Apparently, not only was ice delivery a pretty good business early in the 20th century, but ice delivery men also did okay with the ladies. I guess not too many ladies could afford a pool boy back then. But in all seriousness, the transition from ice to refrigeration is a pretty interesting case of a new technology displacing an old. It took about 10 years for sales of the new technology to exceed the old, and about 30 years for the ice box to go away entirely.

In Philadelphia, one major ice company, Knickerbocker, had massive plants, one with 125 employees and storage capacity for a million tons throughout the city. With the help of 1,200 horses and mules, Knickerbocker drivers kept more than 500 delivery wagons mobile on the streets. At the start of the 20th century, America seemed to need every last one its 1,320 ice plants. And the nation’s iceboxes multiplied. Between 1889 and 1919, the value [of] iceboxes manufactured in the United States increased from $4.5 million to $26 million…In 1920, a household refrigerator cost $600 (more than $7,500 in today’s dollars) and broke down about every tenth week…

Between 1920 and 1925, the number of refrigerators in American kitchens rose from 4,000 to 75,000. In 1926 they boomed to 248,000 units and by 1928, 468,000. The following year, Frigidaire manufactured its millionth refrigerator. By 1930, the sales of electric household refrigerators surpassed those of iceboxes…By 1940, 63 percent of all households had refrigerators—13.7 million of them. Four years later, 85 percent of America’s kitchens were equipped…

By 1953, when the last U.S. icebox manufacturer went out of business, the young, virile delivery man carrying dripping, often dirty, blocks of ice into millions of clean American kitchens, the man whose proximity to wives and daughters fueled countless rumors, would-be scandals and jokes on stage and screen, that man, the iceman, finally found a new home—and new purpose—in nostalgia purgatory.

And now , just because, the relevant Top Gun clip: