The History of Refrigeration

Keeping things cold with electricity changed the world as we know it. In more ways than you might expect. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck
and Jerry. Chilly Willy Rowland is here. Do you in
the recording? Wearing a little red beanie. It's been all
cute and this is stuff as shit. You can see
Jerry in my mind's eye.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Oh look, I don't see Jerry. She has a setting
on her on her setup where it's like show camera
only to Josh m hm and not Chuck.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
And she's wearing a little red beanie and looks like
a mini penguin.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah, but she has you can't smell her. She has
a button to allow me to smell her even though
she's in la and you know what, it smells like miso? Yep,
but she may have gotten at miso from the fridge.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Oh okay, all right, I see what you're doing. Nice work, Chuck.
That was a good old stuff you should know, segue
and in full stuff you should know fashion. I stepped
all over it, so it didn't actually work that well, No.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yes, we are talking about refrigeration, which is why you
brought that up. And again, nice work. This is one
of those I guess topics that has popped up myriad
ways in myriad episodes, So I mean literally thirty thousand
ways and thirty thousand episodes, and this is one of

(01:35):
those stuff you should know things where we're just gonna
bring it all together and finally talk about the main topic.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Yeah, big thanks to Olivia for her help with this.
And this was a me idea because I think after
our history of dentistry, I just sort of got turned
on by the idea of the history of like certain
just commonplace practices and things these days. And maybe it
got something out of the fridge one day and it
was like, oh, man, refrigerators, you really changed the game.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Did you wonder to yourself out loud or were you
just thinking this?

Speaker 3 (02:07):
I think I did, and Emily said, what the heck
are you talking about? And then of course they did.
But I was kind of curious, like, I bet it's
changed the game in more ways than I think. And
that was sort of Libya's charge, and uh, here we
go with that, because I think it did change in
more ways than I thought it might have.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Oh, I was gonna ask that I had a follow
up question, and then you just answered it.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yes, it was satisfying. The result was for me.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
So the I think initially you were thinking like refrigerators,
like home refrigeration. Yeah, she'd be like warehouse refrigeration, fairly
recent refrigeration. But Olivia, like you said, who helped us
with this one? No? No, and wag your finger. And
so this stuff goes way back beyond this chalk and
you said, how did you get in my kitchen? Right?

Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, so we're going to start early, way way before
mechanical refrigeration. Uh, there was still refrigeration, which just means
keeping something cold. Yeah, a refrigerator is mechanical version of that.
But in olden times, one might even say ancient times,
people were still trying to keep things cold. Like, since
we figured out that cold things lasted longer, people have

(03:11):
been trying to keep things cold in various ways.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, cold keeps the flies away, yeah exactly. Ites don't
like cold. So one of the things that people have
long loved to do is cool down their drinks, right,
m m. It's just something you can take for granted
these days. But that's one of the first uses people
put cold storage or refrigeration to, which was the store

(03:36):
ice so that they could chop it off with an
ancient ice pick, probably made out of a bone or
tusk or something like that, and put it in their drinks.
And as we'll see, like that, that's just long been
a desire of people. But whenever someone has access to
ice in places you normally can't get ice, that's one
of the first things they do to it. And it's

(03:57):
also almost always a sign of wealth to start off,
for sure.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, I find it interesting that. And now you know,
I've traveled my fair share around Europe and I was
shocked early on in my twenties when a lot of
the drinks came without ice. Yeah, and they said, you know,
that's sort of the European way, because in Italy and
ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the people that had the

(04:23):
dough they were putting ice in those drinks. And that's
because iced drinks are better.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, across the board, to me, they are.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
I know, everyone has their own things. Some people have
sensitivities teeth wise and things like that, so I get that.
But I've always been a super icy drink guy. I
love them cold, cold, cold.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
And even if you're like into cocktails, like you might
not want ice in your drink. But I'll bet you
used ice to chill that drink.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Hey, unless you just like a straight up warm room
temperature neat whiskey, which is yourative. Sure of course you
need to be cool in those drinks down really well,
Like a cool drink isn't great, you gotta have it cold.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
I remember there's one of the lamest mixology trends that
somebody tried to start, and there was it was around
long enough for there to be some press on it,
and it just went away inevitably. It was home temperature cocktails.
Ah yeah, Like, why would you do that? You might
as well make sure that every single one of them
has to have celery bidders in it too.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah, And I know we're going to get people that say, like,
I don't like things that cold, so even if they
don't have teeth sensitivity. So again, people like what they like.
But uh, I'm an ice since I was a kid.
A tall glass of the iciest ice water is the
most refreshing thing I can put in my mouth.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Huh. I just realized I drink room temperature water. I
have a glass of it right here, So I guess
I can't just stand with you one hundred percent there, Chuck,
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
Well, actually, the studio is the only place where I
don't drink iced water because it makes noise, So I
have a a you know, out of the refrigerator coold,
so it's still pretty cold.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Sure, supposedly your body metabolizes room temperature water much more easily,
but supposedly you also burn more calories warming water up
in your body. So all right, you're gonna be torn.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Well, I believe you because you said it.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
One other thing about ice and drinks, I think the
best martinis are the ones that have you get them
so cold that they have like a little shard of
like arctic ice on the top.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
I love that. But supposedly that's not the way, but
I love that.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
I love it too. It's so good out ooh.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
And are getting so sidetracked over these drinks. We're not
even through like the first paragraph here. But the martini,
the ultimate martini, is when they do that, and then
they bring you the tiny, you know, little half pitcher
sitting in a little tiny bowl of ice.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, I love that too. And then also when they
leave five thousand dollars in cash with you as well,
for no reason other than ordering the five thousand dollars Martini.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
All right, So people are cooling their drinks with ice
in ancient times and places around the seventh century. Of course,
the Chinese are always discovering the biggest and best ways
to do things. Way back in the day, they found.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Out you hedged yourself right then, and I was like, oh,
be careful, right.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Saltpeter, which is used in making gunpowder, was found to
absorb heat when dissolved in water, so they.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Would not know that.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
Maybe one of the first artificial cooling methods was to
make a little saltpeter bath and you would just sit
a jar of whatever you want to keep cool in
that cooler water.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Pretty cool, get it. Yep, That's gonna happen many times,
and I'll never do it on purpose, so I just
apologize in advance.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
One of the other things that people figured out pretty
quickly is that when you have a liquid evaporating, usually water,
as it evaporates turns from liquid to gas. That phase
change is what they call it. The eggheads call it
a phase change. It requires energy, and typically it gets
that energy to change phase from heat, my god, the heat,

