This Common Substance Was Once Worth Millions

In the summer of 1841, Florida doctor John Gory faced a dire situation. Yellow fever, also known as the black vomit, was [music] sweeping through his town, wiping out entire families. Patients came to Gory's small infirmary jaundest and burning with fevers up to 40° C. To cool his patients down, Gory couldn't turn to refrigeration because that hadn't been invented yet.

So, he came up with a radical treatment. He suspended pans of ice in his infirmary, allowing [music] the cool, dense air to flow down over his patients, providing much needed relief. But this treatment [music] was almost impossible to sustain because it required hundreds of kg of ice per day. And Gory had only one way to get it.

He relied on ice blocks that were transported thousands of kilometers through a now [music] forgotten ice empire. A vast network of ships and ice houses, all built and controlled by one [music] man, known to the world as the Ice King. Over the previous 35 years, he had forged a monopoly that spanned the globe, and anyone who wanted ice was at his mercy. Gory only got a few deliveries each year.

And now by the peak of summer, the cost of just a few days ice for the infirmary would have been more expensive than the average yearly wage. So locals began to refer to the ice as white gold. As Gory's supply ran out, he was forced to watch his patients suffer and die. It was in that moment that he decided he would find a way to free the world from the grip of the Ice King.

By the turn of the 19th century, most of America's ice came from the northern states, where thousands of square kilometers of lakes would freeze over for much of the year. The hard part was getting all that ice out. To get ice out of a lake or river, first of all, you had to trust that it was deep enough to support your weight. Then there's no way to really tell.

Then you had to walk out several [music] feet onto this plane of ice, take a saw that's as long as I am tall, and then carve [music] the very ice that you're standing on and just, you know, hope to heaven that it doesn't sink. [music] Then you had to kind of float it ...