By the mid-nineteenth century. The term "icebox" had entered the American language but ice was still only beginning to affect diet of ordinary citizens in the United States The ice trade grew with the growth of cities Ice was used in hotels taverns and hospitals and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat
fresh fish andbutter After the civil war (1861-1865) as iec wasused to refrigerate freiht cars it also came into household use Even before 1880 half the ice sold in New York Philadelphia and Baltimore and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago went to families for their own use This had become possible because a new household convenience the icebox a precursor of the modern refrigerator had been invented
Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose In the early nineteenth century the knowledge of the physics of heat which was essential to a science of refrigeration was rudimentary The commonsense ontion that the best icebox was one that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken for it was the melting of the ice that that performed the cooling Nevertheless early efforts to
economize ice included wrapping the ice in blankets which kept the ice from doing its job Not until near the end of the nineteenth century did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation and circulation needed for an efficient icebox
But as early as 1803 an ingenious Maryland farmer Thomas Moore had been on the right track He owned a farm about twenty miles outside the city of Washington for
which the village of Georgetown was the market center When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market he found that customers would pass up the rapidly melting stuff in the tubs of his competitors to pay a premium price for his butter still fresh and hard in neat
one-pound bricks One advantage of his icebox Moore explained was that farmers would no longer have to travel to market at night in order to keep their produce cool