(08:15):
and it usually just pulls it from the surrounding air,
which means that when a liquid turns into a gas,
the air around it is cooler because it pulls that
heat right out of the air to use it for
the phase change. And if you have some way of
moving that cooler water from around whatever vessel of or sorry,

(08:37):
the cooler air from around the vessel of water that's evaporating,
you have yourself a primitive air conditioning system that sometimes
called it swamp cooler.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
I saw, Yeah, I've heard that before. This is something
that has been done in India for centuries and centuries.
And you know, it's not refrigerator cold, but if you're
looking to keep something cool and something a little bit,
and it's not a bad way to do it, for sure.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
No, for sure. And it has to be this is
the downside. It has to be a dry, hot place. Yeah,
if it's muggy out then it's not going to have
much in an effect.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
But I also saw it a swamp ironically, Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
Thought that was weird too. I also saw one of
the other really basic uses for is to dampen a
towel and hang it in front of a breezy window
and as that water evaporates in the towel as it
dries off is what the lady people call it. The
breeze pushes that cooler air into your house. And I
realized that I was having trouble like envisioning this stuff

(09:38):
for why anybody would go to the trouble And I
was like, oh, yeah, before the kind of AC and
refrigeration that we're used to, you had to go to
all sorts of trouble. It's just so easy to take
for granted these days. But before this and in other
places where they don't have AC, people would hang damp
towels in front of a breezy window to get cooler.

(10:01):
That's how desperate they were to cool down.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, I imagine knocking something down a few degrees makes
a big difference. Yeah, you know in the pre AC days,
you know, sure, bearing things in the ground is also
a good way to keep things cool. You know, like
three to five feet down, you're gonna find pretty consistent
temperatures depending on where you are. If you're in the north,
it can be forty five to fifty degrees down there,

(10:25):
more like seventy in the south, and you know that's fahrenheit.
And of course, anyone who's ever spent any time camping
or hiking, knows, as I did when I was a kid.
My dad would build a little like cordoned off area
with stacked rocks in a very cold mountain river to
put like jugs of milk and stuff like that, and
when we were camping as a family.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, there's things called spring houses or spring boxes, depending
on how big the structure is. But typically if you
have a stream or a spring running through your homestead,
which from what I've read recently is like like point
number one that you want to make sure your homestead
has as a source of fresh water, one of the
cool things you could do with that is to build

(11:08):
an enclosure around it. But first within the enclosure, what
you want to build is like a kind of like
a widened area for the stream to flow into, and
then it kind of fills up and then it exits
the other side of this widened area. So you narrow
the channel of the spring or the stream line it
with rocks, line this box with rocks, basically, and it

(11:30):
stays about half full year round of this nice cool
mountain spring or mountain stream water, and you just keep
your butter in there and crocs and stuff. So it's
just like doing it in the stream, but you're basically
making it a little easier to store your things in there,
and you could put more stuff in it than you
would if you just threw it in the stream like

(11:51):
a total hay seed. Like even even the mountainous of
mountain people are like, you don't you didn't go to
the trouble of building a spring for somebody who just
throws it into the stream themselves.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Yeah, so far keeping track now you have name checked eggheads,
lay people, and.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Hay seeds and mountain folk.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah, and mountain folk, that's what we do here. So
in the seventeenth century in Europe they had official ice
houses and they were you know, you'd bring down ice
from where you could get ice, like literal just ice
from the wild, like in Scandinavia, and they were using
it to preserve food obviously also for like the medical

