Of Ice and Men, with Fred Hogge

you enjoyed this interview. This chat I had with Fred a tremendous amount of fun, just as the book is a tremendous amount of fun. Hi. Fred, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. It's really really pleasure to be here. Excellent. Yeah, the book is is so much fun. I just read it the other day. Of Ice and Men, How We've Used Cold to Transform Humanity wonder for inside ful and surprising

look and humanity's history with ice. Humanity's propensity to take ice for granted is a recurring theme in your book, and I just was wondering were you prepared for just how often it has been taken for granted in recorded history. That's a really, really interesting question, um. And to one degree I was because having sort of started out in my career as an ancient historian, one finds oneself very limited by what people not just what people choose to

write about, but what survives. UM. So when you're dealing with with with the ancient world, it's not just that people have the topics that they think are interesting and that they care about, but we also have to deal with this whole big problem of textual transmission, and a number of books, the fast number of books and just do not come down to us from the ancient world, and some of the ones that do come down by

very very um strange ways. If I were member correctly, Catullus poetry was found under a barrel in the fourteenth century, UM, and that was the only copy that came through somehow. And it's it's wonderful stuff. But when it comes to stuff like like ice and functional things, it requires on the one hand, an ancient writer to be interested, on the other hand, for it to be copied. So, for example, we know an enormous amount about Aqueduct because a book

by a guy called Frontinus survives. If it hadn't, we would just have the archaeology. But as it is, we have the book and we know how they work with ice. I knew that the sources would be will be slim for the ancient stuff, and that's fair enough. And you spend a lot of time trawling around just trying to find a glimpse and mentioned as something here or there, but you know it's it's um. But that's part of

the challenge. That's part of what makes it fun. Now, this is probably a question of being asked a lot, but just in general, how did you come to write a book about ice? Um? Well, basically what happened was I I hadn't really thought about it as a topic to write about. And my wife's a cookery writer and cookery teacher and she was doing a class back when we lived in London, and she asked me to help out and kind and make some cocktails for the for

the customers. And as I was shaking up these drinks, I happened to remark that if you don't have ice, you can't really have a cocktail. And one of the punters said, prove it um. And basically that's what I've set out to try and do. And as soon as I started to delving into it, I realized what an extraordinary rich um seem of information it is because it is that the big sort of unsung hero and monster of modern life, and it's changing us. I I I think it's quite profound. Um. I was reading what was

it last week? I think that the eight billion person has just been born on planet Earth. This is in those small parts down two. The extraordinary benefits that ice have brought humanity, both in terms of our nutrition, in terms of medicine, in terms of so many things, is absolutely supercharged the species. It's from from now, the species

has exploded. And it is entirely down to the fact that we are able to feed ourselves so much better because the refrigeration, because of cool chains, because of all of the benefits that ice has brought us. And what burden does that place upon the rest of the system. And I think that's the big question. Yeah. You you you returned to the idea of multiple times in the book that that ice is inherently linked to civilization, and and you you frequently invoked the film AdPT of the

Mosquito Coast. Can you remind our listeners of this film? And I suppose of the book and it's the use of ice. I have to confess I have never read the book. I've only ever seen the movie, which is a terrible, terrible admission. I know pulled through as a

wonderful writer, but I haven't read it. But in the movie version, directed by the wonderful Australian director Peter Weir, the lead character Alie Fox, as played by Harrison Ford, has this very catching line of ice is civilization and then sets out into the rainforests of Believe to build an ice machine to bring ice to the people. That idea has always struck with me. And I first saw

that film. Gosh, this dates me now. I saw that film on general release, so gosh, that was what eighty six, As you said, I think came at eighty seven in the UK because we were often at that point a little bit behind the United States. But yes, and I think I think that he hasn't absolute point. Ice has always been there from the very beginning of the civilization.

The ancient Sumerians, the very first civilized society, had ice, which is something that is quite baffling to grasp, given as in the City of a Rook, the first city is in the deserts of southern ire K, and you know, were you to visit it today, you'd find this barren, wind swept, desolate landscape. And it's very hard to imagine a that it was once a blossoming, fertile place and b that they could make ice there and it's baking its forty five degrees in the shade. But ice was there.

