You know that suction forces liquids to evaporate which pulls energy from the liquid. If you put enough suction on water, it will freeze.
I saw this happen in high school chemistry.
The image below is a machine that mechanically produces ice using this effect. Pretty cool right?
At the farm where I grew up, there was a building leftover from long times previous, that we called the “ice house.” It had a basement that had been used to store ice during the summer. We turned it into a pool/
| Ice was stored during winter months in the earth’s northern and colder parts in specially constructed buildings located near ponds, lakes or rivers, from where it was taken and sent to regions near the equator. |
| However, ice supply was highly dependent on season’s conditions and consequently very uncertain. Ice crops failures were usually followed by shortage, marketplace disruptions and price increases in the following summer. Natural ice shipments from North to Central and South America, West Indies and India, and from Norway and Sweden to England and the German ports on the North Sea, slowly reached their maximum capacities in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the other side, the significant increase in ice consumption in different parts of the world during the same time period caused that in the 1880s, for example, the annual ice supplies of around two million tons transported through the Hudson river become inadequate for a city as New York, forcing in turn imports from countries such as Canada and Norway. Similar measures must to be also taken to make up for the deficiencies in the usual provision from Scandinavian Alps in order to cover the needs of about ten million ice tons for the residents of Paris. Artificial refrigeration emerged then to satisfy this growing demand, freeing the market from being weather dependent, and to additionally calm down the worry caused by the constantly increasing contamination of the water sources in the vicinity of large cities, from which the ice-crops were harvested. Although the harvested ice producers advertised, in view of the imminent competition, that their natural refrigeration resource did not fail like the recently devised mechanical systems, it was a fact, that the different apparatus and mechanisms designed between the middle of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century not only competed with harvested ice but successfully exceeded all expectations. |
| – from “Les systèmes de fabrication de glace au 19e siècle” (translated), Simón Reif-Acherman, International Journal of Refrigeration, vol. 35 (2012) |
