By the mid-nineteenth century, the term “icebox” had entered the American language, but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals, and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the Civil War,as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, it also came into household use. Even before 1880,half of the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had become possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator, had been invented.
直到19世纪中期，"冰箱"这个名词才进入了美国语言，但冰仅仅只不过开始影响美国一般市民的饮食。冰的交易伴随城市的进步而进步。冰被用在旅馆、酒馆、医院与被一些有眼光的城市商人用于肉、鱼和黄油的保鲜。内战之后，冰被用于冷藏货车，同时也进入了民用。甚至在1880年前，半数在纽约、费城和巴尔的摩销售的冰，三分之一在波士顿和芝加哥销售的冰进入家庭用，由于一种新的家庭设施，冰箱，即现代冰箱的前身，被创造了。
Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the early nineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science of refrigeration, was rudimentary. The commonsense notion that the best icebox was one that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the ice that performed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to economize ice included wrapping up the ice in blankets, which kept the ice from doing its job. Not until near the end of the nineteenth century did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation and circulation needed for an efficient icebox.
制造一台有效率的冰箱不像大家想象的那样容易。19世纪早期，关于对冷藏科学至关要紧的热物理常识是非常浅陋的。觉得最好的冰箱应该预防冰的融化如此一个常见的看法显然是不对的，由于正是冰的融化起了制冷用途。早期为节省冰的努力，包含用毯子把冰包起来，使得冰不可以发挥它有哪些用途。直到近19世纪末，创造家们才成功地找到有效率的冰箱所需要的精确的隔热和循环的精确平衡。
But as early as 1803, and ingenious Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, had been on the right track. He owned a farm about twenty miles outside the city of Washington, for which the village of Georgetown was the market center. When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market, he found that customers would pass up the rapidly melting stuff in the tubs of his competitors to pay a premium price for his butter, still fresh and hard in neat, one-pound bricks. One advantage of his icebox, Moore explained, was that farmers would no longer have to travel to market at night in order to keep their produce cool.
但早在1803年，一位有创造天才的马里兰农场主，托马斯·莫尔，找到了正确办法。他拥有一个农场，离华盛顿约20英里，那里的乔治镇村庄是集市中心。当他用自己设计的冰箱运送黄油去市场时，他发现客户们会走过装在角逐者桶里那些飞速融化的黄油而给他比市价更高的价格买他仍然新鲜坚硬，整齐地切成一磅一块的黄油。莫尔说他的冰箱的一个好处是使得农民们不必在夜里上路去市场以维持他们商品的低温。