Ice was inherent in their lives. We don't know how they use it. We just know that it was there, which is, as ever, often one of the big problems with archaeological sources. They'll tell you a thing that they won't give you a context. But but sorry, I'm rabbiting on. I'm so rob No, no, this is wonderful. Yeah, because that was what I'm gonna ask about. Next was the the ancient Sumerian ice houses, because this was this really blew me away, just imagining me away too, I've got

to be honest. Yeah, So is it thought that the ancient Sumerians invented ice house technology or or where do we just like I was saying, you know, we have in the year thirteen of the reign of Shulgi, they built an ice house. That's what the tablet tells us Um and that's it. I'm not a Sumerian expert at all. I I had to read up on quite a lot

of stuff, and I still don't fully understand it. But when we look at those kind of cuneve form tablets from the ancient Middle and Near East, particularly as we get into the next section of where ice reas its head and a kingdom called Marii, which is was situated in eastern Syria around about like the fifteen four hundred

BC dame mentioned in ice House in their tablets. But when we get to that era, what we do have as an extraordinary level of correspondence written between the great kingdoms of the Middle and Near East, from the hit Sides to the Assyrians, to the Marii to the Egyptians, and they're they're all broadly in Assyrium and and and we have some of these archives, the one in mari was discovered in the thirties. Is there a huge insight

into how that world operated and how it worked. And these kings would you know, right to each other, you know, to the great king of Assyria, my brother, how how you're doing, or or that kind of thing. But but again the ice House and Marii is mentioned obliquely. We know that it was there. We we don't know if there was only one or if there were many in their various and cities, but we know they had access to ice. And we know again, um, it was a

luxury ice. It wasn't something that was there for everybody. It was a prestige product. And you you mentioned these various other ice houses and ice pits that pop up in other civilizations. Does it does it seem like this is a case of cultural transmission or it's just kind of like independent inventions from people who or people or kingdoms that are in areas where they have access to snow and they are figuring out ways to keep that

snow around. You have to have access, I mean when we when we look at the Persian ice houses or yacht coals, these are specially designed structures that UM operates on evaporative cooling and they in those kind of desert environments where the temperature drops incredibly fast and UM as the s and goes down, you can create conditions in a controlled space where you can freeze things. So that is a technology specific to their environment. And we're talking

seven b C five b C or thereabouts. When you start looking at ancient Greece or civilizations like that. They have access to ice from mountains. They will bring the snow down UM and we and we see this technology so in Italy, UM and in Spain into the early modern era. And it doesn't really change a whole lot. You some poor bloke generally a bloke has to carry

the snow down and a thing on his back. You pack it down hard into the ground into a pit that's insulated with branches and then covered and then sold. And you could do this. Um. You can do this in the Lebanon because you can get the um the ice from the mountains at the top of the beck Up Valley. You can do it in Greece. You can do it in Italy. The Apennines was the big source of ice for Rome. You can do it in Sudden

Spain as host cities. In Seville you still have mountains quite close by where you shouldn where you can get the ice from. But if you don't have that access, it's not going to happen. And India is quite an interesting one because because because again they were able to do an evaporative cooling technique with special ponds and as the the cool, they would come off the mountains, they could place clay pots out on the walls, would freeze, and they would have ice for the next day. But again,

this is a short lived resource. It's not going to to be around for very long, and therefore is the preserve of the wealthy for for really up until the nineteenth century. Now you get into get into this area where there there, there there is. There are more mentions of of ice, and a one that I thought was particularly interesting. You mentioned first century CE Roman philosopher Seneca. For I sold in Roman markets. Do we do we know why he disapproved? I think we don't know. I

I don't know why he does. It was Seneca. From everything that I know, I what little I know of Seneca, he was a fairly sniffy old chap he was. He Yes, he was a very proper fellow, was our Seneca. Um, it was probably why Nero killed him. Great philosopher, great writer, really really really disgusting playwright in terms of the amount of blood and gore in his plays. Oh my God, in his version of Medea, you actually see the babies

being thrown from the battlements on stage. I mean, Seneca's plays are mental and Shakespeare was a very big fan of Naka's playwriting, which might explain explain all the Claret and Gore and Coriolanus. But he was. Yeah, Seneca Shakespeare was a big fan of Seneca's dramaturgy. Uh, he's he does, he does like to you know him that you know

juvenile as well. There there are a bunch of those guys around that first century who do like to have quite snaughty opinions about how awful the modern world is, which I suppose is something that hasn't really changed. But yes, he was not a fan of ice. He thought ice was it was bad for people, and that they shouldn't be doing it, which is an idea that that would prevail for quite a long time, for at least another