(12:34):
community would use it for different things and also chilling
those drinks. Still, but you know, you would you could
use ice to treat burns and things like that, to
bring down a fever, you know, making things cooler was
a big benefit to a doctor.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah. Also remember in our feet of cold starve a
fever short stuff. We talked about how there was like
a doctor's viewed heat and cold as a duality of health. So, yeah,
somebody was sick with one of the hot sicknesses, you
would probably give them a cold drink and that was
considered as good as medicine is today.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah, or of course any you know, sprains and you
know muscle pulls, things like that. Heat and ice. It
can be used in various ways. Sure, the rice method,
you know. Sure.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
So one other thing I want to mention real quick
is we're talking about people like technologies that are like
thousands of years old. There was something called a yakh
chawl that Persians created that to listeners may or may
not sound familiar, depending on when we release the short
stuff on it.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
Yeah, so it's either just out or coming out soon.
It's getting its own short stuff because it was just
kind of too much there.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
It was pretty cool, Yeah, but it was like an
ancient Persian ice making machine that dates back at least
to four hundred BCE, which is really impressive. But yeah,
we'll get way more in depth on those in whatever
short stuff we do. But the point is that people
have been doing doing this for a really long time,
and they figured out some really ingenious technologies that harness

(14:05):
natural processes to cool and as we kind of progress
through the technology, you'll see that we're basically doing the
same thing just a little more whiz bang, much more efficiently.
It delivers much cooler air or water whatever we're cooling,
but it's still basically the same premise as what we
were doing thousands of years ago to keep things cool.

Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, totally. I think it's super cool. If you want
to talk about like real ice, and there's this really extensive,
in depth, long New Yorker thing, which you know, most
New Yorker things are about Frederick Tudor, the Ice King,
who's around in the nineteenth century. And he was the
guy that was like, hey, we got all this ice

(14:49):
up in New England, like our lakes are literally frozen,
and why don't we try and make some money by
shipping this ice out? He had, you know, he tried
to get investors and they were like, I don't know,
it seems like that stuff is going to melt if
you put it on a ship and try and send
it to Cuba. And he said, oh, watch me, and
he puts some on a ship and sent some toward

(15:12):
Cuba and it melted and he was like, oh man,
they were totally right. But he kept at it and
kept at it. And you know, they used to use
things like straw to help keep the ice a little
more insulated, and he said, sawdust actually works a whole
lot better. And he and other people got in on
the game. And there was like American ice being chipped

(15:34):
all over the world in the nineteenth century, which is
and making it there, which is kind of hard to believe.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yes, And I've been racking my brain what episode we
first introduced the ice King in. I cannot, for the
life of me remember what it was loose, I don't know,
I don't think so, I really don't remember what it was.
But he popped up again later in our episode on
Thorreau because one of the places where he was cutting

(16:01):
ice from was Walden Lake, and Threau noted the ice
King cutting ice in Walden Pond, Sorry, Mayners, while he
was writing his book Walden. I think he appears in Walden.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
Two things you just named checked Mayners, that's another one.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
And Henry David Thureau, the original hippie.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
That's true. But one thing I did want to mention
and that's a nice little segue. Was just to plug
a little Instagram post I made recently. I was cleaning
out my closet and I found a bunch of old
schoolwork from elementary school, and while this part was from
high school, I did a satire, an extra credit satire
on Thoreau about someone who went to live deliberately in

(16:45):
the woods, and you know, the big joke at the end.
As they made it like thirty minutes or something. It
wasn't the best comedy work, you know, for a ninth grader.
It was okay, sure, but people should go check it
out because I did a bunch of screenshots of various projects,
a lot of space travel stuff and book reports. But
one big one was on ancient Egypt, and I literally

(17:07):
and the thing was like, Hi, my name is Chuck Bryant,
and I'm going to be your guide through ancient Egypt.
And at the end it was like, I hope you
enjoyed your tour, and I'd once again signing off, I've
been your guide. And people are like, oh my god,
you were doing stuff you should know as a fifth grader.
That's awesome, man, It's really pretty cute. But you can
go to chuck the podcast or Instagram to check that

(17:29):
stuff out. People got a real kick out of it.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
For sure. I'll go check it out to you.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
You would like it.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
And it's not like I avoid your Instagram. I just
don't go on it. It's okay.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
I know that, buddy. I know you're telling everyone else that,
but I know that's not your jam yet.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
So I talked about how the technology is really just
kind of improved on ancient technology. The uses for this
stuff too have really kind of been relatively the same.
We haven't had a lot of stuff that we wanted
ice for aside from cooling our drinks, which is really honestly,
Olivia turned up a mention of the king of Takua

(18:03):
or Tacoa, I saw different spellings in what's now Syria,
and he used it to ICE's drinks almost four thousand
years ago. So I mean, people have been doing that
for a really long time. Another one is to store
perishable food, like you said, keeps the flies away, right,
And in doing these things is we've gotten better and

(18:23):
better at it. It started to have like really monumental,
massive sweeping changes on humanity, and here in America. One
of the first changes it had. We will talk about
right after this.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
Stop.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
Lately, I've been learning some stock about in Saua or
how you many how.

Speaker 4 (19:01):
About the one on border like dis.

Speaker 5 (19:05):
Yonder worm. But it was so nice who.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
So chuck. I was talking about how refrigeration had massive
sweeping changes as we got better at it, and in America,
one of the first things it did was it allowed
people to expand their diet some because unless you were
in like a southern state or something like that, you
did not have access to a lot of different kinds
of food year round, like during the spring and summer,

(19:50):
maybe even in the fall a little bit, you would
have things like like dairy and poultry and meat. And
then as win yes, and and as winter started to
set in, you had pickled cabbage, pickled neighbor who died
that winter, like pickled everything. Canning didn't even come around.

