In the early 19th century, the idea of exporting ice to the tropics sounded like a joke. Ice was heavy, fragile, and melted. Yet one Boston entrepreneur built a global industry out of frozen New England ponds and earned the nickname “The Ice King.” His name was Frederic Tudor.
Ice Harvesting in Massachusetts, early 1850s. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Tudor was born in Boston in 1783, and grew up in a prosperous family. His father was a wealthy lawyer and his older brother William Tudor would become one of Boston's leading literary figures. Rather than receiving a college education in Harvard, Tudor preoccupied himself with business from a pretty young age of 13.
As a young man, he probably spent winters skating and summers enduring the stifling heat of the American South and Caribbean. The contrast gave him an idea: what if the natural ice that formed in New England each winter could be shipped to hot climates and sold at a profit?
In 1806, at just 23 years old, Tudor bought his first brig, loaded it with ice from his father's farm in Saugus, and sent it sailing to the West Indies. The Boston Gazette reported the news in amusement: "No joke. A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation."
Almost everyone predicted failure, and they were largely right. Much of the ice melted during the three-week journey south. What remained, he was able to sell for a loss of $4,500 overall. But Tudor was stubborn, and he believed the market would grow if he could simply get the ice there intact. He sent several shipments in the subsequent years, incurring even bigger losses. By 1812, he found himself in bankruptcy and in debtor’s prison.
Although Tudor’s path to success was by no means easy, there were a few factors that were in his favour. The ice was free, and so was sawdust he used to insulate the ice since it was regarded as waste by lumber mills. Hiring ships was also cheap because many left Boston empty to collect cargo later in the West Indies. Most importantly, he did not have to worry about competition because he was alone in the business.
Tudor had his first profits in 1810 when his gross sales amounted to about $7,400, then increasing to just short of $9,000. At this point, his personal debts still outweighed his income, and he spent parts of 1812 and 1813 in debtor's prison. By 1815, however, he had managed to borrow $2,100, both to buy ice and to pay for a new ice house in Havana—a double-walled structure 25 feet square and 16 feet high with the capacity to hold 150 tons of ice.
By 1816, Tudor was shipping ice from Massachusetts to Cuba with ever-increasing efficiency. He experimented with different insulating materials, such as wood shavings, sawdust, and rice chaff. The blocks were also stacked together like well-fitted masonry. He constructed ice houses throughout the tropics. Some wealthier families built their own; others bought ice from commercial vendors. A network of ice wagons delivered ice directly to homes, where it was used in iceboxes to preserve food and make cocktails.
Ice harvesting, New York, 1852. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In tropical cities such as Charleston, New Orleans, and on islands like Cuba and Martinique, he marketed ice as a luxury that quickly became a necessity. Cold drinks, preserved food, chilled desserts, and even medical uses made ice desirable among the wealthy, and then the middle classes.
By 1825, Tudor was doing well with ice sales, but the difficulty of hand-cutting large blocks limited his company's growth. However, one supplier, Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, harnessed horses to a metal blade to cut ice. Wyeth's ice plow made mass production a reality and allowed Tudor to more than triple his production.
Tudor also tried importing Cuban fruit to New York. He bought limes, oranges, bananas, and pears, preserving it with ice and hay. The experiment ended in disaster as virtually all the fruit rotted during the month-long voyage, leaving Tudor with several thousand dollars' worth of new debt. Still, he pressed on, opening up new markets in several southern U.S. cities.
Tudor’s biggest gamble was shipping ice to India—a journey of 16,000 miles that required four months. Tudor packed 180 tons of ice onto his first ship to India. Eighty tons melted on the way, but he still managed a profit when he sold the remainder. Over the next 20 years, India would become Tudor's most lucrative destination, yielding an estimated $220,000 in profits. Within a few years, Tudor had ice houses in Havana, Jamaica, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile (Alabama), Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Sri Lanka, and Singapore.
The global ice trade by the middle of the 19th century. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The natural ice trade that Tudor built reshaped daily life. It transformed diets, enabled new culinary habits, improved food preservation, and altered medicine. It also demonstrated that global trade could commodify even something as ephemeral as frozen water.
By the time Tudor died in 1864, the ice trade was a thriving worldwide business full of rival firms competing to sell ice to places as far-flung as Hong Kong and Sao Paulo. At one point, ice had become the most transported commodity on American ships after cotton. Yet the empire Tudor built was ultimately temporary. By the late 19th century, mechanical refrigeration began to replace harvested ice. Artificial ice factories and electric refrigeration would render the long-distance shipping of pond ice obsolete.
Still, Frederic Tudor’s achievement remains extraordinary. He took something people believed could never be transported across oceans and built a global industry out of it.
References:
# Frederic Tudor. Wikipedia
# Frederic Tudor: The Entrepreneur Who Brought Ice to Calcutta. Fee.org
# Frederic Tudor (1783-1864). American Aristocracy
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