How increased access to ice—decades before
refrigeration—transformed American life. During the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans depended upon
ice to stay cool and to keep their perishable foods fresh. Jonathan
Rees tells the fascinating story of how people got ice before
mechanical refrigeration came to the household. Drawing on
newspapers, trade journals, and household advice books, Before the
Refrigerator explains how Americans built a complex system to
harvest, store, and transport ice to everyone who wanted it, even
the very poor. Rees traces the evolution of the natural ice
industry from its mechanization in the 1880s through its gradual
collapse, which started after World War I. Meatpackers began
experimenting with ice refrigeration to ship their products as
early as the 1860s. Starting around 1890, large, bulky ice machines
the size of small houses appeared on the scene, becoming an
important source for the American ice supply. As ice machines
shrunk, more people had access to better ice for a wide variety of
purposes. By the early twentieth century, Rees writes, ice had
become an essential tool for preserving perishable foods of all
kinds, transforming what most people ate and drank every day.
Reviewing all the inventions that made the ice industry possible
and the way they worked together to prevent ice from melting, Rees
demonstrates how technological systems can operate without a
central controlling force. Before the Refrigerator is ideal for
history of technology classes, food studies classes, or anyone
interested in what daily life in the United States was like between
1880 and 1930.
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