(20:14):
I didn't know this until the nineteenth century. I thought
it was really really old, so like you really did
not So actually you didn't have pickled anything, now that
I think about it. You had like salted stuff, cured stuff,
and a lot of it was grains too, right, stuff
you could store fairly easily. And then when we started
learning how to preserve food with refrigeration and got better

(20:34):
and better at it. Like people, their diets just changed radically.
Like apparently in the Northern States, by the time spring came,
you were so malnourished from a lack of niasin vitamin
B three that you normally get from like poultry and
fish and meat, that they had a name for it,
spring sickness. Today we call it pellagra, but it's a

(20:55):
type of like severe malnutrition that people would just annually
get it because they had that limited access to different foods.
And then once we started being able to store and
then more importantly ship items by refrigerating it, then things
really change. That spring sickness went away. And I'm also

(21:16):
the first person in history to say the word refrigerating.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Also, before people write in they were definitely pickling things
before they were canning, so you could still pickle.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
Things, Okay, cool, So yes, you could pickle your neighbor.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Then, Yeah, they had jars and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
Well, what's the pill then, I mean they just hadn't
figured out how to use heat baths and that kind
of thing.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
What for canning, Yeah, I don't know, maybe how to
seal something properly would be my guess. But although I
don't know, maybe, like wax ceiling, maybe canning should be
an episode, all right, and we can figure that out.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yeah, let's figure it out.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
I can regale everyone with more tales of being drug
to the cannery as a child.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
That's all right. I forgot about that.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Which is actually true. It makes me sound one hundred
years old, but that's actually true. So yeah, when artificial
cold came on the scene, that really really really changed
the game. There was a physician in chemists from the
University of Glasgow in the eighteenth century seventeen forty eight
named William Cullen who it looks like did the first

(22:23):
experiment on artificial cooling and kind of demonstrating how that
was possible. And he, like you said, it was just
sort of a version of what they had done in
ancient times with those water in the clay jars and
exploiting that phase change from liquid to gas using the
thermal energy. But he used instead of water diethyl diethel

(22:47):
diethyl ether, and he would pump it out of a
container and it would come to a boil and that
heat would pull all the heat from the surrounding area
just like it did back an old It was just
sort of different, a different medium, and that would cool
things down.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Yeah, this chuck was one of those episodes where I
went near mad trying to understand like the physics of
the whole thing, or even like the mechanical engineering aspects
of this stuff. And it's got to be because my
dad was a mechanical engineer by profession. Yeah, so, like,
I've got that little bug that I can't ignore. And
I looked all over for how William Collen's thing worked,

(23:28):
and apparently no one knows because the same like four
or five sentences are basically copy and pasted everywhere on
the internet.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
That's frustrating.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
So we do know that in the before even seventeen fifty,
he was the first person to demonstrate artificial refrigeration. It
didn't go anywhere, but he showed that this was entirely possible,
and that it was pretty clever to use something like
an artificial refrigerant rather than just say water, although water
is an excellent refrigerator and a lot of different applications.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yeah, for sure. A guy, an American this time named
Jacob Perkins, came along about fifty ish years later in
eighteen thirty four, and he's credited basically for developing the
first working what we would call refrigerator and his machine,
and you know, again it's just not too different from
how they do it today. They just do it a

(24:19):
lot better, right, But he used a vapor compression cycle. Again,
it's all about the the thermal loss of that phase change,
but in this case they're just exploiting it, you know,
because if you move the pressure back and forth between
the two, it keeps a constant cool, right.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, So it's just nuts. If you see like a
diagram and how it's explained and how a vapor compression
refrigerator works, which is almost certainly the kind of refrigerator
you have in your home. There's really just like four
components to it, and they're really doing some basic stuff
to this. But it's more a question of like why,

(24:58):
like why would you put something in low pressure and
heat it up for the next step to be to
like depressurize it and cool it down and then you
print it into liquid up here. It's just it doesn't
make sense. It's almost just nuts, like somebody just went
crazy with a diagram. But apparently that's how it works,
and it's all I think. It's like you said, it's
just taking advantage of the different properties of lower pressure

(25:21):
liquid or higher pressure gas, like they can cool and heat,
and they're there. I guess it puts off so much
coolness or so much heat that it can be used
to refrigerate. And then it passes through this other thing,
like I think a condenser, and that gives off the
waste heat that's what's under your fridge, and then like
the evaporator cools everything down, and then I finally got it. Chuck, Okay,

(25:47):
So I've been looking at it wrong the whole way.
The refrigerator doesn't pump cold into your fridge, right, the
actual mechanical refrigerant process. What it does is it sucks
heat out of your refrigerator. And once I finally understood that,
I was like, I got it. Finally I got it,

(26:07):
because this cooler refrigerant goes through a coil, and I
thought like it was emitting cold and that that's how
it cooled down. Now it's drawing any heat from there,
kind of tricking the heat into joining the coil and
leaving the fridge box cooler, which is what that refrigerant
wanted all the time. It thinks that the heat was

(26:29):
a sucker for falling for it, but that's exactly what
it does every time, And now the entire refrigerator is
way colder.

