The History of Refrigeration

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or domain. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh.
There's Chuck and Jerry Chili Willy Roland is here doing the recording, wearing a little red beanie looking all cute and this is stuff you should know. You can see Jerry? In my mind's eye.
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.
And notch up. And she's wearing a little red beanie and looks like a mini penguin yeah but she has uh you can't smell her she has a button to allow me to smell her oh even though she's in la and you know what it smells like miso yep but she may have gotten that miso from the fridge.
Oh, okay. All right.

I see what you're doing.

Nice work, Chuck. That was a good old-fashioned 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, that's all right.
Yes, we are talking about refrigeration, which is why you brought that up. And again, nice work.
um we one of those, I guess, topics that has popped up myriad ways in myriad episodes.

So, I mean, literally 30,000 ways in 30,000 episodes.

And this is one of those stuff you should know things where we're just going to bring it all together and finally talk about the main topic.

Yeah.

Big thanks to Livia 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 I maybe got something out of the fridge one day and was like, oh, man, refrigerators, they really changed the game. Did you say that to yourself out loud, or were you just thinking this? I think I did, and Emily said, what the heck are you talking about? And of course they did, but I was kind of curious.
I bet it's changed the game in more ways than I think, and that was sort of Libby's charge, and here we go with that because I think it did change in more ways than I thought it to have. Oh, I was going to ask that.
I had a follow up question and then you just answered it. Yes, it was satisfying.
The result was for me. So I think initially you were thinking like refrigerators, like home refrigeration, maybe like warehouse refrigeration, fairly recent refrigeration.
But Livia, like you said, who helps us with this one, no no, no, and wagged her finger and said, this stuff goes way back beyond this chalk. And you said, how did you get in my kitchen? Right.
Yeah, so we're going to start early, way, way before mechanical refrigeration. There was still refrigeration, which just means keeping something cold.
A refrigerator is a 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 been trying to keep things cold in various ways.

Yeah, cold keeps the flies away.

Yeah, exactly.

Flies don't like cold.

So one of the things that people have long loved to do is cool down their drinks, right? It's just something you take for granted these days, but that's one of the first uses people put cold storage or refrigeration to, which was to store ice so that they could chop it off with the ancient ice pick, probably made of a bone or tusk or something like that and put it in their drinks and um as we'll see like that 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 it's one of the first things they do to it and it's also um almost always a sign of wealth to start off for sure. Yeah, I find it interesting that, and, you know, I've traveled my fair share around Europe and I was shocked early on in my 20s 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 dough, they were putting ice in those drinks.
And that's because iced drinks are better. Yeah.
Across the board. To me, they are.
I know everyone has their own thing. 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. 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.
Hey, unless you just like a straight up warm room temperature, neat whiskey, which is your prerogative. Sure, of course.
You need to be cooling those drinks down really well. Like a cool drink isn't great.
You got to have it cold. I remember there's one of the lamest mixology trends that somebody tried to start.
And it was around long enough for there to be some press on it. And it just went away inevitably.
It was room temperature cocktails. Oh, God.
Yeah. Like, why would you do that that you might as well make sure that every single one of them has to have celery bitters in it too yeah and and i know we're gonna get people that say like i don't like things that cold so even if they don't have teeth sensitivity so again my teeth 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.
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 a hundred percent there, Chuck.
I'm sorry. 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 cooled, so it's still pretty cold. 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 you're going to be torn.
Well, I believe you because you said it. 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. I love that.
But supposedly that's not the way. But I love that.
I love it too. It's so good.
Oh, and we're 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.
Yes, I love that too. And then also when they leave $5,000 in cash with you as well for no reason other than ordering the $5,000 martini.
All right. So people are cooling their drinks with ice in ancient times and places around the 7th century.
Of course, the Chinese are always discovering the biggest and best ways to do things way back in the day. They found out that.
You hedged yourself right then. And I was like, oh, be careful.
Salt peter, which is used in making gum powder, was found to absorb heat when dissolved in water. So they would...
Did not know that. Maybe one of the first artificial cooling methods was to make a little salt peter bath, and you would just sit a jar of whatever you wanted to keep cool in that cooler water.
Pretty cool. Get it?

Yep.

That's going to happen many times and I'll never do it on purpose.

