# Ice in the olden days...
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [June 18, 2003, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781 "2003-06-18T20:21:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@McDeath\_the\_Mad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/McDeath_the_Mad)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/1 "2003-06-18T20:21:21Z")
I’ve noticed in westerns people often have “ice houses” to store meat.
In the days of pre-refridgeration, just where did this ice come from? Was it chipped out in the winter and stored in super insulated sheds and divied-out as needed?
If this is the case, was the insulation good enough to have ice year round?
And a follow-up question, when did man first have the ability to make ice blocks using refridgeration?
MtM
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### Author:  [@Rayne\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rayne_Man)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/2 "2003-06-18T20:38:54Z")
I know many of the stately houses in England have ice houses. They used to get the ice from their own lakes in winter. They had thick brick or stone walls with straw giving extra insulation.I think that a hundred or so years ago winters in the UK were much colder and there was more chances to collect the ice.
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### Author:  [@jeel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jeel)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/3 "2003-06-18T20:38:55Z")
I read a book once, and they usually got ice from frozen lakes and such during the winter and stored it during the warmer months for as long as it would last. I’m not sure it lasted all summer or not.
My guess is that if you collected enough ice, you could insulate it well enough to keep the mass through until the next winter.
I don’t know if I remember exactly when the first “freezer” was invented, but IIRC it was in the 30’s.
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### Author:  [@DreadCthulhu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DreadCthulhu)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/4 "2003-06-18T20:41:31Z")
They did in fact chip it out lakes during the river, and normally sawdust was used as insulation for long term storage of the ice.
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### Author:  [@jeel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jeel)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/5 "2003-06-18T20:41:33Z")
They usually got ice from frozen lakes and such during the winter and stored it during the warmer months for as long as it would last. I’m not sure it lasted all summer or not.
My guess is that if you collected enough ice, you could insulate it well enough to keep the mass through until the next winter.
I don’t know if I remember exactly when the first “freezer” was invented, but IIRC it was in the 30’s.
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### Author:  [@jeel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jeel)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/6 "2003-06-18T20:44:43Z")
Nice…two posts. :rolleyes: Sorry about that.
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### Author:  [@legion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/legion)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/7 "2003-06-18T21:09:51Z")
The Romans of 2000 years ago used ice all year round.
They would transport a one metre square block of ice - from the mountains I suppose - stick it in a pit and insulated it with straw. It would easily last all year, even in the temperate climate of Rome.
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### Author:  [@Lagged2Death](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lagged2Death)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/8 "2003-06-18T21:22:20Z")
I believe one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (Farmer Boy?) described the process of sawing enormous blocks of ice from a lake, to be packed in a thick layer of sawdust in an ice-house.
I think I saw a picture in an old National Geographic of the the aftermath of an ice-house fire. Little of the building itself remained, save for a few scorched beams and some ash. But the pile of ice inside was still quite imposing. I guess sawdust is a pretty good insulator.
According to [this museum site,](http://www.cedarfallshistorical.org/ice_house_museum.htm) at least a few harvest-and-store type ice-houses were still going concerns into the 1930s.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/9 "2003-06-18T21:43:20Z")
The second volume of Daniel J. Boorstin’s great trilogy, the Americans, has a chapter detailing the creation of the ice industry in New England in the early part of the 19th century.
> [@](#):
>
> By 1846, sixty-five thousand tons were shipped; only ten years later more than twice that amount went in nearly four hundred different shipments to over fifty different destinations in the United States, the Caribbean, South America, the East Indies, China, the Philippines, and Australia.
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### Author:  [@MC\_Master\_of\_Ceremonies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MC_Master_of_Ceremonies)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2003, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/10 "2003-06-18T21:57:43Z")
My family’s estate in Devon has an ice house and they also have ice ponds there (the people who have the house and the title now are something ridculous like 3rd or 4th cousins to me, but it was the seat of my ancestors). Ice houses are usually dug into the ground.
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### Author:  [@Dancing\_Fool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dancing_Fool)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2003, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/11 "2003-06-19T02:06:17Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by McDeath\_the\_Mad \*
> **And a follow-up question, when did man first have the ability to make ice blocks using refridgeration?**
First have the ability? Probably this
> [@](#):
>
> The first known artificial refrigeration was demonstrated by William Cullen at the University of Glasgow in 1748. Cullen let ethyl ether boil into a partial vacuum; he did not, however, use the result to any practical purpose.
Or when was there actually a machine available that could do it? Sometime soon after this (these very first machines were capable of cooling, but not freezing)
> [@](#):
>
> Commercial refrigeration is believed to have been initiated by an American businessperson, Alexander C. Twinning, in 1856. Shortly afterward, an Australian, James Harrison, examined the refrigerators used by Gorrie and Twinning and introduced vapor-compression refrigeration to the brewing and meatpacking industries.
DancingFool
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### Author:  [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2003, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/12 "2003-06-19T02:26:41Z")
In the upper Great Lakes states, the annual ice harvest was a big part of the local economy during the Nineteenth Century. See [here](http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/wis150/stories/1217sesq.stm) for story and pictures of the ice harvest in Wisconsin.
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### Author:  [@Zenster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zenster)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2003, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ice-in-the-olden-days/182781/13 "2003-06-19T05:06:54Z")
And then there’s the darker side of ice harvesting as told in Upton Sinclair’s, “The Jungle.” Written in 1906 (before the advent of mechanical refrigeration), he mentions how a (semi) fictional meat packing plant would dump their offal and effluent into a big holding pond next door throughout the year.
_Every winter they would carve up the ice and sell it to the local neighborhood_.