The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story

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.

In 1806 the brig Favorite left Boston bound for Martinique packed with large chunks of ice cut from a frozen lake: the first venture of a Boston entrepreneur who believed he could make a fortune selling ice to people in the tropics. Despite ridicule and hardship, Tudor made his fortune and founded a huge industry in the process: The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story provides a lively discourse on his accomplishments. The Frozen-Water Trade is the impressive and informative story of that early 19th century adventerous entrepreneur.

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.

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.

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 enorm