The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Product decision · 1925
In 1925 Thomas Slate made dry ice a product you could ship as the cold
Slate turned solid CO2 into a commercial refrigerant, so a shipper could carry extreme cold without a cooling machine.
DryIce Corporation of America
the move
Before reliable small refrigeration, moving anything that needed deep cold meant an ice house, an insulated box and a working cooling machine at each end. For a delivery truck or a railway wagon carrying food or medicine, there was no practical way to bring the cold along.
Solid carbon dioxide had been observed since 1835, but Thomas Benton Slate made it a distributed product. He developed a method to produce and sell it commercially, and in 1925 the DryIce Corporation of America began marketing it as 'dry ice'. The blocks sat at about -78 C and, as they warmed, turned directly into gas — no water, no drip.
That single material let any vehicle carry deep cold. Boxes of food, blood, film or chemicals could travel with a block of dry ice and no refrigerator, and a receiver simply let it evaporate. The cold was part of the cargo instead of a fixed plant.
Dry ice soon became a standard tool for shipping perishables and for cooling railway cars and trucks that previously had no way to hold a low temperature.
why it works
- Sublimation means no liquid mess, so it suits packing alongside food that ice would soak.
- Its -78 C temperature reaches a far colder range than ice, protecting many products that need deep freeze.
- It is a plug-and-play unit — a shipper adds blocks, with no compressor or power supply to run.
- Made in factories and sold by weight, it scales to any size shipment, from an insulated box to a railcar.
what transfers
Sometimes the simplest transport answer is a material you can put in the load, not a machine you have to bring with it.
what came after
Dry ice became a staple of refrigerated transport for food, medicine and biomedical samples, and remains important for shipping items that must stay at very low temperatures, including vaccines. Its production and distribution grew into an industry of its own.
references
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