So I just apologize in advance.

Yeah.

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.
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

Thank you. 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, the cooler air from around the vessel of water that's evaporating, you have yourself a primitive air conditioning system that's sometimes called a swamp cooler, 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 fresher, it's not a bad way to do it for sure.
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 it, an effect.
But I also saw a swamp, ironically. Yeah.
I thought that was weird too. I also saw one of the other really basic uses for it 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 laypeople call it, the breeze pushes that cooler air into your house. And I realized that I was having trouble envisioning this stuff or 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. That's how desperate they were to cool down.
Yeah. I imagine knocking something down a few degrees makes a big difference, you know, in the pre-AC days, you know? For sure.
Burying things in the ground is also a good way to keep things cool. You know, like three to five feet down, you're going to find pretty consistent temperatures depending on where you are.
If you're in the north, it can be 45, 50 degrees down there, more like 70 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 a cordoned off area with stacked rocks in a very cold mountain river to put like jugs of milk and stuff like that in when we were camping as a family. 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 an enclosure around it. But first within the enclosure, what you want to build is like, um, kind of like a widened area for the stream to flow into.
And then it kind of fills up and then exits the other side 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 it 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 crocks and stuff so it's just like doing it in a stream but you're basically making it a little easier to store your things in there you could put more stuff in it than you would if you just threw it in the stream like a total hayseed like even even the mountainest of mountain people are like you don't you didn't go to the trouble of building a spring house for somebody who just throws it into the stream themselves. Yeah.
So far, I'm keeping track now, you have name checked eggheads, lay people, and hayseeds. And mountain folk.
Yeah. And mountain folk.
That's what we do here. So in the 17th 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 community would use it for different things. And also chilling those drinks still.
But, you know, 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.
Yeah, also remember in our Feed a 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, if 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.
Yeah. Or of course, any, you know, uh, sprains and, you know, muscle pulls, things like that, heat and ice can be used in various ways.
Sure. The rice method, you know? Sure.
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 yak chal that Persians created that to listeners may or may not sound familiar depending on when we release the short stuff on it.
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.
It was pretty cool. Yeah, but it was like an ancient Persian ice-making machine that dates back at least to 400 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 this for a really long time and they figured out some really ingenious technologies that harness 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 or 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. 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 most New Yorker things are, about Frederick Tudor, the ice king, who's around in the 19th century.
And he was the guy that was like, hey, we got all this ice 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 put some on a ship and sent some toward 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 shipped all over the world in the 19th century, which is and making it there, which is kind of hard to believe.
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. Igloos? 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 Thoreau because one of the places where he was cutting ice from was Walden Lake, and Thoreau noted the Ice King cutting ice in Walden Pond, sorry, Mainers, while he was writing his book Walden.
I think he appears in Walden. Two things.
You just name-checked Mainers. That's another one.
And Henry David Thoreau, the original hippie. 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 the woods.

And, you know, the big joke at the end is they made it like 30 minutes or something.

It wasn't the best comedy work, you know, for a ninth grader.

It was OK.

Sure.

But people should go check it out.

So 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 in 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 once again, signing off, I've been your guide. And people are like, oh, my God, you are 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 stuff out.

People got a real kick out of it.

For sure.

I'll go check it out.

You would like it.

And it's not like I avoid your Instagram.

I just don't go on Instagram much.

OK.

I know that, buddy.

I know you're telling everyone else that, but I know that's not your jam.

Yeah.

So I talked about how like 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 Tekoa, or Tekoa, I saw different spellings, in what's now Syria. And he used it to ice his drinks almost 4,000 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? Yeah.

And in doing these things, as we've gotten better and better at it,

it started to have 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. Hey, everyone.
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Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or alluminia.

