The Conquest of Cold by Tom Shachtman
Refrigerated railroad cars played a fateful role
in the final subjugation of native cultures in the American West.
Artificially
produced refrigeration has been the least noted of the three technological
breakthroughs of great significance to the growth of cities that came to the
fore between the 1860s and the 1880s. More emphasis has been given to the role
played by the elevator and by the varying means of communication, first the
telegraph and later the telephone. The elevator permitted buildings to be
erected higher than the half-dozen stories a worker or resident could
comfortably climb; telegraphs and telephones enabled companies to locate
managerial and sales headquarters at a distance from the ultimate consumers of
goods and services.
Refrigeration
had equal impact, allowing the establishment of larger populations farther than
ever from the sources of their food supplies. These innovations helped
consolidate the results of the Industrial Revolution, and after their
introduction, the populations of major cities doubled each quarter century,
first in the United States—where technologies took hold earlier than they
did in older countries—and then elsewhere in the world.
An
index of civilization
A
spate of fantastic literature also began to appear at this time; in books such
as Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, set in 1960, indoor climate control was
mentioned, though its wonders were not fully explored. From the mid-19th
century on, most visions of technologically rich futures included predictions
of control over indoor and sometimes outdoor temperature.
In
addition to flocking to cities for jobs, Americans also became urbanites in the
latter part of the 19th century because there seemed to be fewer hospitable
open spaces into which an exploding population could expand. Large areas of the
United States were too hot during many months of the year to sustain colonies
of human beings; these included the Southwest and parts of the Southeast, with
their tropical and semitropical climates, deserts, and swamps. Looked at in retrospect, the
principal limitation on people settling in those areas was the lack of
air-conditioning and home refrigeration.
In
the second half of the 19th century, the use of cold in the home became an
index of civilization. In New York, 45 percent of the population kept
provisions in natural-ice home refrigerators. It was said in this period that
if all the natural-ice storage facilities along the Hudson River in New York
State were grouped together, they would account for seven miles of its length.
Consumption of ice in New York rose steadily from the 100,000 tons-per-year level
of 1860 toward a million tons annually in 1880. But while the per capita use of
ice in large American cities climbed to two-thirds of a ton annually, in
smaller cities it remained lower, a quarter of a ton per person per year.
Ice
age
When
New York apple growers felt competitively squeezed by western growers who
shipped their products in by refrigerated railroad car, they hired experts to
improve the quality of their own apples. A specialist was hired to help prevent
blue mold, a disease affecting oranges, so that California's oranges
would be more appealing to New York consumers than oranges from Central and
South America.
Believing
there were not enough good clams to eat on the West Coast, the city fathers of
San Francisco ordered a refrigerator carload of eastern bivalves to plant in
San Francisco Bay, founding a new industry there. Commenting in 1869 on the
first refrigerated railroad-car shipment of strawberries from Chicago to New
York, Scientific American
predicted, "We shall expect to see grapes raised in California and
brought over the Pacific Railroad for sale in New York this season."
The conventional view is that the "iron horse" finally killed off
the "red man"; but one could with as much justification say that it
was the refrigerator.
The
desire for refrigeration continued to grow, almost exponentially, but the
perils associated with using sulfuric acid, ammonia, ether, and other chemicals
in vapor compression and absorption systems remained a constraint on greater
use of artificial ice, as did the high costs of manufacturing ice compared with
the low costs of what had become a superbly efficient natural-ice industry.
Artificial
refrigeration finally began to surpass natural-ice refrigeration in the
American West and Midwest in the mid-1870s. In the space of a few years, as a
result of the introduction of refrigeration, hog production grew 86 percent,
and the annual export of American beef (in ice-refrigerated ships) to the
British Isles rose from 109,500 pounds to 72 million pounds. Simultaneously,
the number of refrigerated railroad cars in the United States skyrocketed from
a few thousand to more than 120,000.
The
rise of refrigeration
Growth
of the American railroads and of refrigeration went hand in hand; moreover, the
ability conveyed by refrigeration to store food and to transport slaughtered
meat in a relatively fresh state led to huge, socially significant increases in
the food supply, and to changes in the American social and geographical
landscape.
"Slaughter
of livestock for sale as fresh meat had remained essentially a local industry
until a practical refrigerator car was invented," Oscar Anderson's
1953 historical study of the spread of refrigeration in the United States
reported. And because refrigeration permitted processing to go on year-round,
hog farmers no longer had to sell hogs only at the end of the summer, the
traditional moment for sale—and the moment when the market was glutted
with harvest-fattened hogs—but could sell them whenever they reached their
best weight.
In
Great Britain, the Bell family of Glasgow, who wanted to replace the
natural-ice storage rooms on trans-Atlantic ships with artificially
refrigerated rooms that could make their own ice, sought advice from another
Glaswegian, Lord Kelvin. Lord
Kelvin assisted the engineer J. Coleman in designing what became the
Bell-Coleman compressed-air machine, which the Bells used to aid in the
transport of meat to the British Isles from as far away as Australia. Because
of refrigeration, every region of the world able to produce meat, vegetables,
or fruit could now be used as a source for food to sustain people in cities
even half a world away. Oranges in winter were no longer a luxury affordable
only by kings.
A
fateful association
Refrigeration
in combination with railroads helped cause the wealth of the United States to
begin to flow west, raising the per capita income of workers in the
food-packing and transshipment centers of Chicago and Kansas City at the
expense of workers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Refrigeration enabled
midwestern dairy farmers, whose cost of land was low, to undercut the prices
charged for butter and cheese by the dairy farmers of the Northeast.
Refrigeration made it possible for St. Louis and Omaha packers to ship dressed
beef, mutton, or lamb to market at a lower price per pound than it cost to ship
live animals, and when the railroad magnates tried to coerce the packers to pay
the same rate for dressed meat as for live animals, the packers built their own
refrigerated railcars and forced a compromise.
The
enormous jump in demand for meat, accelerated by refrigerated storage and
transport, spurred ranchers and the federal government to take over millions of
acres in the American West for use in raising cattle. This action brought on
the last phase of the centuries-long push by European colonizers to rid America
of its native tribes, by forcing to near extinction the buffalo and the Native
American tribes whose lives centered on the buffalo. The conventional view of
American history is that it was the "iron horse" that finally
killed off the "red man"; but one could with as much justification
say that it was the refrigerator.
