Dealers In Ice & Snow

The seasons marched on, and the use of ice became a more widely functioning item in daily life of Man. In some localities ice was cut in blocks, packed in straw or sawdust and stored in insulated houses during the winter and sold in the summer. Dealers in ice and snow were fairly common in France by the end of the seventeenth century. Frozen lemonade and other ices were sold on the streets of Paris by a guild of "limonadiers", but, even so, ice refrigeration was a luxury far beyond the means of the majority of people.

The ice business began in this country at about the time the United States was born, and a shipment of ice cut from a pond near Canal Street in New York City went to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1799. The first big ice storehouse was built in 1805, and the ice business grew rapidly thereafter. Yankee Clippers carried ice to India, to China and to both the East and West Indies. For many years after 1841 Great Britain obtained its ice supply from Wenham Lake through Boston, although the trade was eventually shifted to Norway.

The ice business grew rapidly, and by 1830 icemen made regular rounds in many American cities and towns, delivering ice cut the winter before from nearby lakes, ponds and streams. In the South, ice shipped to New Orleans sold for fifty cents to a dollar a pound, depending on the season. During the War between the States, so great was the desire for ice in the Confederacy that blockade runners braved the guns of Union warships in order to reap the profits resulting from sale of such a cargo. One ice-making machine was invented by Holborn and was thus pictured in 1858. It made slabs of ice eighteen inches square and produced 6,000 pounds a day when tested.

The first machine to produce ice by purely mechanical means was invented by Dr. William Cullen, a Scotch physician, in 1755. But after this first start, many years passed without any advance. Several methods for making ice were developed, but the machines proved either too expensive or too impractical for actual large scale production. For a century and a half after man knew how to manufacture ice artificially, he continued to use natural ice for his needs—or to go without. Jacob Perkins, an American engineer, patented the first machine capable of making ice in commercial quantities in England in 1834. The first American patent on an ice-making machine was granted to Dr. John Gorrie of Apalachicola, Florida, in 1851. The latter inventor, a physician, hoped to relieve the sufferings of patients ill with malaria, and yellow fever. But although Dr. Gorrie discovered how to freeze water, he never learned how to remove the ice blocks from the containers in which they were frozen. He died four years after obtaining his patent, with the problem still unsolved.

By: davidbunch

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