How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, birth order Heard that one before 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 spring and summer, maybe even into fall a little bit, you would have things like, like dairy and poultry and meat.
And then as winter- Freshere veggies. Yes.
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.
I didn't know this until the 19th 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. Um, and a lot of it was grains too, right? Stuff you could store fairly easily.
Um, and then when we started learning how to preserve food with refrigeration and got better 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 niacin, vitamin B3 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 type of like severe malnutrition that people would just annually get 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 changed.
That spring sickness went away. And I'm also the first person in history to say the word refrigerating.
Also, before people write in, they were definitely pickling things before they were canning. You could still pickle things.
Okay, cool. So yes, you could pickle your neighbor then.
Yeah, they had jars and stuff like that. Well, what's the deal then? I mean, they just hadn't figured out how to use heat baths and that kind of thing? 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 sealing, maybe canning should be an episode.
All right. And we can figure that out.
Yeah, let's figure it out. I can regale everyone with more tales of being drugged to the cannery as a child.
That's right. I forgot about that.
Which is actually true. It makes me sound 100 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 and chemist from the University of Glasgow in the 18th century, 1748, named William Cullen, who it looks like did the first 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 ether, and he would pump it out of a container and it would come to a boil and that heat would pull all, heat from the surrounding area, just like it did back in old days.
It was just sort of different, um, a different medium and that would cool things down. 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 gotta 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 look all over for how william cullen's thing worked and apparently no one knows because the same like four or five sentences are basically copy and pasted everywhere on the internet oh That's frustrating.
So we do know that in the before even 1750, 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 artificial refrigerant rather than just say water.
Although water is an excellent refrigerant in a lot of different applications. Yeah, for sure.
A guy, an American this time named Jacob Perkins came along about 50-ish years later in 1834. 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 lot better.
But he used a vapor compression cycle. Again, it's all about 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.
Yeah. So 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? Like, why would you put something into low pressure and heat it up for the next step to be to like depressurize it and cool it down? And then you turn 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 liquid or higher pressure gas.
Like they can cool and heat and 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 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 I finally got it, Chuck.

Okay.

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 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 a sucker for falling for it but that's exactly what it does every time and now the inside of your refrigerator is way colder I think it's kind of amazing too, because it's the opposite of what I always thought was going on.
Yeah, that's super cool. I love that.
They've used various liquids over the years. Ammonia is one they use for a while, methyl chloride for a while.
All of these things were toxic though. So until they figured out a safer way, which they would soon enough, people would actually die.
In the 1920s, there were cases where methyl chloride leaks happened, actually killed people. And then they said, you know what, maybe we should come up with a synthetic substance that does basically the same thing.
So they came up with dichlorofluoromethane, aka freon. And until the 1990s, freon was the go-to.
And then we said, hey, that's not so great either because of our environment and the ozone layer. And so let's develop even newer, safer chemicals to keep things cool.
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, CO2, as a one. That's like the baseline because we know how much it warms the atmosphere over 100 years.
So it has a global warming potential or GWP of one. Carbon dioxide does.
Hydrofluorocarbons have a global warming potential of 14,800. That's a lot more than CO2 if you really stop and think about it.
And these are the refrigerants we're still using. These are the alternatives that we developed and started using in the 90s.
So it's like we go from the frying pan into the fire whenever we try to do something environmental, 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 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 1850s, they started, and this to me is just like super ingenious.
They started keeping railroad cars cool by using ice. So they would, they were called reefers, R-E-E-F-E-R, a reefer was a refrigerated, you know, rail car.
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 them like a breeze past 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 meatpacking industry really got on board because they said, we've been shipping live cows across country for people to take care of when they get there, when we can butcher everything in one place and ship out this, what they call dead meat. It's disgusting, but that's what they called it.
Right. That's what sixth grade bullies call you, too, when they tell you to meet them in the playground at three.
Dead meat. But 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 like that.
Yeah, that's right. 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 30 years after

we figured out how to refrigerate meat or ship refrigerated meat.

Yeah. Yeah.
That's incredible. That's a lot of dead cows.
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.
We 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. And have you have you ever had not just an orange in 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 uh u.s fruit i think was one of the first companies um to get involved in like sending

their good stuff all over the place. And as a result, obviously, the prices really, really dropped.
There was an article in the New York Sun in 1894 that talked about the price of pears went from 40 cents to two for a nickel in just a couple of decades, thanks to refrigerated cars. It's even more impressive when you adjust for inflation.
So a single pair was $11 in the 1870s, and they were two for $1.80 in the 1890s, 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 never did? Oh, we always did.
And I was always like, why is there an orange in the bottom of this stocking making it seem like there's way more stuff in here than there actually is? 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.

Sure.

