Cold is good, sometimes

The BBC has an interactive article by Steven Johnson about the development of cold:

This is the chilling story of men who changed the planet forever by dropping the temperature.
Life without artificial cold is hard to imagine in the developed world, but it all started two hundred years ago with some giant ice cubes.
In the early summer months of 1834, a three-masted bark vessel named the Madagascar sailed into the port of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, its hull filled with the most implausible of cargo: a frozen New England lake.
The Madagascar and her crew were in the service of an enterprising and dogged Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor.
As a well-to-do young Bostonian, Tudor’s family had long enjoyed the frozen water from the pond on their country estate, Rockwood; not just for its aesthetics, but also for its enduring capacity to keep things cold.
Like many wealthy families in northern climes, the Tudors stored blocks of frozen lake water in ice houses, two hundred pound ice cubes that would remain marvelously unmelted until the hot summer months arrived, and a new ritual began. Chipping off slices from the blocks to freshen drinks, make ice cream, cool down a bath during a heat wave.
At the age of seventeen, Tudor’s father sent him on a voyage to the Caribbean. Suffering through the inescapable humidity of the tropics in the full regalia of a nineteenth century gentleman suggested a radical (some would say preposterous) idea to young Frederic Tudor: if he could somehow transport ice from the frozen north to the West Indies, there would be an immense market for it.
In November of 1805, Tudor dispatched his brother William to Martinique as an advance guard, bought a brig called the Favorite, and began harvesting ice in preparation for the journey.
In February of 1806, Tudor set sail from Boston Harbor, the Favorite loaded with a full cargo of Rockwood ice, bound for the West Indies.
“No joke,” the Boston Gazette reported. "A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of Ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.”
The Gazette’s derision would turn out to be well-founded, though not for the reasons one might expect. Despite weather-related delays, the ice survived the journey in remarkably good shape. The problem proved to be one that Tudor had never contemplated: the residents of Martinique had no interest in his exotic frozen bounty, because they simply had no idea what to do with it.

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The indifference to ice’s magical powers had prevented Frederic Tudor’s brother William from lining up an exclusive buyer for the cargo.
Even worse, William had failed to establish a suitable location to store the ice.
Tudor had made it all the way to Martinique but found himself with no demand for a product that was melting in the tropical heat at an alarming rate.
The trip was a complete failure.
The bleak pattern of the Martinique voyage would repeat itself in the years to come, with ever more catastrophic results.
Tudor’s fledgling business had a demand and a storage problem. But there were also advantages.
Ships tended to leave Boston harbour empty, heading off for the West Indies to fill their hulls with valuable cargo, which meant that he could negotiate cheaper rates for transporting his ice on the otherwise empty vessels.
Furthermore, the ice itself was basically free. Tudor needed only to pay workers to carve blocks of it out of the frozen lakes.
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New England’s economy generated another product that was equally worthless. Sawdust – the primary waste product of lumber mills.
After years of experimenting, Tudor discovered that sawdust made a brilliant insulator for his ice.
Blocks layered on top of each other with sawdust separating them would last almost twice as long as unprotected ice.
This was Tudor’s frugal genius. He took three things that the market had effectively priced at zero - ice, sawdust, and an empty vessel - and turned them into a flourishing business.
Tudor’s initial catastrophic trip to Martinique had made it clear that he also needed on-site storage in the tropics.
He tinkered with multiple ice house designs, finally settling on a double-shelled structure that used the air between two stone walls to keep the interior cool.
Tudor didn’t understand the molecular chemistry of it, but both the sawdust and the double-shelled architecture revolved around the same principle.
For ice to melt, it needs to pull heat from the surrounding environment to break the tetrahedral bonding of hydrogen atoms that gives ice its crystalline structure.
(The extraction of heat from the surrounding atmosphere is what grants ice its miraculous capacity to cool us down.)
The only place that heat exchange can happen is at the surface of the ice, which is why large blocks of ice survive for so long - all the interior hydrogen bonds are perfectly insulated from the exterior temperature.
Fifteen years after his original hunch, Tudor’s ice trade finally turned a profit.
By the 1820s, he had ice houses packed with frozen New England water all over the American South.
By the 1830s, his ships were sailing to Rio and Bombay. (India would ultimately prove to be his most lucrative market.)
By his death in 1864, Tudor had amassed a fortune worth more than $200m in today’s dollars. And in New York 2 out of 3 homes had a daily delivery of ice.
In less than a century, ice had gone from a curiosity to a luxury, to a necessity.

Ice-powered refrigeration began to change the map of America, nowhere more so than in the transformation of Chicago.
Stockyard in Chicago, circa 1913
Stockyard in Chicago, circa 1913
Its fortuitous location as a transportation hub enabled wheat to flow from the bountiful plains to the Northeast population centres.
But meat couldn’t make the journey without spoiling.
As the century progressed, a supply/demand imbalance developed between the hungry cities of the Northeast and the cattle of the Midwest.
As immigration fueled the population of New York and Philadelphia in the 1840s and 50s, the supply of local beef failed to keep up with the surging demand.
Meanwhile, the conquest of the Great Plains had enabled ranchers to breed massive herds of cattle, without a corresponding population base of humans to feed.
It was ice that ultimately provided a way around this impasse.
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In 1878, Gustavus Franklin Swift hired an engineer to build an advanced refrigerator car.
Ice was placed in bins above the meat; at stops along the route, workers could swap in new blocks of ice from above, without disturbing the meat below.
“It was this application of elementary physics,” Donald Miller, in his history of nineteenth century Chicago, Illinois writes “that transformed the ancient trade of beef slaughtering from a local to an international business, for refrigerator cars led naturally to refrigerator ships, which carried Chicago beef to four continents”.

Rico says ice is good, but not outside...