Transcript

Intro

Music

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome To Hub history, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston. The Hub of the universe. This is episode 211, The Ice King of Boston. Hi, I’m Jake.
What you’re about to hear is actually the third script that I attempted to write for this week. I started out researching the murder of Starr Faithful, a beautiful 25 year old flapper whose body washed up on a Long Island beach in 1931.
Her family would accuse Boston Mayor Andrew Peters of murdering her.

[0:40] When I sat down to start writing the episode during the week of Thanksgiving, there was just far too much murder and addiction and child sexual abuse.
After a few days, I shifted gears, decided to research a lighter topic and, for some strange reason, settled on the Bussey Bridge disaster.
I got pretty far down that path before realizing that Jamaica Plain train wreck where 38 commuters were killed and even more were injured, was not the answer to my Thanksgiving blues.

[1:09] Switching gears again, I landed on the topic that’s been on my podcast backlog for a long time.

Main Topic: The Ice King Of Boston

[1:18] Ice seems like such a simple thing today when I could just go to my freezer and grab a few cubes to cool down my drink.
But before artificial refrigeration, New Englanders would cut in store ice during the long winter to keep their food fresh and their drinks cold during the summer.
That was all well and good for people who live near an ice pond anyway. But what about people in the far away tropics who might want to get their hands on some ice?
Until the early 18 hundreds, the idea of shipping ice to the tropics was seen as a crazy pipe dream.
But then along came a Boston entrepreneur who built a fortune and a reputation as the Ice King.

[1:55] But before we talk about Boston’s ice King, I just want to pause for a moment to thank our latest Patreon sponsor. John B.
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And thanks again to everyone who supports the show.

[2:46] And now it’s time to learn about the ice king. In September of 18 33 an American ship called the Tuscany crossed the Bay of Bengal, sighted the Indian coast and sailed up the Hooghly River to the city we now call Kolkata,
landing on the 13th,
the crew had been at sea for four months and seven days, leaving Boston on May 6th.
The ship’s arrival heralded an economic shift, undercutting the market for a product that had been a luxury good and transforming it into a commodity.
It also marked the culmination of almost 30 years of ambition.

[3:21] An article the following year in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal describes the ship’s reception.
The arrival of the Tuscany with a cargo of ice from America forms an epic in the history of Calcutta, worthy of commemoration.
As a facetious friend remarked in a Medal of Frosted Silver in the month of May.
Last, we received a present of some ice from Dr Wise that Huguely, whose efforts have been so long directed to the extension of its manufactured by the native process as a proof that the precious luxury might be preserved by careful husbandry.
Until the season, when it’s coolness was the most grateful little did.
We then contemplate being able to return the compliment with a solid lump of the clearest crystal ice at the conclusion of the rains,
nor that we should be finally indebted to American enterprise for the realization of a measure for which we have so long envied are more fortunate countrymen in the upper provinces,
that a body of ice maybe easily conveyed from one side of the globe to the other, crossing the line meaning the equator twice with a very moderate loss from liquefaction.

[4:26] Before the arrival of the Tuscany, ice was nearly unknown in the tropical coastal plains of India, where Calcutta lies.
While ice was common in the Himalayas and their foothills, there was no infrastructure in place the harvest and ship it to the coastal cities.
To the extent that locals had any experience with ice, it was small amounts made by digging cold pits in the temperate inland areas,
waiting for a frosty morning and skimming the thin crust of ice from the surface of the water and an unglazed clay pot lined with reeds at the bottom of the pit.
Each morning’s collection was combined with the previous until there was a small nugget of slushy ice, which could be protected with insulation until the summer.
Like the one apparently produced by Dr Wise, it hugely obviously such a scarce and labor intensive product was only available to the noble class and the officers of the British East India Company.

[5:19] Halfway around the world. The far end of this global supply chain led to a Worf in Charlestown, where Frederic Tudor, the architect of the global ice trade, would write in the Icehouse diary that he kept for a half century.
The frost covers the windows, the Wheels creek, the boys run winter rules and $50,000 worth of ice.
Now floats for me upon Fresh Pond Fresh Pond in Cambridge and Spy Pond in Arlington were among the first bodies of freshwater where armies of workers descended in winter toe harvest. The frozen water that was the cash crop of the cold months.
Even Walden Pond and Conquered was harvested where Thoreau watched the operation in road.
Thus, it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans of Madras and Bombay in Calcutta drink it. My well.
The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges, an article published in the Accounting Historians Journal in 1984 notes.
At first, Tudor employed work crews to cut the ice by hand from throughout eastern Massachusetts in coastal New Hampshire and Maine.
As demand grew tutors, Iceman used equipment such as the horse drawn ice cutter, which was invented by Nathaniel Wyeth.
Wyeth eventually developed specialized tools for cutting and processing ice at all stages of production, and Tudor strongly urged Wyeth to patent these devices and restrict their use to Tudor operations.

