Before the Refrigerator

How We Used to Get Ice (How Things Worked)

By: Jonathan Rees

Narrated by: Gary L Willprecht

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. 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.

The book is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2018 Johns Hopkins University Press (P)2024 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A masterful job illustrating how, in its rise and fall, the ice industry created many industry alliances and consumer habits that are still with us today." (Journal of Southern History)

"An in-depth portrayal of a once-indispensable, life-changing technology...as refreshing as ice water on a hot summer day. (Journal of American History)

"Fascinating and well-written book..." (Bruce Kraig, author of A Rich and Fertile Land)