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The Origin of the Refrigerators
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By the mid-nineteenth century,
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the term icebox had entered the American language,
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but ice was still only beginning
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to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States.
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The ice trade grew with the growth of cities.
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Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals,
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and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat,
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fresh fish, and butter.
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After the Civil War (1861－1865),
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as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars,
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it also came into household use.
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Even before 1880 half of the ice sold in New York,
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Philadelphia, and Baltimore,
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and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago,
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went to families for their own use.
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This had become possible because a new household convenience,
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the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator,
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had been invented.
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Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose.
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In the early nineteenth century,
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the knowledge of the physics of heat,
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which was essential to a science of refrigeration,
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was rudimentary.
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The commonsense notion that the best icebox was one
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that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken,
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for it was the melting of the ice that performed the cooling.
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Nevertheless,
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early efforts to economize ice included wrapping up the ice in blankets,
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which kept the ice from doing its job.
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Not until near the end of the nineteenth century
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did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation
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and circulation needed for an efficient icebox.
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But as early as 1803, an ingenious Maryland farmer,
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Thomas Moore, had been on the right track.
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When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market,
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his butter, still fresh and hard in neat,
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was worth one-pound a brick.
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One advantage of his icebox, Moore explained,
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was that farmers would no longer have to travel to market at night
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in order to keep their produce cool.