sort of five six years after his time. There's a Spanish doctor Menards who's I think I mentioned the book who's writes about how bad ice can be for you. There's an enormous amount of inco and paper wasted on medical literature saying that ice is a bad thing in the fifty and sixteen centuries. Yeah. This. I was intrigued by this the more I read in the book, too, because initially I was also reminded of some traditions I think in like Chinese traditional medicine, the idea that one

should drink hot water as opposed to child water. But then later on in the book you also mentioned issues concerning the potential contamination of snow with dirt that later the idea that you could you could have actual outbreaks

due to contamination of water ice. A lot of them were about the Roman stuff, and early on a lot of that ice that was sold in in those markets in ancient grease ancient rooms actually snow compacted snow, and that contains inherently particles of dirt and mud and and bits. Where the market evolves into thanks to a brilliant Bostonian guy called for Edric Tudor, is the export of hand cut ice from lakes in New England. And these are blocks of solid ice, and solid ice is very much

more pure than compacted snow. And they were shipping this all around the world from Tudor start of an eighteen o six and finally really got it figured out in the eighteen twenties after the War of eighteen twelve. Was you know that kind of put the kibosh on him for a while, Um, but as the demand increases, you have two problems. The first is you want to make

more ice faster for your stores. So they would do this thing which was called sinking the well, whereby having cut a bunch of ice out, they would also drill extra holes in the top of a pond or lake so that the water would well up and refreeze. But what that would do, what it would catch your footprints between in the original layer that you're walking on in the water that welld up, so there would be dirt trapped within the ice, which was not exactly pleasing to

the customer. But the bigger problem, as you point out, as time goes on, is pollution, and the uptaker ice usage runs parallel alongside with the industrial revolution and the various pourings of industrial waste human waste into the waterways which were then being harvested for ice. And then one of the most awful cases there was a mental hospital and upstate New York that used to cut its ice from the river downstream of where they're effluent pipe ran

in and a number of people died. And this is kind of the beginning of the end for natural ice as a commercial proposition. Now now, thus far far and a lot of students are probably you know, we're talking

about the use of this ice and hello listeners. Uses kind of the kind of a novelty and I know, I'm I'm imagining drinks with ice in them, drinks with bits of snow in them, and you you get into this this this is a really fun part of the book to talking about, like a Florentine wine a chilling back in the thirteen so I was thinking about that a lot. But then of course another important ice treat comes up, and then of course his ice cream. Um yes, what's the where do we seem to find like the

oldest possible evidence of ice cream in the world. There's a lot of mythology wrap top with ice cream. Um so stories tell us that ice cream was invented in China and that it was the privilege and unique dessert of the Imperial court and nobody else could have it. And then the apographer goes on to say that Marco Polo brought the recipe back to Italy. The absolutely the latter, it is absolutely rot Whether the Chinese we're eating ice cream as opposed to have cooled, chilled things, that's kind

of hard to pin down. But ice cream in the European context doesn't happen until the seventeenth century. There's a lovely sort of piece of mythology that Catherine de Medici, when she was married to the Dauphin of France, brought the recipe and all kinds of other recipes with her

into France and re transformed French cooking. But this is absolutely rot For one reason, she was thirteen fourteen and probably not widely interesting recipes at the time um and would have been stripped of all things Italian at the border. For another, the science of how do you make cream freeze was not known in Europe at that point, although it was known in other parts of the world, and

it crops up. There's a twelfth century Indian Treaties which describes how to do it, and it basically involves making a brine solution within too within which to freeze your your cream. The thing is, cream freezes about half a degree lower than water, so even if you just put it in ice, you're just gonna end up with cold cream. So you've got to find a way to make the chilling scenario even colder, and the best way to do that is to add a shed load of salt to it.

