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The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story

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It was necessary to add the subtitle to the book _The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story_ (Hyperion), as in it, Gavin Weightman has told a tale that stretches credulity. How can we have almost completely forgotten an industry that employed thousands, created millionaires and monopolies, and sent an American product around the world, changing forever the way people dined and drank? Oh, the answer is artificial refrigeration, but before that there was the commercial ice trade, and before that, people simply did not have ice cream, mint juleps, and fresh fish that could keep in the markets. Beyond being an exposure of a surprisingly secret history, this book is the story of an entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who may never have heard the phrase "Find a need and fill it," but who did just that, showing commercial ingenuity and perseverance that ought to make this a textbook case of American business acumen.

Tudor, born in 1783 to a wealthy Massachusetts family, was more interested in making his fortune than in getting an education, and dropped out of college. On a trip to Havana in 1801, he discovered that it was hot, and that no one would sell you a cool drink, for there were none to sell. But at home in New England, they had ice on ponds and rivers every year, ice that uselessly froze and then melted as the seasons changed. The ice was mostly a nuisance, restricting river traffic, and there were tons and tons of it. Tudor merely had to get it from cold lands to hot. This, of course, was the problem, a problem solved with Yankee ingenuity in design of ice houses and ice cutters and of insulation for cargo ships. He went through bankruptcy, incarceration for debt, and a mental breakdown in making his dream become a reality. Originally, people sneered at him; a trade in ice seemed as ridiculous to those who had never heard of it then as now. But Tudor, having developed thriving business to New York, Charleston, Havana, and New Orleans, hit his supreme mark when his brig reached Calcutta in 1833 with two-thirds of its ice cargo intact.

Tudor's commercial triumph offset his sometimes disastrous speculations in sea salt, graphite, and coffee, so that he ended his life a very wealthy man. He was the first trader in ice, and others saw the profits he was making and went into the business for themselves, forming an enormous industry throughout New England. One of the reasons so little is remembered about it is that it seldom figured in any official trade statistics. It was neither mining nor farming, so it was not taxed or regulated. It was only by the years of the First World War, over fifty years after Tudor died, that mechanical refrigeration to manufacture what used to be harvested from ponds and rivers, began to make a real dent in the ice trade, although some river and pond ice continued to be traded until the middle of the twentieth century. As Weightman says, "All of this huge industry simply melted away," but the enterprise was so enormous, so complicated, so revolutionary, and so very strange that it is a real pleasure to read his preservation of Tudor's life and works.

The indescribable heat of summer in Calcutta was especially oppressive for officials of the British Empire, accustomed as they were to cooler weather at home, and when word reached them in September, 1833, that a ship carrying ice from Boston had arrived at the mouth of the Hooghly River, many regarded this as a huge practical joke. The temperature that September day was over 90 degrees, and any ice from New England would have had to be cut from rivers or ponds at least six months earlier. No such shipment of ice had ever been attempted before, and the journey from Boston to Calcutta would have taken 120 days, even if the weather had been good. How could ice possibly survive so long without refrigeration in the hold of a ship? Nevertheless, fifty tons of ice were soon unloaded and sold to the astonished British inhabitants.

For Frederic Tudor the successful shipping of this ice to Calcutta in 1833 was the culmination of a thirty-year dream. A "diminutive, pig-headed Bostonian," he had dropped out of school at thirteen and had been seen as a family maverick, always doing something different from what was expected. Boston financiers refused to help him finance his wild dream of shipping ice to the tropics, and it was Frederic's own family and connections which had to subsidize his initial experiments in 1806, when, at age twenty-two, he made his first shipment of "frozen water" to Martinique. By selling an easily available, free commodity--ice from New England's frozen rivers and ponds--to other parts of the world, however, Frederic Tudor eventually became one of the great American entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, ultimately earning a long-term profit of almost a quarter of a million dollars in the Calcutta trade alone.

The Frozen Water Trade is a fascinating story of entrepreneurship, engineering, marketing, and Yankee ingenuity, and Weightman's contribution to our understanding of this little known industry is immense. With fascinating illustrations and many old photographs, he documents how Massachusetts ice, if heavily insulated with sawdust, could last in icehouses for several years, and, with similar insulation, could be shipped throughout the world for most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The author, a British journalist, has gathered information about the unique and almost-forgotten New England ice industry from archives all over the world, turning his research into a truly compelling narrative which is great fun to read. His ability to highlight details which keep the reader enthralled while learning something new makes his scholarly research accessible to even the most reluctant reader of history.

Weightman presents the story of refrigeration from the first ice houses to the development of the home refrigerator. The proponent behind this business was Frederic Tudor of Boston. Although the wealthy of Europe had had small ice houses for the storage of ice harvested from lakes and pond, those structures were small and relatively costly. Tradition required that the ice house be below grade or at least have one wall below grade.