Speaker 3 (26:37):
Amazing.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
I think it's kind of amazing too, because it's the
opposite of what I always thought was going on.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah, that's super cool. I love that they've used various
liquids over the years, ammonia's when they used for a while,
methyl chloride for a while. All of these things were
toxic though, so until they figured out a safer way,
which you know they would soon enough, people would actually die.
In the nineteen twenties, there were cases where methyl chloride
leaks happened actually killed people. And then they said, you

(27:06):
know what, maybe we should come up with a synthetic
substance that does basically the same thing. So they came
up with dichlorofluoromethane aka free on, and until the nineteen nineties,
freeon was the go to. And then we said, hey,
that's not so great either because of our environment in
the ozone layer, and so let's develop even newer safer

(27:28):
chemicals did keep things cool.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, which hydrofluorocarbons are good for the ozone layer, but
they're actually horrible as greenhouse gases. There's a rating of
just how much of an effect, like a chemical has
on warming the atmosphere, and they use carbon dioxide CO
two as a one. That's like the baseline because we

(27:49):
know how much it warms the atmosphere over one hundred years,
so it has a global warming potential or GWP of
one carbon dioxide does hydrofluor carbons have a global warming
potential of fourteen thousand, eight hundred. Wow, that's a lot
more than CO two if you really stop and think

(28:11):
about it. And these are the refrigerants we're still using.
These are the alternatives that we developed and started using
in the nineties. So it's like we go from the
frying pan into the fire. Whenever we try to do
something environmental.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
It feels like, yeah, that's probably true to me. This
is where this episode gets super interesting, And this is
kind of what I was really after when it came
to the assignment, which is when things started moving around.
Cooling systems started getting better and better, people were developing
this stuff, and at the same time, railroads were growing

(28:46):
and growing and expanding and expanding, and all of a sudden,
people in the Midwest farmers could, you know, They were like, hey,
I want to be able to ship my stuff and
sell it to the East coast. So the whole food
scene was changing because of this. In the eighteen fifties,
they started, and this to me is just like super ingenious,
they started keeping railroad cars cool by using ice. So

(29:10):
they would they were called reefers r ee f e R.
A reefer was a refrigerated you know, railcar, and they
had these big hatches in the roof they would load
just these huge, huge blocks of ice and then fans
that were driven by you know, powered by the turning
of the axle on the train or on the train
car rather, and that just you know, it just blew on.

(29:31):
I'm like a breeze pasted a cool towel in your window,
and all of a sudden you had refrigerated train cars.
They were lined in like flax and sawdust, like we mentioned,
sometimes dirt, sometimes cow hair. And even though people were
a little bit at first like I don't know about this,
the meat packing industry really got on board because they said,

(29:52):
we've been shipping live cows across country for people to
take care of when they get there, When we can
butcher every thing in one place and ship out this
what they call dead meat. It's disgusting, but that's what
they called it, right.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
That's what sixth grade bullies call you too when they
tell you to meet them in the playground at three.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Did meet?

Speaker 2 (30:14):
But that changed, That changed absolutely everything. This is when
meat became like a staple of the American diet. We
talked a little bit about Chicago being the epicenter of
this and that what did Americans eat before the FDA
came along or something.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
But all of a sudden, meat was much easier, much
cheaper to ship, and they could ship it further and further,
so they started supplying the cities with meat and people
started to be able to afford it, and that just
that was another huge change, not just for humans, but
for cows too, because apparently the cow population in the
United States more than doubled in thirty years after we

(30:51):
figured out how to refrigerate some meat or ship refrigerated meat.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, yeah, that's incredible.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
That cows.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Yeah, it's a lot of dead cows. It completely changed
Chicago as a city, and it completely changed the way
we were eating as a nation. All of a sudden,
you had refrigerated cars also shipping produce. It wasn't just
about the cows and the beef, even though it was
a big part of it. But all of a sudden
you could be like, Hey, I'm growing this fruit in Florida.

(31:24):
And have you Have you ever had not just an
orange and your stocking for Christmas? You ever had a
big bag of oranges sitting around your house, Well, we're
happy to provide that for you and us fruit. I
think it was one of the first companies to get
involved in like sending their good stuff all over the place,
and you know, as a result, obviously the prices really

(31:44):
really dropped. That was an article in the New York
Sun in eighteen ninety four that talked about the price
of pears went from forty cents to two for a
nickel in just a couple of decades thanks to refrigerated cars.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
It's even more impressive when you adjust for inflation. So
a single pair was eleven dollars in the eighteen seventies,
and they were two for a dollar eighty in the
eighteen nineties thanks to refrigeration. Did you ever get an
orange in the bottom of your Christmas stocking? Because I
never understood why until I started researching this. No, you

(32:19):
never did. Oh we always didn't. I was always like,
why is there an orange in the bottom of this stocking?
Making it seem like stuff in here than there actually is.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
I feel like I would remember that our stockings were
a couple of little fun things, like a little top
or some silly putty, but usually just like socks and
stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Sure, I'm guessing that the reason I did and you
didn't is because I was raised in the north, the Midwest.
Maybe I'll bet that's why. And so it was like
a Midwestern tradition because we didn't have access to oranges,
and you could eat an orange year round, basically you
lucky duck.

