Lloyd Groff Copeman patents the first rubber ice-cube tray. Guy Tinkham makes his with flexible stainless steel in Frigidaire uses Freon in fridges. It's safer than previously used chemicals, but no one realizes until the '70s how damaging it is to the ozone layer. Ernest Hansen makes a motorized ice-shaving machine.
Snowball, anyone? David Klutho. When a chill settles over their ice-block factory, the Zamboni family builds an ice-skating rink, then creates a surface-smoothing vehicle to keep business running smoothly. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Mary Bellis. Inventions Expert.
Mary Bellis covered inventions and inventors for ThoughtCo for 18 years. She is known for her independent films and documentaries, including one about Alexander Graham Bell. Updated February 24, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format.
And no one was wiser for it. David Embury has a brief mention of it in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks , one of the top cocktail books to come out of that era. He promotes the use of transparent cubes of ice in cocktails, not for looks but for flavor. Most of his critique about ice that comes out of the refrigerator is the unintentional flavors it can add to your cocktail.
Ice was an afterthought, not a component of a cocktail. It would be over five decades before ice started to reclaim its place as a critical component in a bar. According to Camper English, the first bar to bring an ice program back to craft cocktails is Weather Up in This has set up the beginning of the Second Ice Age, where ice returned to its original place as an essential element when presenting a cocktail, not just a way to chill it and add water.
Bartenders and drinks enthusiasts, led by English, became obsessed with finding ways to create clear ice that was not a pound block and did not take a week to form. Ice making companies, which all but disappeared in the middle of the 20th century, returned to serve this growing demand. Ice chisels, chainsaws, picks, and tappers have all returned to the bar. Round balls of ice and frozen spears for have become part and parcel of the ice repertoire in many bar programs around the country.
The importance of ice grew as the cocktail became an experience. The presentation of an artisanal spirit, mixed with house-made bitters and syrups, accented by a clever garnish, was not going to be ruined any longer by plopping industrial ice into the glass.
That does not fit into the craft story or aesthetic! A clear, carved piece of ice is the only thing that will do. Ice in the modern era has one more added function: delivering surprises. Cocktails on ice have been around for over two hundred years, but cocktails IN ice are a much newer invention.
Spherical ice molds allowed daring mixologists to figure out a way to partially freeze the ice, drill a hole to release the extra water, then inject any cocktail they choose into the mold.
All you have to do is break it open in the appropriate glass and enjoy. Other bartenders use ice cubes to deliver flavor by freezing fruit, coffee, or other liquids into cubed form and adding them to cocktails.
Still others use the ice as a frozen frame, delivering an aesthetic pop to their creation. Their visions range from turning the ice different colors to adding edible flowers to the mix. Large cubes of ice have even made their way into the shaker, offering bartenders a better way to control the amount of water that ends up in the cocktail. They also agitate better, providing a measurably different amount of foam for cocktails based on many experiments by David Arnold of Liquid Intelligence fame.
The more we explore and experiment with ice, the better we understand its impact on the drinks that leave the bar, from the amount of dilution to the temperature of the cocktail. The Second Ice Age is still in its infancy, and it is only going to get bigger. When the bartender places your cocktail in front of you, take a moment to appreciate the effort that has been invested in the ice used to create it. He also taught restaurants how to make ice cream, and reached out to doctors and hospitals to convince them that ice was the perfect way to cool feverish patients.
The truth is that people never knew they needed ice until Tudor made them try it. Once they did, they couldn't live without it. By , Tudor's business was strengthening. He'd created real demand for his product in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, and even Havana, but he still needed to refine his operation.
Enter Nathaniel Wyeth, an innovator who became Tudor's foreman in Using a horse-drawn plow to cut the ice into large grids, Wyeth invented a much faster harvesting method. He also put an assembly process into place. Laborers sawed the blocks apart and plunked them into canals to float them downstream. Then a conveyor belt would hoist the blocks from the water and carry them up to icehouses, where they'd be stacked up to 80 feet high.
Still, only one-tenth of the ice harvested made it to sale. What's worse, the whole operation was incredibly unsafe. In addition to those towering stacks of ice, numb hands, sharp instruments, and frigid waters made the process dangerous. The pound blocks of ice could slide easily, knocking down men and breaking their limbs. Despite these drawbacks, Wyeth's ingenious methods were a major improvement on prior harvesting practices.
With the inventor by his side, Tudor asserted his long-fomenting monopoly and became known as the "Ice King. The venture was so successful that it reopened trade routes between India and Boston.
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