In about 1805, Tudor decided that a profitable business could be created by harvesting ice from lakes and rivers in New England and shipping it to tropical climates for sale. He began in the West Indies, expanded to Havana, and eventually Southern US and India. Along the way he developed inexpensive ice house designs, techniques to pack the ice for shipment at sea, and marketing techniques to educate customers on uses like cooled beverages and ice cream. One of his associates, one Nathaniel Wythe, developed a horse-drawn ice plow that automatically marked off the width of the blocks. This made ice harvesting much more efficient and facilitated uniform blocks that made it easy to store the ice efficiently.

It spite of the accuracy of Tudor's vision, the path to success was not an easy one. Ships were lost or delayed. Ice houses were not ready. His early ventures were only marginally successful. He was frequently in debtors prison or fearful of being caught by his creditors. Tudor succeeded only by sheer determination in the face of opposition.

Techniques were also developed to thicken the ice. Once ice was thick enough to support weight, holes were bored to allow water from below to cover its surface. This made it possible to freeze ice up to 12 inches thick.

The ice business fit nicely in Boston. Many business men there participated in international trading. Ships brought trade goods to Boston, but finding goods to fill the holds for the return voyages was difficult. Often rocks were loaded as ballast. Ice was an ideal cargo, once the packing techniques were perfected. The ice had to be insulated on all sides and water from melting had to be pumped out.

The manpower required also fit well in New England. Ice was harvested by day laborers in the middle of winter. At that time, farm and construction workers were unoccupied. Ice harvesting provided extra income during otherwise idle periods. Smaller crews worked throughout the year to transport ice to ships and help in loading them.

Once Tudor developed the techniques, they were widely copied. Others brought ice to Northern cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Often the ice was harvested from nearby lakes or rivers. Services that delivered ice to your door began about 1840. The first ice boxes for keeping food began to appear at the same time. Periodically a warm winter would produce an ice famine. In those cases, ice was typically harvested in Maine and shipped in. The same situation prevailed in Armour's shipment of meat in refrigerated railcars from Chicago to New York, New Orleans and California. Ice harvested locally was stored in huge ice houses next to the tracks.

The technology to manufacture ice by refrigeration using ammonia as refrigerant began to appear in patent literature around the Civil War. The initial machines were expensive to operate (usually powered by steam engines), unreliable and had inadequate capacity compared to the need, which continued to grow, especially in the South. Natural ice continued in use for many years. Only after turn of the century did concerns about pollution in rivers cause the acceptance of manufactured ice on a large scale. However, some harvesting continued as late as 1950.

Technology for electric home refrigerators using toxic sulfur dioxide as refrigerant was invented by Marcel Audiffren in France in 1895. General Electric offered a refined model after World War I when small electric motors began to be made in quantity. In 1926, 2000 units were sold.

Missing is the story of the development of non-toxic, non-flammable Freon for use as refrigerant in Dupont laboratories in about 1930. Missing is the story of rental lockers in locker plants that allowed personal storage of frozen foods long before such storage became available in the home in deep freezes and in freezer compartments in refrigerators (beginning about 1950). Missing is the story of air conditioning, all additional stories in the development of refrigeration technology. Excellent index. No references.

Part biography, part business history, author Gavin Weightman's "The Frozen Water Trade," is an interesting and readable account of a uniquely American business that is all but forgotten today. In this modern era of refigeration, it seems impossible to imagine the world of a century ago in which everything was cooled by harvested freshwater ice, or indeed a world of two centuries ago when NOTHING was refrigerated. Were it not for the entreprenurial genius of a man named Fredric Tudor, Weightman's man protagonist, we all might be drinking warm drinks to this very day becuase the very idea of cold beverages might never have caught on.

Tudor's classic story is that of a vsionary who had difficulty convincing his contemporaries of the wisdom of his ideas, and who risked everything he had to make that vision a reality. He eventually succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and in the process changed the habits of first America and then of the world. Starting in 1806, Tudor hatched upon a scheme to deliver New England ice to the tropics for sale. He was beset by all kinds of difficulties: bureaucratic red tape, unreliable underlings, shipwrecks, disease, debtors prison, embargoes and even a war or two. By midcentury, however, his trade in ice had become New England's leading export and had become a commodity no American could do without.

All of this Weightman dutifully recounts in the narrative history style that has become so popular these days. It was appeal most to those who enjoy business success stoires. The one drawback of the book is that Tudor as a character is relatively colorless. He was a driven businessman who had few other interests. Because he is forgotten today, the accounts of his personal life don't carry much interest. Nevertheless, the story of the forgotten industry he pioneered has been well preserved by this enjoyable book.