Brian freezes at a much lower temperature, so you can get the surrounding liquid down to about minus sixteen celsius and then you have a chance of channel you're cream into ice cream. And and and Europeans did not figure this out for quite a long time. I think part of the reason being that salt was so expensive. This is one of the things that is quite hard for us to grasp today because you know, you go into the store store and you can buy a packet of

a cocier salt for less than a dollar. The idea of salt being a prestigian expensive commodity is something that the battles us now. But it was uh and it was highly taxed as well. It was very highly taxed. Um and so as good as ice cream tastes, even if you know the science, you're not going to waste

the salts on it, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I'm just thinking to my own experiences with making ice cream, like you end up using a fair amount of salt, uh, like Durning, it's like a whole box of rock salt to oh at least absolutely absolutely, do do you hand shown in one of those old fashioned Oh no, if I did say that. We we tried. At one point we tried this device. It was like a ball, and the ideas you you fill it up and then children will play with the ball and that

will eventually produce ice cream via the churning. But we found that it's a little too much to ask for for children to continually play with the ball that long, so it ends up. The adults just have to roll it back and forth across the ground until it becomes ice cream. We have imagine mixed ice cream machine. We kind of conn the cheats way, but it works. So coming back to opinions against chilled beverages, how did the

medieval world view the consumption of chilled beverages? And then where do we see that, like, where do we see a shift in general opinion of chilled beverages and and so forth. Oh man, you're bringing the big questions today, aren't you. Okay, So, in the medieval world, um ice is certainly very present, and we we know that um particularly in in the Middle East, ice was it was

very popular. We we we know stories of salad that there's a lovely myth about saladine sending a sack of ice to Richard the third, when so Richard the first

and Richard the First was ill, probably not true. We know again with Saladine, there's the fan tastic story of him killing a guy called Raymond a shatti or because Raymond took a glass of iced rose water out of Saladine's hand and drank it when it wasn't given to him, and Saladine kills him stone dead, which is a scene that crops up in Realley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, which

interesting movie. Original release cut, not very good, the director's cut, which has an extra forty five minutes of stuff, and it is actually quite the movie. And that scene is is very powerful. UM so we we we know the ice is is very present, and we know that people argue about whether it's good for people or not. You always have your senicon kind of people cropping up saying, oh, you know, the party poopers saying no, we shouldn't have

any ice. But it's there, is there is current, it's present, and it's, as I said before, is the preserve of the wealthy. Um. As to whether there's a shift or not of acceptance, I I don't think he ever wasn't accepted. I just think that there were your dissenters in literature who happened to be writing about it, and their books survive. With a product like ice. Um, the fans aren't going

to bother writing. The dissenters will because that sells. And twas ever, thus even you know, before the invention of the printing press, So the people who are who are writing and dissenting are I think, I think in the minority. I can't prove that because there's just not enough information upon which to make a judgment. But that's my hunch. Okay, yeah, I mean it's squares with a lot of what what

we've been talking about with taking ice for granted. Um, and unless you have an issue with it, or and I guess in our experiences, unless there's a problem in actually acquiring it, then you begin to realize how how marvelous it is well well exactly and and and you sort of see that in the tropics, you know, people, that's why Frederick Tudor hits on such a genius idea when he started shipping it to the Caribbean and then further afield, because you had no ready source. I mean

in Jamaica. I'm I'm half Jamaica. My mother's from Tica Bay. We have the beautiful blue mountains, but they don't get snow on them. They are they're high enough, but you know it's too tropical, it's never gonna happen. So let's let's get back to cocktails. So I was, I was very excited when you brought it up. I almost wanted

to shift ahead to the cocktail discussion at that point. Um. Yeah, yeah, to your point, like we think about about mixed beverages especially, and and we instantly think about ice, we may and then there's so many ways to add ice, you know, particular streams of cube, the different sort of grains of crushed ice. Uh. Did you have a particular favorite. Well, it depends on what the drink is, to be honest

with you. If if it's like an old fashioned and nice large big cube, um, you know, if if if it's something else, then that there may be a bit more crushed I'm a big fan of of a good stirred martini. I know that some cocktail enthusiasts are so wild for the for the pearl ice or sometimes called here in the States, that the sonic ice that I've seen memes about, like you about leaving the bar if the if that particular grain of ice it's not available.

I think that that's I think that's a little ponsey if we're I mean, I'm a dive bar kind of a guy, so you know, I'm not that fast about about it. But that said, that said, I do have a friend in Los Angeles, a bar keep there, and he designs ice. Oh wow. And he has an ice business and makes bespoke cubes of various shapes, these beautiful of globes of ice that are about like three inches across um and they're wonderful, wonderful things. You can't help

but be impressed by that. But I'm a simple boy. But let's talk let's but let's talk cocktails. Rob, come on, where's the big question? Let's go all right, Well, eventually you also you bring up Jerry Thomas Bartenders guys. Yes, one of the world's great Well, he only mentions ice once in the book, and he says in the introduction he says ice should be wiped clean and set aside, and then he doesn't mention it again beyond the fact that's in all the recipes. But he doesn't talk about