Speaker 3 (32:54):
Trains. Eventually, shipping wise gave way to trucks and they said, hey,
now we got these trucks that we can, you know,
refrigerate as well, and so we're not you know, things
were built around industries, entire industries. Separate industries were built
near rail yards because rail shipping was the only only game,
you know, for a long time. So and I think

(33:16):
it was in the that What Did We Eat episode
when we talked about Chicago, like the whole meat packing
area was around the rail yards because they could you know,
they wanted to have it super close. So now all
of a sudden, you could say, hey, stuff is you know,
it's really much cheaper to raise cattle or grow vegetables
way out in the boonies. You can get cheaper labor,
cheaper land. So now we can do that and just

(33:37):
throw it on a refrigerated truck to get it across country. Yep.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
So chuck. Little by little as these like innovations in
shipping stuff meat produce things that just could not make
it from you know, California to oh, I don't know,
let's say Denver without rotting or something. As we got
better and better at this, something called the chain started

(34:01):
to emerge and involve. And that was basically how we
move perishable items from one part of the country to
another thanks to this refrigerated stuff. And it was super
primitive and separate. I think the I don't know if
you said or not, but the very first private railcars
were these meat packers refrigerated cars. They just did this
on their own as like a great business move. But

(34:24):
these things became so invaluable and people became so hooked
on having stuff available year round that they normally wouldn't
that it just became an institution, like a part of
any growing, developing country's infrastructure. There was something called the
cold chain.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
Yeah. Absolutely. There was an engineer early on who did
not realize his dream, but he was sort of the
first visionary in the mid nineteenth century. His name was
Charles tell ye ooh nailed it. He was the guy
that kind of envisioned this and said, hey, the cold
chain is a thing that we could make a reality

(35:04):
and then we can sort of reorganize rationally on how
we grow food and how we ship food. And it
was his idea. He apparently died in extreme poverty because
he never realized a dream to its fullest, but he tried.
He actually got a British steamership and outfitted it with
a refrigerator. Even named it lee Les frigger Rique frigger raffete. Yeah, okay, like.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
Like fantastic basically, but fantastic refrigerator is basically what it means.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
Yeah, that sounds like a magnifique fantastic refrigerator concern. And
this was in eighteen seventy seven and he was bringing
beef across the ocean from Uruguay to Paris, and when
they got there, he was like, everyone's gonna love this.
And the French were like, uh, you think I'm eating
meat that's been dead for a month. Yeah, you're crazy,

(36:02):
and we're going to pass a bunch of laws that
banned this kind of thing for the next twenty years.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
And tell you're screeched.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
I'm not crazy, shut up, take it back. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
So, like you said, he died penniless, as you like
to say, but his legacy lived on. Eventually people said like, Okay,
we can get used to this. But it took some
It took some selling for sure. One of the other
major things that helped establish the cold chain was not
just shipping, but it had to like sit for a

(36:35):
little while when it got to where it's going. Like
it's not like the train stopped at every every house
for anyone who wanted eggs, Like it went to one
central destination and it unloaded its contents, and so as
a result, cold storage had to develop. You remember Rocky,
he helped train by punching huge sides of beef that

(36:57):
would that was part of the cold chain he worked in.
At least I guess that's where he worked, was a
cold storage place.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
Yeah, yeah, like a meatpacker storage facility.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
I think.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
By the way, second Rocky reference in here, there was
another very subtle one. We'll see if that listeners can
pick that out.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
It already happened.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
Yeah, yeah, a little easter egg.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
I didn't pick it out. I want to know.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
All right, I'm gonna tell you off air ready, I'll
tell you right now.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Okay, thank you for telling me.

Speaker 3 (37:37):
It sounded like you were acting just then a new
kind of were But I really did just tell Josh.
But yes, let's leave that as an easter egg anyway. Yeah,
cold warehouses started becoming a thing again. That sawdust insulation
provided a lot of the you know insulation. I guess
these were in the eighteen sixties, and you know, it

(37:58):
wasn't like your refriger or cold, but they were storing
like fruit and produce. So it basically it was like, hey,
you don't get too warm and spoil is what they
were trying to you know, accomplish there.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah, it didn't have to be frozen necessarily, no, no.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
No, no, But by nineteen oh four, this was a
legitimate thing. There were more than six hundred huge storage
you know cold storage facilities, I think one one hundred
and two million cubic feet and you know, mainly based
around cities. But they were holding everything from you know,
produce to namely eggs because people wanted their eggs year round.
And back then, before they started breeding chickens to lay

(38:34):
eggs y around, they were basically laying in the spring
and people wanted those eggs in the winter.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Yeah, and they really did breed them chuck through selective
breeding programs. There's something called the red jungle fowl, which
is a type of chicken. Wild chicken lays about ten
to fifteen eggs per year, and like you said, normally
in the spring, maybe in the early summer, that's just
not enough if you want eggs year round. So the
breeds that we developed, like the leg horns, which is

(39:00):
the top egg layer, the champ, they lay about three
hundred and fifty eggs per year year round.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
That's a lot.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
But before that, yeah, you could just hang on to eggs.
I almost said you could just sit on eggs for
a while thanks to cold storage.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
That's right, But you know, we said the French were
kind of grossed out by this. It wasn't just the French.
A lot of people had a hard time kind of
coming around to this idea of eating things that had
been around for a while, and false rumors spread that
you know, that stuff could make you sick, it could
cause cancer. So in nineteen eleven, as a pr rebuttal,

(39:37):
I guess, the Poultry, Butter and Egg Association had a
cold storage banquet at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago where
they served an entire meal of foods that had been
preserved through refrigeration to a lot of folks, including the
mayor and the health commissioner. It's sort of like, hey,
here's where we are now. You don't need to be
grossed out. And people said, okay, I may not be

