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chapter 3 The Decline of the Natural Ice Industry In the late nineteenth century, the Schuylkill River, the main source for Philadelphia ’s drinking water, became infamous for its pollution.1 As early as 1875, the chemical engineer Julius W. Adams, a consultant for the city, reported that the Fairmount Pool, the reservoir into which the Schuylkill drained inside the city limits, “is, at times, from the amount of refuse, from the slaughterhouses, breweries, and above all, the manufactories at Manayunk, not a proper water for domestic use. This is conceded by all who have examined it.”2 Smokestacks became symbols of progress during the nineteenth century, but Philadelphians knew they had a problem when chemicals entered their source for drinking water. They not only drank that water every day; they also consumed ice cut every winter from that same river when summer came around. Every glass of water chilled with natural ice left sediment as the ice melted, but as the pollution worsened, consumers increasingly recognized that industrial chemicals already contaminated their ice. While the city of Philadelphia had banned cutting ice from the Fairmount Pool around this time (presumably for sanitary reasons), natural ice companies cut thousands of tons of ice from sites further up the Schuylkill and on its tributaries during the late 1870s and early 1880s despite the pollution there.3 Ice firms did not think that consuming this ice carried any health risk because they, as well as many independent experts, incorrectly believed that freezing was self-purifying—in effect, that disease germs trapped in ice froze to death. (In fact, they starve.) In the winter of 1882–83 the stench of chemicals from the Schuylkill became so bad that even Philadelphians long accustomed to polluted water took notice. One paper described the Schuylkill as having “a dark greenish color,” with “thousands of dead fish . . . lying about the banks.”4 When the water flowed, Philadelphians saw woolen and cotton fabrics float by; large amounts regularly appeared in the water north of Vine Street, the part of the city closest to the river from which polluted ice would have come.5 Ice manufacturers claimed that the freezing process expelled all such impurities. The city’s water 56 Refrigeration Nation department suggested that when the ice harvesting firms cut the ice on the river open, the impurities would waft away. The Knickerbocker Ice Company, the largest in Philadelphia, cut the ice, tested it free of charge, and pronounced it safe.6 The people of Philadelphia thought otherwise. Knickerbocker’s Philadelphia ice cards from these years indicate the extent to which consumers rejected their local product. Ice companies distributed these cards to display in windows on days when customers wanted ice delivered to their homes. The cards included not just a company logo, but also price information for a particular year as well as information about the product. The Knickerbocker Ice Company’s card from summer 1882, before the river water became unbearable, includes no language about the origins of the ice. But the card from summer 1883 has the words “We furnish pure eastern ice only” stamped on it, suggesting that the company had come to realize how the market had changed in just one season. Eastern ice might be a euphemism for ice from Maine, but the important point was that Knickerbocker’s ice did not come from the Schuylkill. By 1884, the words “pure imported ice” were printed on the card in bold. The similarity of the cards in every other respect across this time frame only underscores the significance of this change. This large, well-established natural ice supplier had to adapt or die. It did so by finding new sources for its ice. As natural ice grew dirtier, mechanical refrigeration gradually became the primary technology along the cold chain. Pollution alone does not explain this change. Consumers could buy natural ice for only part of the year, and even in winter its quality depended upon the weather. Ice machines could produce all year round. Natural ice took up lots of space and usually required a long trip to get from its point of production to its point of consumption. Artificial ice also took up lots of space, but machines produced it in regular shapes. This made it easier to transport, maintain, and control with precision. Because artificial ice surpassed natural ice in terms of quality in every way, it became a vital element in the development of the modern cold chain. Only with...

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