Ice Boxes vs. Refrigerators

Jonathan Rees

I’ve written previously here about the good and bad sides of suddenly being able to access the world’s biggest libraries through Google Books when you have a research project that you’d like to finish someday. Another Google experiment that debuted while I was working on Refrigeration Nation was Google Ngrams.

Ngrams, if you don’t know about them, chart the frequency of words or phrases as they appeared in volumes scanned by the Google Books project against the years that those books were published. (See Eric Schultz's post from last month.) Yes, it is incredibly easy to lose several hours playing with this research tool. Luckily for me, I already knew what I wanted to chart as soon as I heard of it:

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That is the chart for “ice box” vs. “refrigerator.” (For what it’s worth, icebox [one word] looks almost identical.) What I really appreciate about that chart is that it basically illustrates something that my research already told me: before the electric household refrigerator came along, “ice boxes” were called “refrigerators.” Before explaining that statement a little better, let me define terms. While often used interchangeably with the word “refrigerator” by people over sixty, an ice box in the historical sense refers to a box with ice in it designed to keep perishable food fresh. The first ice boxes were made by carpenters in the 1840s, designed to take advantage of something new in American life: the regular household delivery of large blocks of ice that could be obtained daily in large cities and even small ones. Now, instead of going to market every day for your vegetables or fresh meats, consumers could buy for more than one day of meals at once, and keep the extra food in their ice box.

Ice, Ice Baby

Jonathan Rees

When I titled my book Refrigeration Nation, I had to fight the urge to try out any number of bad puns first. Somehow doing that for blog posts seems more acceptable since they’re more transient. So no, I’m not going to make you watch a Vanilla Ice video (although I’m sorely tempted). Instead, take a look at this:



By the time this amateur film was made in 1919, the practices it documents had largely passed into history. Testing  ice for thickness, cutting a grid pattern on the ice with what looks exactly like horse-drawn plows, moving blocks of ice across a narrow channel cut in a lake and into an ice house – each of these practices began over a century earlier in New England. Even today it seems incredible that New England once sent its ice for sale as far away as India. Other than shipbuilding and fishing, this may have been that region’s largest industry.