How did ice go from a ship cargo to something a machine makes?
In 1806 a Boston newspaper joked that a ship carrying ice to Martinique was a slippery speculation. Within a century, machines had put the ice trade out of business.
▶ Start the storyIce stopped being a ship's cargo and became something machines make after a business that moved ice and a line of inventors who made cold with pumps finally collided.
It began with a joke that wasn't one. In 1806 the New England merchant Frederic Tudor sent a cargo of ice to Martinique, and a local paper wrote that it hoped the voyage would not prove "a slippery speculation". With nowhere to store it, the ice quickly melted away. Tudor kept going, built icehouses, and with better insulated ships cut the ice lost to melting from 66% to 8%. By the end of the century the American ice trade employed around 90,000 people.
66% → 8%
Meanwhile a quieter line of inventors was asking whether you could skip the pond altogether. In 1755 William Cullen made a little cold by pumping a vacuum over ether until it boiled and pulled heat out of the air. In 1834 Jacob Perkins built a machine that could do it continuously, and in 1842 a physician named John Gorrie built a prototype. Both machines worked, and neither succeeded commercially. A journalist, James Harrison, built a mechanical ice-making machine in 1851, and his first commercial one followed in 1854.
Two pressures kept pushing in the same direction. The Civil War cut New Orleans off from New England ice, and brewers wanted year-round lager, which is what sent Carl von Linde into refrigeration research. By 1914 the United States was making more ice in plants than it was cutting from ponds.
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Recap
Machines that boil a liquid took over cold from the ice trade, helped along by a war and by brewers.
💡 A trick to remember it · A fridge is a pond in a loop: squeeze, cool, release, boil, and the heat goes out the back.
Surprising fact · The American ice trade employed about 90,000 people at its peak, and by 1914 machines were making more ice than ponds did.
Sources (4)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.