He Made the Refrigerator Car Pay, and Changed How We Eat Meat | This Is How Our Lives Were Designed

Gustavus Swift was the first man to rebuild the whole business of shipping and processing meat, and to make sure nothing went wrong at any step.

In 1877, a train left Chicago for the eastern United States carrying a car of dressed beef — not live cattle.

That one car would carry the meatpacking industry into a new era. Everything the business was used to — how meat moved, how the market was arranged, what was done with the parts nobody bought — would be rebuilt, and beef would become an everyday food rather than a pleasure reserved for the rich.

Gustavus Franklin Swift, the man who sent that car on its way, is often miscredited as the "father of the refrigerator car." He did not invent it. He was simply the first to make it pay.

When the idea of experimenting with refrigerator cars first came to Swift, American cities were only beginning to fill up.

After the Civil War, Americans started leaving the countryside and gathering in cities. In 1820, only 7% of the country's 9 million people lived in a city or town; by the 1860s, about a quarter of its 31 million people had moved into cities.

The country was building out its transport network at the same time. To keep up with demand, Americans dug more than 3,000 miles of canals in the 1820s and 1830s. Over the following decade, they laid more than 7,000 miles of railroad in the Northeast alone. As railroads spread, they took on every kind of freight: raw materials, vegetables, fruit, meat.

Next to the East Coast, with its big cities like New York and Boston, the country around the Mississippi was thinly settled; the two were known as the East and the West. The eastern economy was growing fast, and demand with it, so the East had to bring in goods of every kind from the West. Chicago, which tied the two together by canal and rail, became the shipping hub of the age.

Beef was one of those goods, and an important one. Americans, following British eating habits, had always loved beef, and raising cattle at any scale inside a city was obviously out of the question — Easterners had to buy from the West and its vast grasslands.

Merchants who saw the opening started shipping live cattle east. Cattle were pushed into rail cars by the thousand, and a chain of middlemen moved them from the West to Chicago and from Chicago to slaughterhouses in eastern cities; once the animals were killed, the beef was sold on to wholesalers and retailers.

Swift was one of these merchants. At 14 he went to work for his older brother, then a butcher in their town; later he traded cattle as a middleman and opened a meat shop of his own. In 1875 he moved to Chicago, which he considered the best source of supply, and took a job with two beef middlemen, D. M. Anthony and J. A. Hathaway, where his work was to pick the best cattle and buy them.

The meatpacking business of the day had no shortage of problems. With no way to keep meat cold, men in the trade had to haul live cattle as close to the point of sale as they could and slaughter them there, so the meat would still be fresh.

As you would guess, none of this was easy. Merchants had to supply water and feed the whole way, clean up after the animals, and keep them as comfortable as possible. However hard they worked, some cattle still died on the journey, or lost weight — and either way that was money gone.

Worse, even when the cattle reached the slaughterhouse safely, customers did not want every part of the animal. In fact, as much as 50%-60% of each animal was thrown away; more or less all that sold was the meat and the hide.

In The Yankee of the Yards, the biography he wrote of his father, Swift's son Louis F. Swift says that Swift spent his whole business life working to cut costs. This time he wanted to stop two things — "paying freight on parts that could not be sold" and "cattle losing weight on the road" — and he decided to end "the waste of the heavy charges that piled up as cattle passed through too many middlemen."

The answer Swift arrived at was the refrigerator car: slaughter the cattle first, load the dressed beef into a cold car, and sell it only once it reached the other end.

The advantages were plain. Dressed beef took less room than a whole live animal, and only the parts anyone wanted had to travel; there was no feed or water to buy on the train, and nothing to lose to weight loss or death on the way; and there was no need for a line of middlemen — the meat could go straight to wholesalers or retailers in the destination city.

Swift was not the first to try. Ice-making machines, which began to appear in the 1830s, brought down the price of ice, and with it the cost of the refrigerator car, which ran on blocks of stored ice.

According to the historian Maureen Ogle's In Meat We Trust, as early as the 1860s a Detroit meat wholesaler named George Hammond was using the winter cold to ship his meat from Detroit to the East. Swift's first attempt, in 1877, worked much the same way: nothing but cold air and natural ventilation to keep the meat fresh.

In the years between Hammond's experiment and Swift's, a good many companies tried the same thing. None of them could keep meat moving by refrigerator car for long, for roughly two reasons: they could not guarantee the meat would still be fresh when it reached the customer, and they could not get the railroads to work with them.

The refrigerator car, in truth, was only one part of the job. Between buying a steer and selling the beef lay many steps: paying the railroad's freight charges, slaughtering the animal and storing the meat, loading it into the car, keeping it cold on the way, storing it again at the far end, and selling it to customers.