(39:59):
grossed out, but I'm also like have to get use
the idea of not buying the eggs from the farmer
down the street, or getting my milk from down the street,
or the produce from the farmer down the street. And
so it took a while for people to come around
to just getting food away from a source they really
sort of knew personally entrusted, yeah, and that was.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
One of the roles of the FDA and the Pure
Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six was to
basically say, Okay, we get why you don't trust some
of these people because some of them are actual total scals.
Some of the people selling food. Apparently, one technique was
to if you had a bunch of meat that was
about a spoil, you just froze it and shipped it
and the person wouldn't be able to tell until they

(40:38):
thawed the meat out and tried to sell it. Yeah,
and you just rip them off. That was a big one.
Or if you had a cold storage facility, if you're
storing something for months, you need to keep it cold
for months. There can't be like a week where everything
breaks down and you just hang on to that stuff
and sell it anyway after things get back online. And
this was the kind of thing that like people in

(41:00):
the US, we're having to worry about. So thanks to
the Pure Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six
and then later on actual laws that gave it teeth,
that kind of helped set the stage for people to
finally relax and be like, Okay, I can deal with
frozen food. Because it was like the GMOs of its day,
like people were just like, it'll give you cancer if

(41:21):
you eat frozen food. Like it was like people did
not trust food that had been frozen.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
That's right. We should take our second break here at
minute forty two, and we're gonna come back finally with
home refrigeration right after this.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Stop.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or alumnia.

Speaker 5 (41:58):
How about the one on border like disorder, that cht
north border, that one being worn. But it was so
nice I learned, except body, listen.

Speaker 4 (42:15):
Shot, stop, stop, stop, all right.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
So, iceboxes had been a thing since you know, at
least in nineteenth century. Uh, they started to become more
and more common. And this is you know, a big
wooden sort of cabinet in your kitchen usually would and
it was lined with something like a tin lining or
zinc maybe, and the iceman would come around deliver a
big block of ice to your house. And that's how

(42:47):
things were kept cool in the icebox. And if you
are a gen xer or older, your grandparents may have
even said the word icebox. My grandmother certainly did, because
she lived to be one hundred and was around and
then when they called them ice and when they were icebox.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Right, and not just call them. Yeah, there's also that
whole excellent subgenre of desserts that are icebox like icebox cakes.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Yeah yeah, lemon icebox pie yeh. But finally, in nineteen fourteen,
we get our first mechanical refrigerator in the house. The
domestic electric refrigerator or the dome E l Re fridge
made its debut. And this was still not a fully
integrated refrigerator. It was a device that you got to

(43:31):
put in your ice box to keep things cool and
to keep that ice from melting.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah. So, yeah, it didn't take off. They weren't super reliable,
they were pretty expensive. But not too long later, a
decade or so later, nineteen twenty seven, GE introduced its refrigerator.
It's nicknamed the monitor top because there's a big round
turret on top of the refrigerator that gives it a

(43:56):
very distinctive look. It looks like a robot fashioned by
like a six Yeah, but monitor refers to the Civil
War ironclad USS monitor and that's just that was the nickname.
I was looking all over for what General Electric called it,
and they seem to have just called it refrigerator.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
Yeah, it's kind of cool looking if you want to
look up a photo, I mean, it looks as described leftovers.
And this was something I was really curious about that
had been a thing. It was eighteen seventy eight, I
think when that term was coin. But leftovers back then
meant like you got to eat this stuff the next

(44:36):
day because people didn't want their food to go bad.
People didn't waste stuff like they do now and just
throw stuff away. They didn't eat it, so dinner went
into the breakfast or the lunch, or it went into
a big pot the next day that was on the stove,
and you just had these big sort of stews of
leftover things. Now that you had the mechanical electric refrigerator,

(44:57):
all of a sudden, you could preserve stuff and you
could serve You didn't have to transform something. You could
like warm up and serve the same meal that you
ate a few days ago. And that was a pretty
radical thing at the time.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Oh yeah, for sure. Again though people were kind of like,
I don't know about this. I was about to say, fortunately,
but related to that scarcity during World War two and
World War One, but also the Great Depression, basically said hey, everybody,
you can't just like be throwing food away, like we
need to be very thrifty with food, and that really

(45:31):
kind of gave leftovers a big boost also because the
government came in and created propaganda campaigns to kind of
persuade people to start eating leftovers more because again, thanks
to your new handy ge refrigerator, you can do that
kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
That's right, it's pretty great, you know. The cold chain
is what really changed the game early on. But it
also changed like not just availability, but like literally creating
news of foods, like inventing new foods. Iceberg lettuce is
so named because it could hold up to being shipped
on ice and it is an iceberg. Hey man, I'll

(46:12):
go to bad for iceberg l really really yeah. I
think it's unfairly labeled as as junk and like iceberg
in with some arugula and a little romaine and some
leafy greens that went a little iceberg because it's so
crunchy and you don't get that kind of texture from
I mean maybe a little bit, but it's the crunchiest