ice again. It's such a commonplace by the time he writes that book, it's ridiculous. This this, this was this you you asked me earlier on about the way into this book. And you know, I've done my my time in Bars. I worked in Bars when I was a student to pay my way through college and all the rest of it. So I've had Jerry Thomas on my shop for a long time because I've had the book for so long. I suppose this kind of blew my mind. It was like, what, wait, Jerry, where's the ice? What

the hell is going on? Man? I just you know, um, I couldn't quite get my head around it. Eighteen sixty two, he writes that Frederick Tudor starts trading his eyes out of Boston eight six. That gap of time, what's that? Fifty four years? Fifty six years? My math is atrocious. Please forgive me. Ice has become every day it's become an ordinary, unremarkable thing. And this to me blows my actual mind. Yeah, I found myself wondering if it was just like ice was ice at that point then there

just hadn't been a lot of innovation. It was just you were sort of happy to have what you had or no. Well, the innovation is Mr Tudor. And he starts shipping, like I just said, in eighteen o six to Martinique, which doesn't go very well for him. He hasn't got his his organization fully sorted, he hasn't got a nice house built there to receive his cargo. It largely melts on the dock. Um. So he tries again the next year, and he goes to Cuba, and that

goes rather better. But then things start going a bit a right. Um. He manages the first few years. The War of eighteen twelve starts, and of course, as its name suggests, eteen twelve the Caesar closed. The seas were closed earlier than that in eight o seven because the Americans didn't want to have their seamen captured by the British impressed into the British Navy who were fighting the French at that time. So there was a whole thing going on with that which made it quite tricky for him.

He gets into terrible, terrible, terrible debt to the extent that he's sent to prison for it, and his father manages to get some people together and have a whip around, and they bail him out and he gets back into business and he starts, um, I think it's Charleston first, and then Savannah in the South, he starts shipping ice. And he also he doesn't just ship ice to these places.

He also invents ice boxes for domestic use, which would put a lump of ice on the top and you can keep your milky cheese, your fish or whatever nice and cool. But his real innovation is that he realizes that the gateway to the ice business is drinks and ice cream. So whenever he arrives in a place, when he arrives in Savannah, when he arrives in Charleston, when he arrives in New Orleans, he gives the ice away to bartenders for at least the first sort of period

of time. Because his theory, as he writes in one of his letters to a guy called Stephen Cabot, who is managing one of his ice operations in the Caribbean, is that I'm going to paraphrase, I'm not going to quite quote this accurately. He says, if a man has had his drink cold for one week, he will not go back to having it warm. And he's not wrong, particularly in those kind of climates, and and so you know that that's when the sort of the ice cube gets into the old fashioned I think is that is

around that very era. I mean, he gets to New Orleans, that's to me the birth of the cardtail right there. He was brilliant. Um, he was shipping to India by eighteen thirty three, he was shipping to Australia by eighteen thirty five. This is all hand carved ice from lakes in New England going around the world. Um, and it is. It's one of those brilliantly baffling moments of history that's

completely forgotten because we don't need it anymore. But you know, there are there's there's there's one brilliant thing I think I reference in referenced in the book. I think it' about thirty seven the ice supply drives up in Calcutta and the place goes nuts. All these people are just going, you know, where is that? Their editorials written written in the newspaper saying where has our ice gone? How can we function like this? You know? And it's it's kind

of brilliant. So yes, because of Tudor's brilliance and his determination to come into a place, bring a load of ice, snack it up and sell it cheap, and turn it from being this luxury commodity for the wealthy into an everyday necessity. And I think this is the big thing is he makes it quittity, and he makes it ordinary.

He makes it something you cannot function without. That's why Jerry Thomas is able to just say ice should be washed and set aside, because to him is it is now ordinary, And even even as it is transforming his customers experience, even as it is in two beginning to form the basis of the very first cool chains in the United States, with big, massive locks of ice being strung in hammocks in train cabins over meat and vegetables,

it is now an everyday thing. Um. And and that's exactly the kind of stuff that people don't write about. And it's exactly why it's fascinating, Thank thank so. Coming coming back to to wine a bit. We touched on chilled wine earlier. How long does it seem like we've been in joining chilled wine and and and and I don't know. I also can't help but think about the fact that, yes, we still have for the most part red wines are not chilled. Well, there shouldn't be. There was.

