This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Picture with me, if you will, India during British colonial rule. Let's say around the year 1865.

Picture a government office in Bombay, as the city was then known.

Two British officers are discussing an uprising that has been challenging Britain's sovereignty

over the subcontinent.

It's May, the hottest month in India.

Temperatures have soared to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The officers are sweating.

There's no air conditioning of course, but they have a servant who brings them two ice-cold drinks.

The officers take sips of their drinks and swirl the ice in their glasses.

And at this moment, these cold drinks dripping with condensation

feel like a small miracle to these colonialist wankers.

But actually, the ice was a kind of miracle.

That's our own little miracles, Sam Greensman.

Because in 1865, no one had refrigerators.

It wouldn't be for another half century

until they started appearing in the US,

let alone India.

Think about the ice in those officers' glasses.

If you were to zoom out from those glasses, and out and out, and then zoom in on the United States, on Boston, on a frozen lake in the dead of winter.

There, you'd find men working.

You see a lot of men and horses and a lot of activities going on and then you'll see

horse drawn plows, pikes and pusher bars or poles. That's Rick Smith, amateur historian of the American ice trade.

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