[6:47] Once the ice on a pond reached a depth of at least 12 inches, though 15 or 18 inches would be preferable, the ice harvest began.
Now I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Henry David Thoreau in his famous work, Walden,
where he bangs on and on endlessly about the necessity of self reliance without mentioning the inconvenient fact that while Thoreau was on Walden, his friends and neighbors kept him fed and his mother stopped by to do the washing.
However, there are times when I admire his power of description, like when he spoke of entering the cloud factory, the top of Mount Katahdin as sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away.

[7:28] We’ll call on Thoreau is descriptive powers here because he watched and described the process of ice harvesting for his chapter on Winter and Walden,
and the winner of 46 47 There came 100 men of hyper berry and extraction swooping down upon our pond one morning with many carloads of ungainly looking farming tools,
sleds, plows, Jill Barrows, turf knives, spade saws, rakes.
And each man was armed with a double pointed pike staff, such as is not described in the New England farmer, the Cultivator.
Thus, for 16 days, I saw from my window 100 minute work like busy husband hman with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming, such as a picture we see on the first page of the almanac to speak literally.
Ah 100 Irishman with Yankee overseers came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice, they divided it into cakes by methods to well known to require description.

[8:24] The methods of harvesting ice may have been too well known to require description and throws time, but in 2020 we could be forgiven for needing a bit more detail.
First, horse drawn scrapers removed the snow from on top of the ice, then a foreman surveyed outta 600 square foot rectangle on the ice.
In the next step, another horse pulled a device that looked a lot like a traditional sled, with the runner set 44 inches apart.
One runner was normal and the other was a serrated blade that cut a two inch deep groove in the surface of the ice.
On the return pass, the normal runner road in the groove cut in the first pass. Then it would turn and come back again.
In relatively short order, a grid of 44 inch squares was scored into the surface of the ice.

[9:11] Next up was another Wyeth invention. The ice plow. The plow had runner set 44 inches apart to follow the grid, but it also had progressively larger chisel like blades that followed the scored grooves,
as the horse plotted slowly forward, each successive blade cut a couple of inches deeper into the ice, and so the blocks of ice were nearly ready to float free.
An article about ice harvesting at Jamaica Pond, published by the JP Historical Society, describes the final step.

[9:41] The final cutting of the ice was done with hand tools. These included long bladed saws with long handled spades and forks bars.
Large sections of the 600 ft square were cut away, and these floats were written like rafts.
The larger floats were divided into smaller pieces as it was floated toward the ice house.
The small pieces were then pushed onto a conveyor for the trip to the icehouse, 70 ft above the pond surface.
Out at Walden, old Henry David reported on the same process where the cut blocks,
being sledded to the shore were rapidly hauled off to an ice platform and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle work by horses onto a stack as surely as so many barrels of flour.
And they’re placed evenly, side by side and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the very clouds.
They told me that in a good day they could get out of 1000 tons, which was the yield of about one acre deep.
Ruts and cradle holes were worn in the ice, as on terra firma by the passage of the sledge over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets.
They stacked up the cakes, thus in the open air and a pile 35 ft high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hey between the outside layers to exclude the air.

[11:04] From the ice house on each pond, the ice had to be hauled to the Port of Boston and loaded on a ship.

[11:11] Early on, this was done with horse drawn carts, but as time went on, more and more was hauled by rail, starting with a spur of the Charlestown Branch railway that was laid directly to tutors.
Icehouse on Fresh Pond in Cambridge 18 75 issue of Scribner’s monthly magazine describes the process of loading a cargo of ice from a railcar onto a ship in an era when the ice trait was fully matured.
The loading of ships that Charlestown is perhaps one of the most interesting features connected with the ice trade.
As the cars pass down the track from the main road to the WARF where the ships are waiting there separately, Wade, then the car has moved to a position opposite the gangway of the ship.
A long platform rigged with iron or steel rails is placed between the car and the gangway of the ship.
Over this platform, the Isis slid from the car door to the ship’s rail.

