss all the birthers? Some of them just claim Obama's not a native-born citizen, but some are willing to go all the way to illegal alien. None of which is true, but it hasn't stopped people from claiming it.
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If Obama is not a native-born citizen (at least one US parent or born in US) and he's not naturalized or here on a valid visa, then he's an illegal alien. I've never even heard a suggestion that he's naturalized or here on a visa.
Given that it was YEARS from the time his citizenship was first challenged until valid-looking papers were provided, there's good reason to believe those papers are forgeries.
I'm making no claims with regard to whether he is legally qualified to be president, I'm just pointing out
I saw How We Got To Now too (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Nova's Absolute Zero (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nova's Absolute Zero (Score:5, Funny)
Left behind at the harvesting ranges were huge iceholes. Men would enter the iceholes at their own risk. The owners of the iceholes also had to protect them from intruders. Savvy businessmen would cover their iceholes.
To this day, there are still a lot of iceholes up north.
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Are you trying to be funny? If not then you really don't understand how it works. The water fills in the ice holes where the ice was cut and refreezes. More ice can then be harvested from the same ice holes. That's the nature of reality up here in the north country.
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Spoken like a true coward.
Lousy Cork-soakers... (Score:3)
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.
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
Too bad there's no "Johnny Dangerously" bonus mod point. Perhaps there should be
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Re:I saw How We Got To Now too (Score:5, Informative)
Old ways of doing things often hang on an unexpectedly long time because a mature technology has the advantages of ubiquity. People are comfortable with it, all the kinks have all been worked out, and its popularity gives it a huge structural cost advantage.
You can't think in terms of how expensive it would be to have a 50 lb block of ice delivered to your doorstep today. The *marginal* cost of having ice delivered is nil when everyone on your street is getting it. Everyone had an actual "icebox", and since it had no moving parts it never needed servicing or replacing. So when electric refrigerators became available it was a choice of keeping your perfectly good icebox with its reliable, regularly scheduled ice delivery, or buy a cranky, complicated, expensive piece of machinery that would pay for itself just in time to need replacing. If the ice industry killed itself by shipping polluted ice, it's probably because they couldn't expand their supply to meet demand.
I'll bet the grandchildren of kids learning to drive today will find the whole concept of a massive, truck-based gasoline distribution network absurdly complicated. But it works because it's massive, and because it's ubiquitous we assume it is simple -- which it is on the consumer end. On the production end it is fantastically complicated and labor intensive.
Speaking of the Boston ice industry, I live a half mile from a 20 acre (8 ha) pond that supported a major ice operation in the 1800s. Pictures show men harvesting blocks of ice eighteen, even twenty-four inches thick for shipment around the world. In the non-winter months the companies operated water-powered mills. Ice was a classic case of exploiting slack resources. Ice meant no head for the water powered mill, and an idle workforce. So electric refrigeration wasn't the only pressure on the ice industry: electric factories would have raised the price of winter labor.
Today that same pond never gets more than a couple of inches of ice, even in last year's "polar vortex" event -- you can't make ice that thick in a couple weeks, you need a cold winter that starts early and doesn't let go for months. When I was a kid this pond iced over in December. Now it ices over in Janurary, or Feburary, or some years not at all except for the lee end. In January I can fish from my canoe on ponds where I would once have been ice-fishing.
Incidentally... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Hmm.... not sure I totally buy this. Insulated, iced, box cars were being used to ship meat and fruit in the USA before 1900. My recollection is that pretty early on, the various express companies were operating ice manufacturing plants where it was impractical to harvest natural ice. Southern California, for instance -- places that grow oranges well, and are naturally semi-arid, don't have many opportunities for harvesting natural ice.
Toitally agree, though, that it is an economic decision. It's a clas
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Hmm.... not sure I totally buy this. Insulated, iced, box cars were being used to ship meat and fruit in the USA before 1900. My recollection is that...
You were alive in 1900?
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Hmm.... not sure I totally buy this. Insulated, iced, box cars were being used to ship meat and fruit in the USA before 1900. My recollection is that...
You were alive in 1900?
There are these things called "books" some of which concern the doings of people in the past.
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How quaint!
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So, both the comment you replied to and the facts you recollect appear to be true...one of the places where it was imp
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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)..
I don't know if it was the same in the USA but my dad tells me that dry ice was used for quite a long time after electric refrigerators were available because the electric supply was unreliable. Mind you he did live in Wales!
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Dry ice is still used for the purpose of shipping, especially people wanting to carry souvenirs like fresh lobster on the plane back home: it's packed in a styrofoam box with a scoop of dry ice to keep the contents cold.
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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)..
I don't know if it was the same in the USA but my dad tells me that dry ice was used for quite a long time after electric refrigerators were available because the electric supply was unreliable. Mind you he did live in Wales!
Electricity is not a critical part of the refrigeration process. What's actually needed is an engine to compress/expand the refrigerant. You can just as easily use a heat source to create the required pressure differential. RV refrigerators do exactly that, with no motors or moving parts. They cost an outrageous amount of money, despite being virtually identical in construction to electric ones (some are dual gas/electric), but that's primarily supply and demand.
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Not sure where you're coming from.