I'm guessing that the reason I did and you didn't is because I was raised in the north, the Midwest. I'll bet that's why.
And so it was like a like a Midwestern tradition because we didn't have access to oranges and you could eat an orange year round. Basically, you lucky duck.
trains eventually shipping wise gave way to trucks and they said, Hey, now we got these trucks that, uh, we can, you know, refrigerate as well. And so we're not, um, you know, things were built around industries, entire industry, 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 it was in that What Did We Eat episode when we talked about Chicago. Like the whole meatpacking 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 throw it on a refrigerated truck to get it across country. 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 cold chain started to emerge and evolve. 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 it or not, but the very first private rail cars were these meatpackers refrigerated cars.
They just did this on their own as like a great business move. But 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. 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-19th century. His name was Charles Tellier.
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.
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 the dream to its fullest. But he tried.
He actually got a British steamer ship and outfitted it with a refrigerator. Even named it Le Frigurifique.
Yeah. Like fantastic, basically.
But fantastic refrigerator is basically what it means.

Yeah, that sounds like a magnificent product.

Like magnifique, but refrigerator.

The fantastic refrigerator concern.

And this was in 1877, and he was bringing beef across the ocean from Uruguay to Paris.

And when they got there, he was like, everyone's going to love this.

And the French were like, you think I'm eating meat that's been dead for a month? Yeah. You're crazy.
And we're going to pass a bunch of laws that ban this kind of thing for the next 20 years. And tell your screech, I'm not crazy.
Shut up. Take it back.
Yeah, exactly. So like you said, he died penniless, as you like to say.
But his legacy lived on. Eventually, people said like, OK, we can get used to this.
But 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 little while when it got to where it's going.
Like, it's not like the train stopped at 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 was part of the cold chain.

He worked in at least, I guess that's where he worked was a cold storage place.

Yeah, yeah.

Like a meatpacker storage facility, I think.

By the way, second Rocky reference in here.

That was another very subtle one.

We'll see if listeners can pick that out.

It already happened?

Yeah, yeah. A little Easter egg.
I didn't pick it out. I want to know.
All right. I'm going to tell you off air.
Ready? I'll tell you right now. Oh.
Okay. Thank you for telling me.
It sounded like you were acting just then. Then you 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 1860s.
And, you know, it wasn't like your refrigerator cold, but they were storing like fruit and produce. So it basically is like, hey, you don't get too warm and spoil is what they were trying to accomplish there.
Yeah, it didn't have to be frozen necessarily. No, no, no.
But by 1904, this was a legitimate thing. There were more than 600 huge storage, you know, cold storage facilities.
I think 102 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 eggs year round, they were basically laying in the. And people wanted those eggs in the winter.
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.
It lays about 10 to 15 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-. So the breeds that we developed, like the Leghorns, which is the top egg layer, the Champ, they lay about 350 eggs per year, year round.
That's a lot. 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. 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 1911, as a PR rebuttal, 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, as sort of like, hey, here's where we are now. You don't need to be grossed out.
And people said, OK, I may not be grossed out, but I'm also like I have to get used to 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 one of the roles of the FDA and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was to basically say, OK, we get why you don't trust some of these people, because some of them are actual total scales.
Some of the people selling food. Apparently, one technique was to if you had a bunch of meat that was about to spoil, you just froze it and shipped it and the person wouldn't be able to tell until they thawed the meat out and tried to sell it.
And you just ripped 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 the U.S. were having to worry about.
So thanks to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 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, OK, 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 you eat frozen food.

Like it was like people did not trust food that had been frozen.

That's right.

We should take our second break here at minute 42.

And we're going to come back finally

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Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua.
It's stuff. It's stuff.
It's stuff. You should know.
Alright, so iceboxes had been a thing since, you know, at least the 19th century. They started to become more and more common.
And this is, you know, a big wooden sort of cabinet in your kitchen, usually wood. And it was lined with something like a tin lining or zinc, maybe.
And the ice man would come around, deliver a big block of ice to your house. And that's how 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 a hundred and was around when they were iceboxes.

