ice pick

A standard icepick

An icepick is a tool used to break-up, pick, or chip at ice. It resembles a scratch awl, but is designed for picking at ice rather than wood. Before the invention of modern refrigerators, ice picks were a ubiquitous household tool used for separating and shaping the blocks of ice used in ice boxes.

Other uses

Like most other tools, icepicks have been used for more than their intended use. For example, mafia hitman Abe "Kid Twist" Reles used an icepick as his weapon of choice. Fellow Murder, Inc. hitman Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss also employed an icepick as a weapon. On the show Deadliest Warrior, the Ice Pick is shown as a Mafia weapon, and that it can go through bone easily.

Neurologist Walter Freeman used medical instruments called leucotomes, and later orbitoclasts, both of which which were essentially icepicks, to perform transorbital lobotomies. This operation was informally called "icepick lobotomy": the leucotome was hammered into the patient's brain with a rubber mallet via the eye's tear duct.

Although the murder weapon in the assassination of Leon Trotsky was an ice axe, it is often described as an ice pick^[1].

References

1. ^ See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, 1991, ISBN 0195071328, p.418 for a detailed account