Airdate: June 6th, 2023
There are certain things we use in our lives everyday – so much so that we take them for granted.
Ice is one of them. In a new book released just Tuesday called Ice – From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks – a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, author Amy Brady calls ice a once revolutionary product that has transformed our nation and the world.
On The Spark Tuesday, Brady explained how,”If we go back 200 years, we witnessed the rise of the American ice trade, and that was launched by a man named Frederic Tudor, who was a wealthy Bostonian who landed on the idea to ship blocks of ice out of his Massachusetts lake to warm climates around the country and eventually around the world. Well, what he found at the very beginning is that when ice arrived in these warm climates, people didn’t know what to do with it because it just it would never forms naturally there. So why would they just know to put it in their drink or make ice cream out of it? So he taught them how to do these things. And then that sparked an interest in ice and once more and more people got access to it, all kinds of innovation happened. It’s revolutionized our food and drink industry. It gave rise to the American beer industry, the fishing industry, the meatpacking industry. It changed how we treat patients in hospitals. Ice is truly everywhere.”
In the book, Brady writes about how ice changed how food was stored, so it wouldn’t spoil, led to ice in drinks that up until early 1800s were sipped at room temperature or above, and made ice cream available to a mass of consumers when an African-American man named Augustus Jackson opened his own confectionery store in Philadelphia in 1818.
The first air conditioner was concocted in the 1840s in Florida when Dr. John Gorrie attempted to lower the body temperature of yellow fever patients by drilling a hole in a bedpan, filling it with ice and hanging it over the patient’s bed.
In the book, Brady writes that ice was used to fight cancer and changed fashion because women wearing long skirts or dresses began tripping over them when skating at newly invented skating rinks.
As much good that has come from ice, ice also poses a threat to the planet because of climate change, as Brady told us,”The ice industry revolutionized how Americans think of cold, and it gave rise to electric refrigeration and air conditioning. Today, in the United States alone, there are approximately 110 (million) electric refrigerators in operation, and they draw more energy than almost any other appliance in the house. And if they have an automated ice maker, which most of them do, they draw even more energy because ice makers never shut off. That’s why you can get ice at any time of day or night. All of that energy is having an impact on the climate. Refrigerant. The cooling industry is spewing approximately 60 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere every single year, which makes up about 10% of all carbon emissions.”
Brady added that technologies are being developed so that refrigerators and air conditioners use less energy and polluting materials.
Amy Brady, is also the Executive Editor of Orion Magazine and co-editor of The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate.
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