(46:33):
lettuce to me, So I think it gets a very
snobby sort of people look down on it for for
bad reasons. My is my take. But I like a
little iceberg.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
Tell them what John Waters called iceberg lettuce.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
I thought that was great, the polyester of lettuce. Yeah.
But I was also raised a you know, lower middle
class kid who grew up eating iceberg lettuce, and so
it has a fun place in my heart.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
For that reason, I understand I hated salad, So maybe
that's why I hate iceberg lets, because that's all that's
all we got was iceberg as well, and like French
dressing or something like that, or ranch, and that was it,
and you ate it and you liked it, and you
shut up about it.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
I would party on an old school eighties iceberg salad
so hard for.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
Real, like even when you were a kid, you would
eat that.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
Uh yeah, I mean that's the only kind of you know.
I mean it's probably not even vegetable, but I considered
it a vegetable. I didn't like a lot of vegetables,
but I would eat a salad.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
So that's funny. I hated salad so much. I would
refuse to be served anything except for some iceberg lettuce
and some carrots. And I wouldn't even eat that. No
salad dress in nothing like whenever everyone else was finished.
If I was still eating my salad, I had to
stay at the table and finish it. And so at
that time I would just start slowly putting it bye
by bye under the credenza behind me. But then I

(47:55):
was shortsighted enough I didn't go back and clean it out.
So every few months, like the credit we get moved
and there'd be a pile of like desiccated iceberg, lettuce
and carrots.

Speaker 3 (48:05):
The other thing I like to use iceberg for now
is like, if you're making something in a lettuce cup,
iceberg works really well. Okay, oh yeah, yeah for sure,
like chicken larb.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Or something like that. Totally I'll agree with you on that.

Speaker 3 (48:17):
So frozen foods obviously wasn't a thing for a long
long time, but finally in the nineteen fifties they said, hey,
you know what, we can cool things, we can freeze things.
We can freeze meals, and we can freeze orange juice.
And I know we've already talked about TV dinners and
concentrated frozen concentrate orange juice, but those were two really
big game changers, only made possible for advances in refrigeration

(48:42):
and freezing and chipping.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
Yeah, and while we're on it, I believe in our
Food Origins episode, I don't remember what it was, but
we talked about the TV Dinner and we totally credited
Jerry Thomas as salesman for Swanson is coming up with
the idea. And since then it's become much clearer that

(49:05):
Jerry Thomas might have had almost nothing to do with this,
and that the real hero was a twenty one year
old bacteriologist named Betty Cronin, who was the one who
not only she might not have come up with the idea,
I think she said one of the Swanson sons did,
but she was the one who figured out how to
make it work and to make these meals that are

(49:25):
different foods entirely that all cook at the same time
and come out the way that they're supposed to. That
was all her.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
That's right. Betty Cronin unsurprisingly not forgotten, but doesn't get
nearly the accolades she should have gotten.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
No, she does now though.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
Yeah, way to correct the record, friend. So yeah, TV Dinners,
I mean I would go listen to that episode. It
was pretty great, but it definitely you know, it came
along as TV was coming along. And it was a
big deal. And even though I mean there are still
TV dinners sort of like that. But if you go
in the frozen fe I mean, I don't get any
of this stuff, But if you go the frozen food section,

(50:03):
I mean you can get almost any kind of meal
frozen these days.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah, even a iceberg lettuce is he Oh yeah, that's
not what that means anymore.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
Oh no, I'm not going to let someone ruin hawking
up a loogie for everybody. That's one of life's great pleasures, sir.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
There's one other thing I wanted to mention. So the
cold chain is now so diverse and there's so many
different versions of it all working together. It's now called
the cold web. And Olivia gives a great example of
what we can do now. We can catch a fish
in Norway, send it off to China for processing, and
then send it from China to the United States for eating,

(50:48):
all within a half an hour.

Speaker 3 (50:50):
That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Well maybe longer than that, but still it is still amazing.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
Anything else, you should do an episode on gullibility.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Nice idea? You got anything else?

Speaker 3 (51:03):
I got nothing else.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
I got ten twelve more minutes worth the material. Do
you mind just sitting there.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
No, let's do it.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
Since Chuck said let's do it, I think it's time
for listener mail.

Speaker 3 (51:16):
This is about the Pink House. Hey, guys, I can't
believe there is finally a subject I can share some
information about. Every year I would visit my cousins who
live about twenty minutes away from Plumb Island, and heading
to the beach was a yearly activity. As we all
grew and we had our own families, the yearly gathering
at Plumb Island got bigger and better, and passing the
Pink House has always been to tell that you were

(51:37):
just a few minutes away from the beach. I grew
up hearing the same story you guys shared about that
being a spite house, and believed it to be true,
as it truly sits alone on the Salt March. It's
pretty weird looking. Just last month, though, being a new
homeowner on the island, I was sent a town newsletter
in which a tribute to the Pink House gave a
different history. I've attached the article for you to read.

(51:58):
While it wasn't quite built with spite, there seems to
have been some spite in the story. Our family loves
the show and even flew to Boston to take our
two adult girls who live in Boston to see you live.
Thanks to you, we are walking local experts on the
biosphere too. And that is from Amy Sandy, who is wonderful.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Number one, thank you for
coming to see our show. And number two, congratulations on
your new house.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
Yeah for sure.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
And number three, thank you for sending us a delightful email.
And if you want to be like Amy, you can
send us an email too. To stuff podcasts at iHeartRadio
dot com.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.