As a business professor, I found this book part entertaining history, part cautionary tale about the risks and rewards of hubris.

One might at first read it as the story of a mad genius, Fredrick Tudor, a 19th-century Boston scion fallen on hard times with the nutty notion to ship ice to the Caribbean. Tudor truly didn't seem to have a good head for business, but the fundamental economics of the trade were so strong that he eventually flourished. Take something that you can get for practically free (ice). Hire farm workers laid off for the winter (they'll work for practically nothing). Pack it with something that people want to get rid of (sawdust). Transport it in ships that would otherwise be carrying only ballast (they'll carry it cheap).

Tudor appears to have been more-or-less an irascible nut, whose initial forays into shipping ice were disastrous (he forgot, for example, that no one in the Carribean had a place to store it, so that the first purchasers could do nothing more with their blocks of ice than carry them home gingerly in their aprons and watch them melt). As a sideline, he tried to corner the US coffee market and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and alienated everyone who could help him gain a technological edge over his competitors.

In sum, Tudor is a fascinating character, but the trade itself is even more interesting then he was. Weightman's narrative is well-researched, charming, and swift. It would make an excellent choice for anyone interested in history but also a great change-of-pace for anyone interested in business in general.

Mr. Gavin tells a very good tale of how Fredric Tudor took the seemingly absurd idea of selling ice and turned the idea into what was one of America's largest industries of the 19th Century.

What I found most captivating - more so than the biographical aspect of the book - was how Gavin put ice in perspective in America. It was a huge industry producing millions of dollars a year and employing thousands (many on a seasonal basis), yet because it was not taxed there is very little hard data. Moreover, ice appears to have been a primarily American love in the last century. Only after WWII did the rest of the world pick up our affinity for cold drinks and food. These perspectives make the book more than a biography or "how they done it" book and makes it worth reading.

Although I thought the book weakened towards the end (as if he was looking to fill a few more pages) it was a joy to read. Gavin made the history of a unique industry into a good story.

Gavin Weightman writes very well. His books are very difficult to put down and this one is no exception. The story follows the life of Frederic Tudor and his untiring efforts to harvest, transport and sell ice at distant locations. Tudor's life and the ice trade are so intertwined that when he dies (90% into the book), one is left with the feeling that something is missing in the last 10% of the book. In order to not fall into this trap, one must remember that this is not a Tudor biography but the story of the ice trade. With this in mind, one can enjoy this book from cover to cover. A good read.

An interesting book about a fairly obscure industry, one that was so omnipresent a hundred years and more ago that it would be hard to find a community of any size that wasn't somehow affected by it. The book focuses on Frederic Tudor, the most successful of the frozen water trade entrepreneurs and the originator of many of the practices of the business. Overall it's a pretty good book, although at times it does bog down a bit by focusing on the Tudor family issues. Also, due (according to the author) to a lack of sources, I felt there was a lack of breadth in the narrative, the book being more of a biography than an overview of an industry. These however are minor issues and the book is still worth the reading.

I found this book in my local library, but then purchased a copy on Amazon as it was such a well written and interesting story. My grandfather, who lived in Farmingdale,ME, wrote in his diaries in the late 1800's of driving horses on the Kennebec River during the ice cutting operations. It was a flurry of activity for which the local men came out to work in an all out frenzy of activity for a few days or weeks, in order to cut and stash the ice in the huge ice houses along the banks of the river.
One of my sons lived along the rail trail in Arlington, MA which bordered on Spy Pond. I now know why that route was planned for the RR, as it was to have a good source of transportation for the ice from Spy Pond. My other son, lives in Mahopac, NY and near Lake Croton, which the book states was a primary source of ice for NYC. So many interesting connections with the ice trade. In Maine, where I grew up, local farmers cut ice from small ponds and had their own private, small ice houses. I remember as a child living in town in the 1940's, that the local ice man made deliveries, and he wold chip off small pieces to give to us kids to such on; probably not too sanitary, but we would scrape off the sawdust and eat it anyway.
Ice was such an important supply for the shipping and storage of food before the electric refrigerators became available. Maine and New England played an important role in this activity throughout the US and the world.
A great story.
Richard

It is hard to rate this book. If you are interested in how the ice trade (cutting ice out of frozen lakes) was developed, or want to be inspired if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, then I would rate this book five starts.

If you bought the book out of curiosity, like me, then you are in for a long, somewhat interesting, story. The book is 387 pages long (large print edition) partly because of the large print, but also because the author was so detailed. The detail is what makes this book great if you want a lot of information about the ice business back in the 1800's, or if you want to be inspired by someone Frederick Tudor) who was very tenacious.