refrigerator car

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

by William Cronon  · 2 Nov 2009  · 918pp  · 260,504 words

experienced in shipping live animals led him in 1877 to try the experiment of shipping two carloads of dressed beef back home. He had no refrigerator cars, so instead he arranged to ship at midwinter, using stripped-down express railroad cars with their doors left open to keep cold air moving across

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the meat. The success of the experiement convinced Swift that he should explore refrigerator cars in earnest. Any number of inventors had been working on them to solve several key problems. For one, they sought to prevent meat from touching

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introduced by Swift in the late 1870s, this improved refrigerator car was soon in use by all major firms in the dressed beef trade. In addition to Swift, these included Hammond, Nelson Morris, and Swift’s most important competitor, Philip Armour.100 The refrigerated railroad car, like the grain elevator, was a simple piece of

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time; henceforth, “meatpacking” would replace “pork packing” as the name of the industry.101 The packers themselves attributed their success to the new technology. “The refrigerator car,” announced Swift and Company in a later brochure, “is one of the vehicles on which the packing industry has ridden to greatness.”102 Before the

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refrigerator car could reveal its full implications, however, the packers first had to link it, again like the grain elevator, to a complex new infrastructure. Predictably enough,

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of meat most likely to sell there, with none of the other material local butchers had to try to sell. The real genius of the refrigerator car had more to do with marketing than with technology. The proof of this came when customers examined the cuts of meat Swift offered for sale

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a vast fleet of cattle cars in which the roads had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars. Such cars were more flexible than the new refrigerator cars, since they could easily carry eastern manufactured goods on their return journey and avoid the cost of traveling empty. This was one reason why the

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not prevent the railroads from responding to dressed beef with a kind of passive resistance. They refused to provide capital equipment in the form of refrigerator cars and icing stations. They were reluctant to guarantee a steady volume of traffic or the rapid handling that was essential to iced shipments. They set

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nationwide influence led them to seek new ways of diminishing competition among thelTISelves.143 The packers had made massive investments in capital infrastructure—Chicago factories, refrigerator cars, icing facilities, dozens of branch warehouses—and thus faced all the problems of fixed costs that had created competitive nightmares for the railroads. Just as

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meat, they soon expanded into other areas where their chilled warehouses gave them special advantages. One of these was fruit, the crop for which the refrigerator car had originally been invented. By the 1890s, Philip Armour had invested heavily in the California fruit industry, and he soon dominated the eastern marketing of

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, and dinner table were everywhere apparent, constant reminders of the relationships that sustained one’s own life. In a world of ranches, packing plants, and refrigerator cars, most such connections vanished from easy view. The packing plants distanced their customers most of all from the act of killing. Those who visited the

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and the growth of the city itself, but were also graveyards for the white pine forests rapidly disappearing from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Chicago’s refrigerator cars and packing plants betokened a revolution in the way its citizens killed and sold animals, but were also monuments to the slaughtered bison herds. Behind

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places that so impressed tourists who visited Chicago. This was the alchemy of the elevator receipt, converting wheat into a graded abstraction, and of the refrigerator car, separating the killing of an animal from the eating of its flesh. The easier it became to obscure the connections between Chicago’s trade and

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age. And yet the universality of the process makes Chicago’s explosive growth all the more exemplary. Other cities soon had railroads and elevators and refrigerator cars as well, but it was Chicago that first revealed the importance of such things for the West. Moreover, as Chicago grew to metropolitan stature, hundreds

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beef to travel in refrigerated railroad cars, came to the city from ever greater distances. Here ice is being cut on a Wisconsin lake and moved into an immense insulated warehouse for use over the course of the next year. Courtesy Milwaukee Public Museum. Interior view of a loaded refrigerator car. During the 1870s and

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Mary Yeager, Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry (1981); see also her useful summary in Mary Yeager Kujovich, “The Refrigerator Car and the Growth of the American Dressed Beef Industry,” Bus. Hist. Rev. 44 (1970): 460–82. Her work, like my own, follows that of Alfred

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, 75–76. 115.The best and most comprehensive analysis of relations between the packers and the railroads is Yeager, Competition and Regulation; and Yeager Kujovich, “Refrigerator Car.” The key contemporary document surveying these linkages is New York State Assembly, Proceedings of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate Alleged Abuses in the Management

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–80, which is generally referred to as the Hepburn Report. For its political context, see Benson, Merchants, Farmers, & Railroads; see also Wilford L. White, “The Refrigerator Car and the Effect upon the Public of Packer Control of Refrigerator Lines,” Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly 10 (1930): 388–400. 116.The express

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car as a railroad innovation was the necessary predecessor of the refrigerator car. Express companies emerged as a way of guaranteeing fast shipments for valuable or perishable commodities. Since travel between any two long-distance points might require

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lines (ordinarily the worst bottleneck for long-distance freight) to guarantee their customers the highest possible rate of movement. Without such preexisting institutional arrangements, the refrigerator car would have been impossible. 117.Yeager, Competition and Regulation, 30–41. On the effectiveness of these and subsequent railroad efforts at pooling, using the grain

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, freight was paid on a vast aggregate tonnage of waste product, while in the shipments of dressed beef and other packing-house products in a refrigerator car, only the useful products are shipped and a large saving in freight charges is effected. Meal was delivered to the consumer in better condition after

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the introduction of the refrigerator car also, because the cattle then slaughtered nearer to the point of production, were in better condition, not having had to endure the additional 1,000

