Richard Shotton

And let me tell you, as a fan of the an old fashioned, I can say you can't argue with a drink on the rocks and neither could most of the people who tried a cold cocktail for the very first time.

People went wild for it.

And as soon as the bartenders saw that, they went back to him to ask for more ice.

And this time, Tudor sold it to them at an ever steepening price.

And so Tudor basically

Then the next big thing was the invention of mechanically made ice.

And that also has a really strange origin story.

The first person to develop an ice machine was a doctor named John Gorey, who lived in Apalachicola, Florida, which was this tiny port town off the Gulf Coast.

And the reason why he wanted to make ice was because he wanted to cure yellow fever.

Now, yellow fever was a disease that ravaged the American South every single year.

And doctors back then didn't know that it was caused by mosquito bites.

All Gorey knew is that yellow fever got worse in the hot months and it started to wane in fall and winter.

And so he thought if I can make a patient's body mimic the cycle of the seasons, maybe I can cure yellow fever.

The only thing is that the only way he knew to cure or to make people's bodies colder was with ice.

And in 1820s Florida, the ice trade was brand new.

Ice was still hard to come by and it was very expensive.

It was referred to by white gold by some locals because of how pricey it was.

And Gorey, despite being a doctor, didn't have a lot of money.

So he knew if he wanted to get enough ice to help his patients, he had to learn to make it himself.

So kind of thinking about the laws of physics that he learned during his medical school days,