A Pond in Massachusetts
One man cut ice from a lake in 1806. Follow the consequences and you arrive at a hole in the sky.
- In 1806 a Boston merchant filled a ship with ice cut from a pond and sailed it to the Caribbean.
In 1806 a Boston merchant filled a ship with ice cut from a pond and sailed it to the Caribbean. The newspapers treated it as a joke, and most of the cargo arrived intact.
- The trade only worked because of sawdust.
The trade only worked because of sawdust. Packed around the blocks it cut melting dramatically, and the lumber mills upriver had been treating it as waste.
- Cheap ice meant you could move meat instead of animals.
Cheap ice meant you could move meat instead of animals. Refrigerated rail cars let Chicago do the slaughtering and ship the beef, rather than walking live herds to every city.
- Those packing houses ran carcasses past stationary workers on overhead rails, each man making one cut.
Those packing houses ran carcasses past stationary workers on overhead rails, each man making one cut. Henry Ford credited the sight of it as the origin of his assembly line.
- The ice trade was then killed by the machine that replaced it.
The ice trade was then killed by the machine that replaced it. Electric home refrigerators arrived in the 1910s, and within a generation almost nobody was harvesting ponds.
- Those early refrigerators ran on ammonia, sulphur dioxide and methyl chloride.
Those early refrigerators ran on ammonia, sulphur dioxide and methyl chloride. Leaks killed people in their sleep, and papers carried stories of families found dead in the morning.
- A chemist was hired to find something safer.
A chemist was hired to find something safer. He produced a gas that would neither burn nor poison anyone, and demonstrated it to a room of engineers by inhaling a lungful and…
- That same chemist had already solved another problem by adding lead to petrol.
That same chemist had already solved another problem by adding lead to petrol. One man's two great industrial successes became the worst atmospheric lead contamination in history…