As seen in TIME: the year the press found Liquid Ice

In January 2002 Liquid Ice launched at SIA, America’s big snow sports trade fair. Seven months later it was in TIME.

On 5 August 2002 TIME ran a page on a new generation of products, and among the big brands sat Americool Liquid Ice, the wrap from New Hampshire. TIME described it as a reusable wrap bandage that uses a mentholated fluid as a coolant.

One year, a stack of magazines

TIME was not alone. In May 2002 Men’s Journal put Liquid Ice on its list under “Nicer Ice”. In June Popular Science showed it under “New tech for your first aid box”, and Self called it a “Cool wrap”. In March 2003 Parade, the Sunday magazine of American newspapers, told its readers to “Just cool it”, and in April 2003 Prevention ran it as the “No-Melt ‘Ice’”.

Germany followed. The Süddeutsche Zeitung picked it out at the ISPO summer show in 2002, Bild am Sonntag ran it on 28 July 2002, and Kicker, Germany’s football magazine, described it that September as “eine neuentwickelte Kühlflüssigkeit aus den USA”: a newly developed cooling liquid from the USA. Sport & Fitness and Fit for Fun followed in 2003.

And on television

On 1 May 2002 BBC One’s science show Tomorrow’s World tested Liquid Ice live, with a thermal camera in the studio. That evening has its own page.

What the editors saw

Every one of them saw the same thing: cold that needs no freezer. Liquid Ice is a liquid of water, alcohol, menthol and camphor. On fabric it evaporates and takes heat from the skin with it, which is why a soaked bandage turns cold on the body instead of in an ice box.

The liquid TIME wrote about is the liquid we bottle today in Klosterneuburg near Vienna. Soak it into the Self Cooling Bandage, or spray the 500 ml bottle onto a close-fitting shirt.

The clippings are in our archive. We don’t reprint them, because the pages belong to the magazines. The quoted words are theirs.