The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story Review

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The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story ReviewIt 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 Frozen Water Trade: A True Story Overview

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