Combustion engine driven compressors are similar to electric motor driven ones, but are more complicated and certainly have plenty of moving p
Re:However... (Score:2)
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
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My dad had zero engineering or technical ability, which I can attest to through the two lawn mowers "inspected" for problems that ended up being thrown away after too many parts were removed for inspection to reassemble, and all the shit that never got fixed around the house.
But that man could level a parked motorhome like he was Apollodorus of Damascus so we could run the refrigerator. I was always impressed with the newer motorhomes we saw on our trips that had hydraulic jacking systems built-in and coul
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My 2011-era RV fridge is similar (no moving parts except for the fluid going around), except that instead of using a pilot light, it uses electronic ignition (which means it not just needs propane, but battery power to keep your stuff cooled.) I would prefer the 1975-era style of a pilot light, but I guess times change.
It has two disadvantages: It does cool, but relatively slowly, because the refrigerator part doesn't have any air circulating in it. A small fan in there (Valterra sells on that runs 4-6 w
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Not sure where *you're* coming from...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The scheme sounds pretty goofy; but if you have plenty of potable fresh water lakes around and labor costs are manageable, you can produce a lot of ice for little more than the cost of cutti
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Australia was the first to try, Argentina was the first to succeed, New Zealand
was the first to perfect it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_ship#History_of_reefers [wikipedia.org]
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It's not even really new. It was covered much better by How We Got to Now on PBS months ago, where they mentioned that the guy who "invented" the ice trade was basically insane and spent nearly a decade trying to ship ice before realizing that he could insulate it.
Then, after he did create his ice empire, he fought hard to destroy "artificial ice" made via mechanical refrigeration and succeeded in holding back technological innovation in the field for several decades.
Which does sound a lot like Massachusett
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Which does sound a lot like Massachusetts, honestly: taking credit for things they didn't do while at the same time screwing things up for the rest of us. (Thanks for Obamacare, assholes.)
Yeah, that one's real funny. The Democrats probably thought they'd get a slam dunk if they just implemented Romneycare nation-wide. I'm still not sure how it became the epitome of "that's what you get if you don't vote Romney for president".
Probably a classic case of "We have always been at war with Eastasia.".
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If one wishes a good written treatment, I can recommend Ice to India, by Keith Robertson. It's fiction, though.
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To be fair, he did establish a global ice market. There had previously been some local ice storage and trade, but Tudor established it on a trans- and intercontinental level.
Re:Badly written (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
news.....huh..... (Score:1, Insightful)
....news for nerds, stuff that matters....
i thought the whole point of news was its newness
the wikipedia on this is much more informative though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
how did this story even get accepted?
Re:news.....huh..... (Score:5, Funny)
I have a 3D ice printer in my kitchen.
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Call me when you can 3D print single-walled hydrogen oxide tubes or 2D print a single atom thickness sheet of deuterium oxide.
Uhmmm, wouldn't that be di-hydrogren oxide?
How We Got to Now: Cold (Score:1)
Congratulations, someone watched the How We Got to Now [wikipedia.org] episode, Cold. [pbs.org]
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Yup Connections [wikipedia.org] and The Day the Universe Changed [wikipedia.org] were two of my favorite shows.
[ Don't really understand why I got modded Flamebait for my original post... ]
Heisenberg (Score:4, Funny)
Frederic Tudor may have invented the ice trade, but Walter White perfected it!
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I think Frederic Tudor had Henry Plantagenet iced.
Albert Einstein designed his own refrigerator (Score:5, Interesting)
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for all your info (Score:2, Informative)
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 h
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'Murka
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pallets + ice (Score:1)
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Shipping containers of ice full of pallets of ice!
You wouldn't need to bother about sending the empties back, just leave 'em to melt.
Video on the history of refrigeration (Score:2)
Tim Hunken's The Secret Life of Machine's series did a great job of illustrating the history of refrigeration, from the ancient Roman times to a detailed look at how modern refrigerators work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This ice market still exists (Score:2)
Here in Hong Kong, I routinely see freezer trucks delivering bags of ice cubes to bars and restaurants. No isolation, presumably they're stored cold in the establishment, still it's ice trade.
I've even seen large freezers full of such bags of ice cubes for sale at 7-11, especially in summer, for people to bring a bag or two of ice cubes for their boat or beach party. Probably kept in a isolated container, or it'd melt in the >30 heat in an instant.
For sure it's not what it used to be, and not natural ice
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Ice House St is one of the stops on the HK Island tram that I actually remember the name of :) Ice for keeping drinks cold at parties, picnics, barbecues, etc. is pretty popular in Australia, too. Bottle shops, petrol stations and supermarkets often sell it.
and how did ice get to the Far East? (Score:5, Interesting)
This would have been News for Nerds 180 years ago.
Ice House in Chennai, India. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ..."
This is where the ton for AC capacity comes from. (Score:5, Interesting)
One ton of AC is equivalent to what one ton of ice melting would provide over a day.
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More formally, the rate of heat absorption of ice melting at a rate of one short (i.e., not metric) ton per day. It's about 12,000 Btu's per hour or 3517 watts.
Note that this does not include any heat required to bring colder ice up to the melting point, or any heat added after the melting takes place. The power required to drive an air conditioner equals the number of tons, times 3517 watts, divided by the coefficient of performance of the unit (which is in the neighborhood of 3 for most AC installations).
I can't believe... (Score:3)
there haven't been any Adventure Time jokes yet.
And we are so lucky... (Score:3)
... 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.
Ice... (Score:2)