I am a warm person. I don’t mean my personality. That is up for question. No. When I say I am a “warm” person, I mean that I like to be warm.
There’s the old argument between the people who prefer to be cold and the people who like to be warm. The cold people say, “I can’t take off any more clothes when I’m hot. But you can always wear more clothes when you are cold.”
That isn’t true, I don’t think. You can’t always put more clothes on and still be able to function.
If the house were cold here, I could layer myself and look like the Michelin man. But at some point, you simply can’t put on another layer unless it is extremely large. And after two or three layers, moving becomes a hardship. Conversely, I could cover myself with several blankets, but again, I’d have to remain motionless. And that is not conducive to functionality. However, in the hot heat, one can remove most clothing, ingest cold drinks, use fans, and the like, and still move about freely.
But all of this is a digression. I simply meant to say I am a fan of being warm. You’d think the summertime would be prime time. But air conditioning is a large part of our world. I’ve ridden in people’s cars where I am sure they could store raw meats.
And that is what I thought of when I read about today’s historical event. It was on this day, January 16, 1868, when William Davis, a fish dealer in Detroit, patented the refrigerator car.
What? A refrigerator car?
I thought, “How funny.”
But it is a refrigerator car, as in, a railroad refrigerator car.
Davis, being in the food business, saw a need to ship things on the cool side. Another version of an “ice box” already existed. It was a railroad car designed by a fellow Detroit native named J.B. Sutherland. Sutherland’s railroad cars were containers with ice, basically.
But Davis designed a refrigerated boxcar in 1867. However, he did not have the money to advance his big idea.
Davis built the car to ship fruits — mostly those highly perishable strawberries. When that worked great, he decided he could move his fish in the same way. At about the same time, the beef industry had really started growing. So the need for refrigerated transportation presented itself.
Another Detroit neighbor, a guy named George H. Hammond, owned a meat market next door to Davis’s fish market. Hammond expressed interest in the refrigerated car for shipping beef. So Davis went back to work and modified his boxcars with metal racks. These hooks would be used to hang the meat over a mixture of ice and salt. And with that, the Michigan Car Company used Davis’s new design to build the first refrigerated beef car.
Things were looking up for Davis and his new refrigerator car. But then. He died. Yep. Right before selling the patent to Hammond. (November 24, 1868.) So his heirs sold the patent rights to Hammond.
Hammond went on to produce more than 800 refrigerated cars. But that original design by Davis didn’t last. When the trains went rolling along the tracks, taking a curve, the heavy meat would shift on those meat-hanging hooks. That weight shift sometimes caused derailments.
The refrigeration shipping process is alive and well today, often used for all sorts of food, medicine, and other items.
And me? I’m still a warm person. Or is it I’m a cold person who likes to be warm? Either way, I’m staying out of those boxcars.
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“Nothing burns like the cold.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
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“It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.”
— George Eliot
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“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.”
— Dr. Seuss
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When being cold proves to be useful