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Influence of the Minneapolis Flour Mills upon the Economic Development of Minnesota and the Northwest.” Minn. Hist. 6 (1925): 141–54. Kujovich, Mary Yeager. “The Refrigerator Car and the Growth of the American Dressed Beef Industry.” Bus. Hist. Rev. 44 (1970): 460–82. Lampard, Eric E. “The History of Cities in the

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Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” JAH 55 (1978): 319–43. White, Wilford L. “The Refrigerator Car and the Effect upon the Public of Packer Control of Refrigerator Lines.” Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly 10 (1930): 388–400. White, William Allen

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and, 213–14 railroads and, 209–11, 216–17, 219–20, 222, 224, 227, 230–31, 238–39, 326–42, 345 ranching and, 220–21 refrigerator cars and, 233–34 river transport and, 227–28 standardization in, 237 stockyards and, 207–12 Texas and, 220–21, 223, 224, 232 unified yard in

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, 249 oligopoly of, 244, 248, 253 in Omaha, 375 peddler car of, 242 pollution created by, 250–52 pooling mechanisms of, 245 prices and, 235 refrigerator cars and, 233–34 U.S. investigation of, 246–47 Vest Committee and, 246–47 waste materials used by, 255 mechanical reaper, 100 Medill, Joseph, 140

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and, 229–30 in Cincinnati, 228, 296, 307 grading system and, 236–37 ice trade and, 231–32 meat trade and, 227–34, 236–37 refrigerator car and, 233–34 river transport and, 227–29 seasonal problems of, 230–31 winter and, 227, 229 Port Jervis, New York, 235 postal service, 332

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, 84–86 pedestrian injuries by, 373–74 predecessors compared with, 80 ready-made houses shipped on, 181 real estate and, 66 recreational hinterland and, 382 refrigerator cars of, 233–38, 248, 263 St. Louis and, 296–97, 299–300, 302, 325 sawmills and expansion of, 197–98 schedules of, 76–78, 85

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

by Bee Wilson  · 14 Sep 2012  · 376pp  · 110,321 words

transported in refrigerated railroad cars from New York City to Boston. Fish, too, began to travel the country, and in 1857, fresh meat went from New York to the western states. Refrigerated “beef cars” created a new meatpacking industry, centered in Chicago. This was a very American phenomenon: by 1910, there were 85,000 refrigerated cars in the

Innovation and Its Enemies

by Calestous Juma  · 20 Mar 2017

from the mixture itself, resulting in a colder temperature. This discovery was applied to natural ice cooling, including those involving refrigerators, cold-storage houses, and refrigerated railroad cars. The concept of proper air circulation was also important in the development of this industry. Improvements in natural ice preservation advanced processing and shipping in

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major innovation in the shipping of produce. In 1930, a crusher-slinger was developed that would deposit snowlike crushed ice on all parts of a refrigerator car using a flexible hose. The USDA initiated a relentless series of product-specific tests to determine the optimal shipping conditions for individual kinds of fruits

Capitalism in America: A History

by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan  · 15 Oct 2018  · 585pp  · 151,239 words

one of these abattoirs that Henry Ford got the idea of the mass assembly line. Gustavus Franklin Swift made another breakthrough with the introduction of refrigerated railroad cars in 1877. Before Swift, cattle had been driven long distances to railroad shipping points and then transported live in railroad cars. Swift realized that he

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

the invention, in the 1880s, of the refrigerated railroad car. These early cars were not cooled mechanically but had slots for blocks of ice, which made possible the widespread distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables from California and refrigerated fresh-cut meat from the Midwest. The refrigerated car made the beef industry much more efficient

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution

by Charles R. Morris  · 1 Jan 2012  · 456pp  · 123,534 words

the romance of the cattle drive to the pages of dime novels. Shipping dressed meat was obviously cheaper than shipping steers, but the distances required refrigerated railroad cars. Various experiments with ice-packed cars were unsatisfactory until Gustavus Swift, a Massachusetts butcher, added a forced-air circulatory system. But he was stonewalled by

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

by Joyce Appleby  · 22 Dec 2009  · 540pp  · 168,921 words

while those living in cities increased an astonishing eighty-seven times. Gustavus Franklin Swift helped forge economic ties across the continent with his invention of refrigerated railroad cars. Now the cattle ranging over the grazing lands west of the Mississippi River could be driven to Omaha, Kansas City, and Chicago to be slaughtered

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership

by Andro Linklater  · 12 Nov 2013  · 603pp  · 182,826 words

. Before the end of the century, California fruit growers would be packing a quarter of a million tons of oranges, grapes, lettuces, and almonds into refrigerated railroad cars to add to the cascade of eastward-heading food. The flood of produce from the Midwest, railroaded into Chicago then shipped east in freight trains

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

by Adam Winkler  · 27 Feb 2018  · 581pp  · 162,518 words

goods moved easily too. Railroads transported more than 350 million tons of freight each year and employed upwards of 1.5 million people. The new refrigerated railroad cars brought fresh fruits and vegetables grown in Florida and California to markets across the nation, a sign of the truly national economy.42 Field thus

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

by Anne Case and Angus Deaton  · 17 Mar 2020  · 421pp  · 110,272 words

and set railroad rates that forced others out of business. The meat-packing industry was founded by Gustavus Swift, who figured out how to use refrigerated railroad cars and a system of ice suppliers to bring cheap fresh meat to eastern cities. Later, the industry turned on its competitors using cartels and price

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