The Refrigerated Rail Car's Impact on Society

Post date: Oct 07, 2014 11:23:53 PM

This essay was originally written for an assignment at school. I think it's interesting enough for a blog post.

The development of the refrigerated railway car created lasting impacts on American society.

The first patent for the refrigerated car was issued in 1867; they began to be used on a large scale in 1881, when Gustavus Swift’s meat packing company began operating large numbers of an improved design that reduced moisture damage to the meat [1]. The cars were railway cars with extra insulation and tanks filled with ice and brine to lower the internal temperature [1].

The guiding value in the development of refrigerated rail cars was efficiency. Swift himself had a “never failing creed of economy” [2], and the goal of reducing cost was evident in the car’s purpose. The refrigerated car was made to avoid transporting livestock, which requires feed and rest, loses weight during transport, and contains inedible parts like bones that incur extra freight costs [1]. With the refrigerated cars, only the parts of the animal in demand can be shipped, avoiding waste [1]. This attention to economy is also visible in the car’s design: Rees points out that designs strived for low ice consumption to avoid frequent re-icing [1].

The primary winner from the development of this technology, of course, is the oligopoly of packing plants that controlled the refrigerated cars. Immediately after Swift introduced refrigerated cars, he became the largest slaughterer of beef in the U.S., and, according to his son, “made money very fast” [2]. By 1916, the packing industry was dominated by an oligopoly nicknamed “The Big Five” – together, they were responsible for 82% of the beef shipments, and by 1917 they owned more than 91% of refrigerated cars [3]. With their ownership of almost all rail refrigeration infrastructure, they also profited from the icing services they offered through their ice plants [3], and from transporting other perishables such as fruit and vegetables [1]. In contrast, the smaller packers were the losers. Without the capital for building refrigeration infrastructure, they simply could not compete with the Big Five – they could not ship their meat to remote locations, and even for local markets they were undersold by the big firms [3].

Another apparent winner is the consumer, who enjoyed lower prices and more availability of foods. Swift was able to profitably sell his products at a price below his local competitors [2], which implies savings for the customers. In addition, with the refrigerated car, Anderson comments that cities can “draw upon the resources of the entire country” for their food supply, making available fruit and vegetables grown in areas as remote as California to the inhabitants of large cities on the east coast of the US [3]. However, those in small towns were not among the winners: while Swift attempted to service those markets by building special “peddler cars” with smaller capacity [1], overall, concluded Woolrich (as cited in Anderson), small towns did not receive the aforementioned advantages brought by refrigerated rail transport [3].

Interestingly, the customer later became a loser in a very indirect manner. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a book that depicted the awful working and sanitary conditions in the large packing firms [4]. The controversy surrounding the book prompted an investigation: the inspectors admitted that the products shipped in bulk – i.e. the material actually carried in refrigerated cars – were handled in a fairly clean manner; this was not the case, however, for processed products such as sausage and canned meat. The government also did not have enough inspectors for all the large firms created from centralization [5]. So while the refrigerated cars themselves did not carry tainted meat, the aggregation they made possible indirectly contributed to a lack of food safety.

In addition to the aforementioned centralization and aggregation of packing plants, the refrigerated rail cars brought many other changes to society, both expected and unexpected.

One major societal change is the increased specialization of geographical areas in agriculture. Refrigerated cars were found to be suited for transportation of a variety of other goods besides meat, such as fruit and vegetables [3]. With this knowledge, railway companies invested heavily in refrigerated cars to ship produce across the nation at a large scale [1]. Since fruit and vegetables no longer need to be grown close to market, they can be produced in areas with weather and land best suited for the specific produce, and as a result, many areas switched to producing a single suitable crop for export [3]. Anderson gives examples, such as Georgia, which shipped over 30 times as much peaches in 1905 compared to 1889 [3].

The advent of the refrigerated car also led to major development in the rendering industry. Rendering is the process of extracting valuable materials, such as tallow, from the by-products of slaughtering. Rendering primarily took place in a small scale on farms before the advent of the large packing houses, who were responsible for the growth of the rendering industry through the amount of refuse created by their operations [6]. With the larger volume, rendering operations of these large packers were able to switch to the safer and more sophisticated autoclave to replace the simple kettle used in small scale rendering [6]. In addition, packers depended on the revenue from rendering. Swift’s son recalled that, for his father, “by-products revenue is what developed his business” [2]. Thus, the packers, to increase profit, constantly developed new materials made from by-products: Swift produced fertilizer and oleomargarine [2] as well as animal feed [6] from the wastes of his packing operations.

Perhaps the most unexpected development brought by the refrigerated car is the development of the assembly line and thus modern mass production. Henry Ford, in his autobiography, cited the moving overhead meat hooks used in the large meat packers as the inspiration for his moving assembly line [7]. Those assembly lines went on to transform manufacturing, and “doubled or even tripled” efficiency in factories [8]. Thus, mass production was pioneered by the large meat packers that were created because of, and relied on, the refrigerated car.

References:

[1]  J. Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2013.

[2]  L. F. a. A. v. V. J. Swift, The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift, Chicago: A. W. Shaw Company, 1927.

[3]  O. E. J. Anderson, Refrigeration in America: A History of a New Technology and its Impact, Princeton: Princeton Uiversity Press, 1953.

[4]  M. Hussey, "Global Muckraking: The International Impact of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle," Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, no. 34.1, p. 29, 2009.

[5]  "Conditions in Chicago Stock Yards," in 59th Congress, 1st Session, Document No. 873, 1906.

[6]  F. D. (. b. D. L. M. Bisplinghoff, "A History of North American Rendering," in Essential Rendering: All About the Animal By-Products Industry, Arlington, Kirby Lithography Company, 2006.

[7]  H. a. S. C. Ford, My Life and Work, New York: Garden City Printing Company, 1922.

[8]  E. a. A. M. Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.