How a Massachusetts Man Invented the Global Ice Market

An anonymous reader writes with the story of Frederic Tudor, the man responsible for the modern food industry. "A guy from Boston walks into a bar and offers to sell the owner a chunk of ice. To modern ears, that sounds like the opening line of a joke. But 200 years ago, it would have sounded like science fiction—especially if it was summer, when no one in the bar had seen frozen water in months. In fact, it's history. The ice guy was sent by a 20-something by the name of Frederic Tudor, born in 1783 and known by the mid-19th century as the "Ice King of the World." What he had done was figure out a way to harvest ice from local ponds, and keep it frozen long enough to ship halfway around the world.

Today, the New England ice trade, which Tudor started in Boston's backyard in 1806, sounds cartoonishly old-fashioned. The work of ice-harvesting, which involved cutting massive chunks out of frozen bodies of water, packing them in sawdust for storage and transport, and selling them near and far, seems as archaic as the job of town crier. But scholars in recent years have suggested that we're missing something. In fact, they say, the ice trade was a catalyst for a transformation in daily life so powerful that the mark it left can still be seen on our cultural habits even today. Tudor's big idea ended up altering the course of history, making it possible not only to serve barflies cool mint juleps in the dead of summer, but to dramatically extend the shelf life and reach of food. Suddenly people could eat perishable fruits, vegetables, and meat produced far from their homes. Ice built a new kind of infrastructure that would ultimately become the cold, shiny basis for the entire modern food industry."

Comments

I saw How We Got To Now too

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I saw How We Got To Now when it was on two months ago too.

What the article neglects to mention is that the ice trade managed to suppress mechanical refrigeration for something like 30 years until the natural ice trade managed to self-destruct by selling increasingly polluted ice. Then it was entirely replaced by what was then decades old technology.

Re:I saw How We Got To Now too

[hey!]

Old ways of doing things often hang on an unexpectedly long time because a mature technology has the advantages of ubiquity. People are comfortable with it, all the kinks have all been worked out, and its popularity gives it a huge structural cost advantage.

You can't think in terms of how expensive it would be to have a 50 lb block of ice delivered to your doorstep today. The *marginal* cost of having ice delivered is nil when everyone on your street is getting it. Everyone had an actual "icebox", and since it had no moving parts it never needed servicing or replacing. So when electric refrigerators became available it was a choice of keeping your perfectly good icebox with its reliable, regularly scheduled ice delivery, or buy a cranky, complicated, expensive piece of machinery that would pay for itself just in time to need replacing. If the ice industry killed itself by shipping polluted ice, it's probably because they couldn't expand their supply to meet demand.

I'll bet the grandchildren of kids learning to drive today will find the whole concept of a massive, truck-based gasoline distribution network absurdly complicated. But it works because it's massive, and because it's ubiquitous we assume it is simple -- which it is on the consumer end. On the production end it is fantastically complicated and labor intensive.

Speaking of the Boston ice industry, I live a half mile from a 20 acre (8 ha) pond that supported a major ice operation in the 1800s. Pictures show men harvesting blocks of ice eighteen, even twenty-four inches thick for shipment around the world. In the non-winter months the companies operated water-powered mills. Ice was a classic case of exploiting slack resources. Ice meant no head for the water powered mill, and an idle workforce. So electric refrigeration wasn't the only pressure on the ice industry: electric factories would have raised the price of winter labor.

Today that same pond never gets more than a couple of inches of ice, even in last year's "polar vortex" event -- you can't make ice that thick in a couple weeks, you need a cold winter that starts early and doesn't let go for months. When I was a kid this pond iced over in December. Now it ices over in Janurary, or Feburary, or some years not at all except for the lee end. In January I can fish from my canoe on ponds where I would once have been ice-fishing.

Incidentally...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The harvesting and storage of naturally occurring ice was so successful that, for a somewhat surprising amount of time, it made manufactured ice uneconomic and, for an even longer period, on-site refrigeration hardware a very niche item(even after ice manufactured on large scale ammonia based systems replaced harvested ice, it still fed the same local market of that natural ice deliveries had).

If memory serves, the scale and efficiency of the industry was such that Australia ended up with the first adoption of a refrigeration system on a commercial scale because it was one of the few places that had the necessary technology but lacked a frozen pond without about a zillion miles. The thermodynamics and the necessary hardware were more or less familiar to any region with an enthusiasm for steam power; but the economics just didn't work out.

Nova's Absolute Zero

[Kunedog]

Nova did an episode following human mastery of cold a few years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The Tudor part starts at 27:50, but the entire documentary is an excellent watch that follows the advances (and setbacks) in science through the history of this single subject (but it also glosses over the end of the ice trade).

Re:Nova's Absolute Zero

[Mr D from 63]

They also glossed over the dark side to this trade;

Left behind at the harvesting ranges were huge iceholes. Men would enter the iceholes at their own risk. The owners of the iceholes also had to protect them from intruders. Savvy businessmen would cover their iceholes.

To this day, there are still a lot of iceholes up north.

Albert Einstein designed his own refrigerator

[Ugmug]

Albert Einstein designed his own refrigerator..... "The Einstein–Szilard or Einstein refrigerator is an absorption refrigerator which has no moving parts, operates at constant pressure, and requires only a heat source to operate. It was jointly invented in 1926 by Albert Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd and patented in the US on November 11, 1930 (U.S. Patent 1,781,541). This is an alternative design from the original invention of 1922 by the Swedish inventors Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Re:news.....huh.....

[Mr D from 63]

You want newness?

I have a 3D ice printer in my kitchen.

and how did ice get to the Far East?

[Aviation Pete]

on their way to China at the end of winter, the Tea Clippers would bring ice, insulated in straw, to India where it was stored in ice pits for the British to cool their food in summer. There were even recognized brands of ice from Scottish or Norwegian lakes with exceptionally clean water.

This would have been News for Nerds 180 years ago.

Ice House in Chennai, India.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

To this day, one of the important bus stops in Chennai, India is called The Ice House, (though the building has been renamed now[*]). The Boston ice, packed in sawdust made its way all the way to the tropical heat of Chennai, India. . The whole neighborhood was and sometimes still is called The Ice House, because ice was such a novelty in the tropics. Brief history of ice in chennai

Local politicians in India have this predilection to rename everything. Costs very little financially and works as a kind of vote bank politics. Madras to Chennai, Bangalore to Bengalooru, Bombay to Mumbai, Calcutta to Kolkatta, Orissa to Odisha what the hell? There was guy named A Brito who was well known for his Letters to the Editor, Indian Express, Bangalore. When the local mayor renamed yet another road (which had been named for a British officer) after some local politician he wrote: "... To celebrate his grand achievement of renaming $road, I hereby propose we rename the Queen Victoria statue in the $park Mayor Butte Gowda statue. The resemblance is, after all, so striking that ..."

This is where the ton for AC capacity comes from.

[trout007]

One ton of AC is equivalent to what one ton of ice melting would provide over a day.

Re:Badly written

[Will.Woodhull]

What seems to be missing from these accounts (I have not done an exhaustive search of them, though) is that Tudor was clever enough to recognize that waste from one local industry-- the saw mills of New England-- could be used as one of the key raw materials of his distributed ice product. He was one of the first to recognize that a waste stream could be repurposed this way.

New England still had plenty of waterwheel driven lumber mills at the time, and was in a unique position to create an ice distribution network servicing both sides of the Atlantic. Except for Alaska that was milling a lot of lumber for the San Francisco build up, there were few regions with all three components: natural ice, lots of saw dust (or the equivalent lightweight, cheap insulation), and good harbors.