Right, not just call them. Yeah, there's also that whole excellent subgenre of desserts that are icebox, like icebox cakes.
Yeah, yeah, lemon icebox pie. But finally in 1914, we get our first mechanical refrigerator in the house, the Domestic Electric refrigerator or the d-o-M-E-L-R-E fridge, made its debut.
And this was still not a fully integrated refrigerator. It was a device that you got to put in your icebox to keep things cool and to keep that ice from melting.
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, in 1927, 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 very distinctive look. It looks like a robot fashioned by like a sixth grader.
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. 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 1878, I think, when that term was coined. But leftovers back then meant like you got to eat this stuff the next 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 if 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, 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.
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 II and World War I, 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 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. 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 new kinds of foods, like inventing new foods.

Iceberg lettuce is so named because it could hold... like not just availability, but like literally creating new kinds of foods, like inventing

new foods.

Iceberg lettuce is so named because it could hold up to being shipped on ice. And it has the same taste as an iceberg.
Hey, man, I'll go to bad for iceberg lettuce. Really? Really? Yeah.
I think it's unfairly labeled as junk. and like iceberg in with some arugula and a little romaine and some leafy greens.
Throw in a little iceberg because it's so crunchy. Sure.
And you don't get that kind of texture from, I mean, maybe a little bit, but it's the crunchiest lettuce to me. So I think it gets a very snobby sort of people look down on it for bad reasons is my take.
But I like a little iceberg. Tell them what John Waters called iceberg lettuce.
I thought that was great. The polyester of lettuce.
Yeah. But I was also raised a lower middle class kid who grew up eating iceberg lettuce.
Okay. I was too.
It has a fond place in my heart for that reason. I understand.
I hated salad. So maybe that's why I hate iceberg lettuce.
Cause 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.
I would party on an old school eighties iceberg salad so hard. For real.
Like even when you were a kid, you would eat that? Yeah. I mean, that's the only kind of, you know, I mean, it's probably not even a vegetable, but I considered it a vegetable.
I didn't like a lot of vegetables, but I would eat a salad. 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 dressing, 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 bite by bite under the credenza behind me.
But then I was short-sighted enough. I didn't go back and clean it out.
So every few months, like the credenza would get moved and there'd be a pile of like desiccated iceberg lettuce and carrots. 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, yeah.
For sure. Like chicken larb or something like that.
Totally. I'll agree with you on that.
So frozen foods obviously wasn't a thing for a long, long time. But finally, in the 1950s, 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 and freezing and chipping.
Yeah. And while we're on it, I believe in our like food origins episode.
I don't remember what it was, but we talked about the TV dinner and we totally credited Jerry Thomas, a salesman for Swanson, is coming up with the idea. And since then, it's become much clearer that Jerry Thomas might have had almost nothing to do with this and that the real hero was a 21-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 different foods entirely that all cook at the same time and come out the way that they're supposed to. That was all her.
That's right. Betty Cronin, unsurprisingly, not forgotten, but doesn't get nearly the accolades she should have gotten.
No. She does now, though.
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 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 food, I mean, I don't get any of this stuff.
But if you go to the frozen food section, I mean, you can get almost any kind of meal frozen these days.

Yeah, even iceberg lettuce.

See?

Look to it.

Oh, yeah.

That's not what that means anymore.

Oh, no.

I'm not going to let someone ruin hocking up a loogie for everybody. That's one of life's great pleasures.

For sure.

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 Livia 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.
Wow. All within a half an hour.
That's amazing. Well, maybe longer than that, but still, it is still amazing.
You got anything else? You should do an episode on gullibility. Nice idea.
You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got 10, 12 more minutes worth of material.
Do you mind just sitting there? No, let's do it. Since Chuck said let's do it, I think it's time for listener mail.
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'd visit my cousins who live about 20 minutes away from Plum Island and heading to the beach was a yearly activity. As we all grew and we had our own families, the yearly gathering at Plum Island got bigger and better.
And passing the pink house has always been the tell that you're just a few minutes away from the beach. I grew up hearing the same story you guys shared about it being a spite house and believed it to be true as it truly sits alone on the salt marsh.
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. 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 2.
And that is from Amy Sandy, who is wonderful. Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy.
Number one, thank you for coming to see our show. And number two, congratulations on your new house.

Yeah. Sandy, who is wonderful.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Number one, thank you for coming to see our show.
And number two, congratulations on your new house. Yeah, for sure.
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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but starts driving costs down.

I would love to see that.

We're on our way.

I hope so.

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