Swift was the first man to rebuild the whole system and make sure nothing went wrong at any step.

The first thing he did was build the right car. In 1878 he worked with the engineer Andrew J. Chase to design a refrigerator car suited to meat. Because the meat would hang inside, they built the ventilation around that, and packed salted ice on board, which absorbs heat faster.

Next he had to talk the railroads into coupling refrigerator cars to their trains and charging a fair rate to haul them.

Almost no railroad wanted Swift's way of doing business to work, because their investors were making a great deal of money moving live cattle. They collected the freight charges, and they had also put money into the water and feed stations along the line — merchants were allowed to ship cattle only if they resupplied there. On top of that, carrying the newly designed cars would mean paying to refit the trains.

In the end Swift found the Grand Trunk Railway, which was doing badly, and talked it into taking the risk. But Grand Trunk had no money to build refrigerator cars either. So Swift struck a second deal, with the Michigan Car Company of Detroit, and had privately owned, custom-built refrigerator cars coupled to Grand Trunk's trains.

By now Swift had most of the process settled; what was left was the stretch between the rail car and the warehouse. When the train reached the destination city, his men would move the refrigerator car onto a flatboat, float it down the river to the warehouse, open the warehouse doors and push the car up flush against the building, so that the hanging meat could slide along a rail out of the car and straight onto the warehouse line. If that is hard to picture, think of parts hanging from a factory line, traveling from one end of the shop to the other.

Henry Ford, in fact, took the idea for his own assembly line from Swift. Touring Swift's Chicago slaughterhouse, Ford saw the overhead line the workers used to move beef along and realized that hanging parts from a moving platform would do away with a great deal of carrying and loading. "If you save ten steps a day for each of 12,000 workers, you have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy," he said — and he built the same thing into the line at his own plant.

Swift's new model worked very well. His meat was just as fresh, and priced far below what the live-cattle shippers could manage. You can hear as much in a protest those merchants made in 1880: "Swift is dumping his product on customers in New England at seven cents a pound, and not one live-cattle shipper can get his price below eight cents a pound."

In 1878 Swift and his brother founded the Swift Company together; a year later they were sending hundreds, then thousands, of tons of dressed beef to warehouses around the country. By 1881 the Swift Company was shipping three thousand head of cattle a week out of Chicago.

In under a decade, moving dressed beef by refrigerator car had become the normal way to do business. And the market fell into the hands of five companies — Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson and Cudahy — which controlled most of the beef supply in the United States and came to be called the "Big Five."

It turned out that way because the model Swift created asked a lot of anyone who used it: you needed a slaughterhouse, warehouses to hold the meat, branch plants in different cities, and refrigerator cars of your own. Whoever could meet those terms had plenty of capital and a product hard to beat on price.

In 1887 the Big Five had only seven slaughterhouses and a few branch plants; by 1897 they had 20 slaughterhouses and 600 branch plants; by 1917 the two figures had risen to 91 and 1,120. Small firms and one-man operations could only give up.

The Big Five used that advantage to spread fast, shipping cheap meat to distant cities. And "distant" no longer meant only American cities: better refrigeration let these companies begin selling abroad as well. In 1880 American exports of fresh beef came to roughly 100 million pounds (45.36 million kilograms); by 1892 the figure had grown to 233 million pounds.

There was more. In the past, once live cattle reached the end of the line, the local slaughterhouse could do nothing with the offal and other leftovers but throw them out. With slaughterhouses working at scale, the big companies could take all that discarded material and make byproducts from it: soap, fertilizer, glue. Canning improved around the same time, so the companies could also turn scraps of meat into canned beef. Louis went so far as to write in his father's biography that "it was the byproducts that really improved my father's business."

As the price of beef fell, it stopped being a privilege of the upper class. The new middle class loved fresh beef, and even the poor could afford canned.

In the early 20th century you could measure a person's class by how much meat he ate: about 200 pounds a year marked the middle class, while workers and the upper class ate roughly 100 and 300 pounds. Even now, when people discuss the rise of China's middle class, the growth of Chinese beef consumption is one of the favorite pieces of evidence.

This was only the beginning of America's love of beef; sales would keep rising until the 1980s. Americans would live through one beef-safety scare after another, but it was not until the last few decades that fear of cholesterol finally beat their enthusiasm, and consumption began to fall.

Swift's son did not think the remaking of the refrigerator car had to fall to his father: "Had he not done it, there is no doubt someone else would have accomplished the same thing within the next few years."

Still, there is no denying it. What Swift did, and he did it purely to cut costs, remade the meatpacking industry — and designed the way we live.

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