BROADCASTS.com

b'Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in hotels via noisy machines, and in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to ward off the heat of a hot summer day. Most refrigerators owned by Americans feature automatic ice machines. Ice on-demand has so revolutionized modern life that it\\u2019s easy to forget that it wasn\\u2019t always this way\\u2014in fact, the national obsession with ice can be traced back to a Bostonian merchant who, 200 years ago, figured out how to get Caribbean bartenders addicted to serving their drinks cold.

Today\\u2019s guest is Amy Brady, author of \\u201cIce: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks.\\u201d She shares the strange and storied two-hundred-year-old history of ice in America: from the introduction of mixed drinks \\u201con the rocks,\\u201d to the nation\\u2019s first-ever indoor ice rink, to how delicacies like ice creams and iced tea revolutionized our palates, to the ubiquitous ice machine in every motel across the US. But Ice doesn\\u2019t end in the past. Brady also explores the surprising present-day uses of ice in sports, medicine, and sustainable energy\\u2014including cutting-edge cryotherapy breast-cancer treatments and new refrigerator technologies that may prove to be more energy efficient\\u2014underscoring how precious this commodity is.'