The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story [Paperback]

Gavin Weightman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 4, 2004

Now in paperback, the fascinating story of America's vast natural ice trade which revolutionized the 19th century.

On February 13, 1806, the brig Favorite left Boston harbor bound for the Caribbean island of Martinique with a cargo that few imagined would survive the month-long voyage. Packed in hay in the hold were large chunks of ice cut from a frozen Massachusetts lake. This was the first venture of a young Boston entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who believed he could make a fortune selling ice to people in the tropics.

Ridiculed at the outset, Tudor endured years of hardship before he was to fulfill his dream. Over the years, he and his rivals extended the frozen-water trade to Havana, Charleston, New Orleans, London, and finally to Calcutta, where in 1833 more than one hundred tons of ice survived a four-month journey of 16,000 miles with two crossings of the equator. The Frozen-Water Trade is a fascinating account of the birth of an industry that ultimately revolutionized domestic life for millions of people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Weightman, a London journalist and documentary filmmaker, uncovers a secret history and ends up transforming a dull-sounding topic into a riveting read. He introduces turn-of-the-19th-century Bostonian Frederic Tudor as an indefatigable American dreamer who sought to give people something they didn't know they wanted-and make a killing while he's at it. Tudor hatches scheme after scheme to "farm" ice from New England ponds and deliver chunks of the brand-new commodity to the Caribbean, and ultimately to India and elsewhere, so that items like cold beverages and ice cream become cultural staples. Along the way Tudor encounters disbelievers, creditors, rivals, imprisonment, yellow fever, warm weather, political scuffles-even pirates. Weightman also delves engagingly into the science of freezing and the particulars and economics of ice transport and storage. Through it all, Weightman juggles the players in the burgeoning but finally ephemeral business while he spins a tale of a pre-refrigerated world. Issues of commerce and entrepreneurship in an infant nation are revealed in this page-turner, which gets its title from the name of the industry. When Weightman visits Tudor's original ice source, locals think the author is loony for suggesting that cubes from the pond cooled people in Calcutta two centuries earlier-and made one man (and perhaps many others) rich in the process. Weightman takes a relatively unknown part of history (and the figure at its center), and creates a funny, rollicking human adventure.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

The idea sounds fanciful: harvest ice in Massachusetts and sell it to people in the tropics. But the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Frederic Tudor was immune to ridicule and single-minded in his conviction that the ice trade could be profitable. He was also right. This entertaining history of his crusade to turn New England into the world's ice-maker shows how the combination of technological innovation and sharp marketing—Tudor trained bartenders to use ice in cocktails in order to illustrate the virtues of cold drinks—created an industry that sold thousands of tons of ice a year to places like India, Cuba, and the American South. As a case study of the entrepreneurial mind, Weightman's book reminds us that creating demand can be as important as meeting it.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (February 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786886404
• ISBN-13: 978-0786886401
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #49 in Books > Business & Investing > Economics > Commerce

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Huge, Strange, Influential, and Forgotten Industry December 20, 2002

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Entrepreneurship and Yankee ingenuity create a new industry. January 28, 2003

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Part of a cool story March 5, 2003

By Paul Eckler

Format:Hardcover

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.