There was briefly a fashion in Britain at some point in the nineteenth century for chilling red wine, which is an abominable thing to do, and I honestly don't know what they were thinking, and I'm frankly ashamed of them. But but but I think that the chilling of wine is something that has gone on for for for ages. I we have in um Athena as this book, I can never pronounce this right, I'm going to try the depnostisty.

He records a story of the comic player, right Diphilus, going around for dinner with this woman called good Lethea, and she has snow that's been sent by one of her lovers, brought into chill the wine. So that's, you know, nearly two thous years ago. I think that humans have always liked a cold, refreshing drink. I think that's just

part of who we are. Um it's just that we haven't had access to it for the vast bulk of bar history, and with wine in particular, we we know that the Tuscans were very keen on on chilling their white wines. Down um, in the middle part of the last millennium. We can attest to that. And God knows, those lovely flinty whites that they make are are beautiful when nicely iced and cold, So they clearly knew what

they were doing. Now that the book explores so many other exciting fields, I mean, you get into space exploration, medicine, the food supply chain. Um, there's a lot more invention history and there, and then there's there's even I was I was surprised in the light about that. There's a whole chapter on the Terror and the arab Us Um. Yeah, in part I was excited at that because I very recently watched that that adaptation of Dan Simon's novel The Terror.

I haven't seen that. I'm looking forward to that. Oh, I have not read the original books, so I can't compare it to that. But I my wife and I loved it. Thought it was terrific, wonderful performances. It's it's it's such a fascinating story, um. And there's so much that we just don't know about what happened to these pull man Um. It is ghastly how poorly equipped and badly prepared these memos sent into the altic um. If

the boats survived, arguably the men would um. But you know it was Captain Willard tells us in Apocalypse Now and never get off the boat. Yeah, even though, like like you point out in the in the book that you know they were they had a lot of very advanced technology they had and these are steam powered vessels, but they did. They had they They were among the first ships in the British Navy fitted with steam engines that were attractable. They had retractable propellers, They had chimneys

that they even had a rubber dinghy um. And they had a monkey called Jacko, who by all accounts was an absolute bastard. Um. They had a dog called Old Nap who was beloved by letters that that that that that came back before they finally went to the art to tell us that Old Nap was. It was a big crew favorite. They had a vast library. They were incredibly ahead of the curve in terms of their awareness of the need to take care of the men's mental health should they be frozen in and this is one

of the things they absolutely got right. The real problem for them is that their cold weather clothes were largely made of wool, which is in fact the most terrible insulator if you're in an Arctic environment, because you know you do the work needs to be done, you sweat into the world. Then you stop working, you start getting cold, and the sweat in the wolf freezers. And this is

a problem. And nobody thought to ask the locals, apart weirdly from the guy who was the first person to report back news of what happened to the Franklin expedition, and explorer called John Ray, who was a Scottish guy. He was a surveyor, he was a surgeon. He's probably the only Arctic explorer of the era from the UK who never got a nighthoud. And he was the one guy who learned how to speak to the Innuits and learn how to move like the Innuit, dressed like the Innuit.

Survive hunt exists in that fashion, and and he is largely unique amongst those nineteenth century polar explorers. And he was the one guy who who got the first The first store is the first Inuit testimony of what happened to the men of the Franklin expedition, as tragic as it was, and was rubbished for his efforts by no lesser author than the ghastly Charles Dickens, who, really, you know, was I need? I can't talk. I need to stop talking about Dickens. I can't stand the man. He's been

the bane of my life since school. I can't read his stuff. He's a racist bastard. I can't stand him. I wasn't familiar with the history of dickens involvement in

all of them. He was a great friends with Lady Jane Franklin, um John Franklin's widow, And when the Ray Report came in, which told terrible stories of anthroprophagy and starvation and enormous suffering, he basically took to his magazine outlet of periodical called Household Words to lambast the stories and and basically say it must have been the barbarous Inuit who at our brave, noble naval officers rather than

the meeting themselves. And he couldn't he couldn't countans the idea that a oral society could know something and tell us something that might be useful to him, That was that was preposterous because they couldn't write anything down. Therefore they're absolutely useless in his opinion, and he writes this stuff down. And you know, we we we we tend to remember his novels, which I find the boast and quite dull, but are generally speaking quite open hearted. His

journalism not so much. His journalism betrays the full on Victorian that he and he can be both things at once. I mean, you know, yes, and and I was, weirdly, I was talking to a friend on the phone earlier on the Only bit of Dickens that I actually like is the David Lean film Great Expectations, which I think is a tremendous movie and a brilliant bit of talk storytelling.

