And you thought you knew ice

 kw book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, ice, fads and fashions

In a canny plan quite the opposite of "carrying coals to Newcastle" (a coal mining district in England, for GenX and younger), Frederic Tudor carried ice to the tropics. Beginning in 1801, he persuaded first one of his brothers, and later another, to help him scope out Cuba and other locations at which to sell ice. As told in ICE: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, by Amy Brady, things went badly, time and time again, until the Tudor brothers had a brainstorm: Bring ice to saloons in Havana and show bartenders how to produce really cold (and really cool) cocktails. Can you imagine a warm Martini or Old-fashioned? At the time, nobody in Cuba could imagine anything else. That would soon change.

Americans in the New England colonies had been harvesting ice from ponds for a few generations, and ice houses could keep some of it frozen well through the summer. The last century or so of the Little Ice Age helped. Thoreau wrote of ice harvesters working on Walden Pond in 1846. A century earlier, George Washington's favorite dessert was ice cream, made from ice kept in the Mount Vernon ice house after being harvested nearby. One cannot harvest ice in Virginia any more; the Little Ice Age ended about the time President Washington died. It's still possible to harvest ice in Massachusetts, in colder winters.

By 1806 the alcohol-fueled revolution in the use of New England ice in warmer climes, from the Caribbean to New Orleans to the mid-Atlantic, had triggered the Ice Trade. In 14 illuminating chapters, ICE details the development of the Ice Trade through several incarnations. Mechanical refrigeration using compression and expansion of gases and gas-liquid-gas phase transitions was the subject of experiments from about 1755 to 1850, and the first commercial ice-making machines were sold in about 1865. Fast-forward another century, and the households of America were well on their way to having, if not always "a chicken in every pot", a "Frigidaire in every kitchen".

Today manufactured coldness is a requirement. Ice in our drinks. Ice to skate on. Ice in a cloth bag to soothe sore muscles and tendons. Snow machines on ski slopes for dry winters. Supercold coolers to transfer vaccines. Dry ice (-109°F or -78.5°C) to make vapor for parties, chill organs being transferred between hospitals, and suffocate rats in their nests. Liquid helium (-452°F or -269°C) for the superconducting magnets in MRI machines and giant "colliders" (we used to call them atom smashers).

When I was a child we called refrigerators "ice boxes", and in some parts of the country people still had ice boxes and regular visits from the iceman to deliver a 50- or 100-lb block of manufactured ice. The last time I saw an ice box in use was in the 1950's. Reading ICE was a nostalgic indulgence for me.

Something the book doesn't touch on, but a fun fact nonetheless: from time to time we hear of the "ice death of the Universe." The actual background temperature of the Universe is 2.7K (-270°C or -455°F), colder than liquid helium. However, "stuff" is spread out so thin that there are still billions of galaxies full of billions of stars that harbor temperatures of millions of degrees, and innumerable planets with temperatures ranging from a couple of hundred degrees below zero (but still hundreds of degrees warmer than 2.7K) up to thousands of degrees, where matter begins to break down into plasma. We are a long way from all of it chilling. But, as the Norse predicted, if physics is allowed to have its way for a few more trillion or quadrillion years, ice will win. Then Ragnarok, the victory of the Ice Giants, will finally occur.