[12:04] Frederic Tudor would say that unlike a summertime farmer who had to worry about droughts and rains that might cause his crops to rot in the fields, the winter never rot in the sky.
However, there were some years in the winter never seemed to come when I say conditions were marginal, a thinner sheet could be cut, stacked and re frozen to form larger blocks.
Or Cruz could drill holes in the ice to draw water up to re freeze on top of the existing ice sheet.
When conditions were really poor, however, a nice harvester would have to resort to desperate measures during an unusually warm February.
Frederic Tutors Diary records the difficulties in finding ice in the ponds around Boston as temperatures in the afternoon approached 60 degrees,
the ice crews would do nearly anything to keep their harvest out of the warm winter sun Sina cart from town, with sales amounting to 200 yards in order to avert the sun’s rays from a small part, at least of the ice.
Observing the state of things, I took Wyeth in my chaise and we went through an intricate and very rough woods road toe, long pond which I remember to be shaded on the south border.
Here was a ribbon of ice about 20 ft wide and 150 ft long.
I was induced to instruct Wyeth, who at first with someone against it toe undertake to get out what could be saved value, which he thinks will be 15 cords.

[13:29] During one of these interminable warm spells, Tudor wrote in his diary about the genius of Nathaniel Drive, Us Wyeth, a distant cousin of the painters NC Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth.
January 13th 18 28 thermometer. 45 degrees.
I found Wyeth wandering about the woods at Fresh Pond and all the lonely perturbation of invention and contrivance,
his mind evidently occupied in improving the several contrivances, which is perfecting for carrying into good effect improvements in his several machines for the ice business.
I have from time to time, given them several hints, particularly respecting the ice cutter, which I first suggested to him.
And he has improved the plan of last year, and he now tells me that he has improved upon this year’s improvement for mines highly excited, an ingrate activity. There is no Sunday.
It’s interesting to note that Nathaniel Wyeth and Frederic Tudor revolutionized the ice industry together, Tudor would become known worldwide as the ice King, while Wyeth is remembered.
Maura’s a mountain man who set up to very early trading posts along the Oregon Trail.

[14:39] Ice King Frederic Tudor was the son of William Tudor. Back in Episode 1 31 we described how William wooed and won the heart of the loyalist Delia Jarvis, even as he served as a colonel and judge advocate general in the Continental Army.
The couple had six Children who lived to adulthood, two daughters and four sons.
Frederic was the only son who didn’t go to Harvard, but that did nothing to deflate a sense of self worth.
A sarcastic description by a former business partner named John W.
Damon, who believed the Tudor had cheated them gives a sense of Frederic sparing the distinguished gentleman ISS.
Frederic Tudor, Esquire of Boston, who, to the personal superiority of birth and education, which confers so many advantages in a contention of this sort,
unites the many other advantages flowing from a numerous family connection and a large circle of influential friends in the higher walks of life.

[15:34] Hey, sounds insufferable. The very earliest origins of Fredericks interest in the ice trade are shrouded in legend.
In her 1909 book, Old Boston Days and Ways, Mary Carolyn Crawford wrote about one possibly apocryphal story for the origin of tutors. Interest in frozen water.

[15:55] The ice business seems to have interested Frederic Tudor while he was still only a boy,
his family owned in the state of some 250 acres out in Saugus, and it was on the tiny pond near the almshouse there that his first experiments in the cutting and storing of ice were made.

[16:11] Frederic maintained until his death at the age of 80 that the idea of shipping ice toe warmer climates was his and his alone.
He would fly into a rage at any suggestion to the contrary, and even disowned a close friend and confidante who suggested otherwise to him in a private letter.
However, as Louis Simpson’s 1968 journal article, Boston Ice and Letters in the Age of Jefferson points out, most people who have studied the ice business attribute the idea to a different Tudor.
The historic possibility of the ice trade was created when Frederic Tudor left Boston Latin School at the age of 13 to become the youngest apprentice.
To DaCosta the marshal, a firm on State Street, this was an act of rebellion.
He was about the right age. In his day to enter Harvard s three brothers dutifully did.
Frederic refused to be a Harvard man and scornfully denounced Harvard is a place for loafers.
Eventually, Colonel Tudor set Frederic up on the commodity market in Boston.
Speculator A man about town, Frederic Tudor at the age of 22 seem to be on the way to becoming merely another state street operator.
When Williams suggested that the fashionable party that ice from the tutors pond and rock would would be a profitable commodity and Caribbean ports,
the time was the summer of 18 05 Very likely the Bostonians at the party were enjoying ice strengths and ice confections made with ice taken from nearby ponds and preserved through the hot months in a family icehouse.