But one of the main reasons why it's a brilliant bit of storytelling he doesn't have all that bloody verbiage in it, you know, and and Lean is brilliant at his image selection and everything else. It's a fantastic and very disturbing movie. But no, Dickens and me, we're not friends. So um cannibalism, Charles Dickens cocktails space exploration. You cover

a lot of ground in this book. Was there was there any area in particular that you've found your self surprised that you were going to be covering like, well, I didn't think I was going to be writing about this in my book, but here I am. Well, well, I have to confess you've mentioned space exploration. I was going to do a chat from spake space Exploration and then I was later on my deadline and I didn't do it. So sadly that's not it. Maybe if there's

a sequel. But um, the winter sports stuff, yes, was very interesting to me to particularly the Jean Claude Keilly stuff and the way he became such a marketing phenomenon in UM in the United States in the early seventies and reading that Hunter Thompson article about him. That was really interesting because it never occurred to me. And in part, I mean, I'm god, I'm fifty now and so when when When I was a kid, ski coverage was just

beginning to happen on British television. We had this show called magazine show called Ski Sunday, and it would cover all the big races in Europe and it was tremendously exciting, and we were grit We only had three channels, so we didn't have a great deal of choice, but it was fantastic stuff. The medical chapter as well, was was was eye open it particularly Samuel Tilishman's Tishuman sorry his work on trying to freeze down the body of a trauma patient as quickly as possible to try and stop

the brain damage before you can stop the bleeding. The biggest problem that you have should should you be shot or stabbed, is bleeding out and the organ failure that

then follows. And what he's trying to do, and he's just going into the second phase of clinical trials right now, is to work out a way that you get the patient into the emergency room and you chill them right down as fast as you can to protect the brain and to protect the heart, so you can then get in and you have time to deal with whatever the traumatic issue is that is causing the blood loss. And

this is absolutely cutting edge stuff. And when I started writing that chapter, I had no idea that Mr Tishuman existed. Dr Tishuman. That absolutely blows my mind. Is extraordinary. I I stumbled into that chapter because I I I saw a documentary back in the nineties about using hypothermia in open heart surgery and how it hadn't quite worked out.

But it was the history of the early stages of open heart surgery and how chilling the patient and using hypothermia was really the best way to stop the heart jumping about before somebody invents the bypass machine. And so I was fascinated by the idea of how you can use hypothermia in a in a therapeutical setting. Nothing prepared me for what Dr Tishuman is up to and it is the most astounding stuff and if it works, it's

going to genuinely transform trauma medicine. Yeah, remarkable stuff, especially comparing it to the earlier parts of the book where you're talking about the experience as a freezing to death. I've I've been very fortunate to never experience that myself. When you're talking about like the phase you reach where you you're like, oh, I'm actually quite warm. I need

to strip a few layers off. I know it's mad and and and actually when you read the accounts, actually doesn't seem like it's such a bad way to go. You know, apparently it's quite a trippy high. Um. You know, I'm not that I want not that I want to freeze the death. But you know, if there's an option, you know that that that doesn't seem like one of the worst ways in which one can step off this

mortal coil. Alright, well, Fred, thanks for taking the time out of your day to chat with me about the book. The book, again is of Ice and Men, How We've used cold to transform humanity. As of this publication of this the initial publication of this episode, the book is out in the US, and I think correct me if I'm wrong, but it's coming out in the UK in the next couple of months in February. Okay, excellent. Well, I I've greatly enjoyed it. I highly recommend it to

all of our listeners. I think everyone out there will enjoy the book. Well, thank you so much for Robert. I've really enjoyed talking to you this evening. All right, thank you, thanks again to Fred. Again, the book is of Ice and Men, How We've used Cold to transform Humanity. Highly recommend you check it out. There's a little something in here for everybody. Uh. We're just a wonderful exploration of something that you may be taking for granted right now.

I didn't even think about it, but throughout the interview, I of course had at an entire container of iced water, chilled water right next to me, and I didn't even think about the connection. Thanks as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show, and if you would like to reach out to me or to Joe any of us here at the show, you can shoot us an email at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's production of I Heart Radio.

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