[17:40] William here is not Frederic, famous father, but instead his brother William, one of the Harvard tutors who was interested mostly in literary pursuits but who would also be instrumental in starting up Frederic SISE business.

[17:53] As his mind became fixed on the idea of shipping ice to the West Indies, Frederic heard more and more anecdotal evidence that he could pull off such a scheme.
He wrote in 18 05 letter to a Business Associates cousin.
The idea of carrying ice to tropical climates Will it first, no doubt startling astonish you.
But when you take into consideration the following circumstances, I think you will cease to doubt the practicability of the thing and adopt the proposal I shall presently make to you.
The captain of an American ship in London during peacetime could obtain no freighter employees for his vessel, someone said to him in just what he took in earnest.
We’ve had a mild winter and there’s no ice in the ice houses. Suppose you go to Norway for a cargo.
He did and arrived in London with a full cargo and realized a very handsome profit notwithstanding, he was detained a long time and settling with the custom house. In the account of duties.
Ice has been frequently found to go on the ends of boards safely to the West Indies without thawing during the voyage.
This is a very remarkable fact because the ice so situated must have been very much exposed in the damp hold of the vessel loaded with green boards.
Ice creams were carried to Trinidad by the English when they were in possession of that island and pots packed in sand from Europe.
Isis carried every year to ST Eustatius and is preserved there.

[19:17] All these stories of the successful preservation of ice on the way to the Caribbean got Frederic tutors mind racing on August 1st 18 05 His Icehouse diary notes.
William and myself have this day determined to get together what property we have and embark on the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies.
The ensuing winter by October 18, 05 Frederic and William and enlisted the help of a cousin named James Savage.
While Frederic worked on financing the operation and harvesting ice, William and James would go to the Caribbean island of Martinique.
There, they would set up in Insulated Ice House to store the frozen wears, start a company to sell the ice and begin marketing New England ice to the locals.
Though the Caribbean during the Napoleonic Wars was a hotbed of private tearing by British, French and Spanish ships, the two cousins made it to Martinique in one piece, where they utterly ignored their role in the partnership.
They failed to set up a corporation to sell the ice, and they failed to build an insulated ice house.
They did, however, successfully market New England ice, creating the equivalent of a viral marketing campaign that built significant demand.
Meanwhile, back in Boston, Frederic found it hard to get potential investors to take him seriously.
Another 18 05 entry in the Icehouse diary says, People only laugh and believe me not when I tell them I’m going to carry ice to the West Indies.

[20:47] Luckily for Frederic Tudor, cargo space on ships bound from Boston to the Caribbean was cheap.
Boston imported sugar and molasses, rice, cotton and other goods grown by slave labor on the plantations of the Indies.
But at the time, Boston didn’t ship many goods back to the Caribbean,
With many ships going in ballast that is, with a hold full of worthless stones to give the ship stability at sea, captains were perfectly happy to use seemingly worthless Frozen water is ballast.
Instead, while collecting a minor fee from Tudor, the accounting historians Journal article notes the first of these shipments.
A few months after William Tudor and James Savage it left for Martinique,
on the outgoing tide the morning of February 13th, 18 06 the BRIG favorite captain Pearson commanding, cleared Boston Harbor with the first cargo of New England ice bound for the West Indies.
The favorite arrived in Martinique after a 20 day passage.
Upon clearing customs, Tudor circulated the following advertising broadside announcing his novel New Product.

[21:53] Today, March 7th, and during three consecutive days there will be put up for sale in small amounts. A cargo of ice brought into this port very well. Preserved from Boston by the brig favorite Captain Pearson.
This sale will take place immediately and will last three days. Only the break having to proceed at that time to another island.
The price is 10 cents a pound. It is necessary to bring a wool cloth or a piece of covering to wrap the ice.
This means preserves it much longer with that first shipment. The Boston Gazette. Chocolate tutors expense.
No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique.
We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.
It very nearly did. Frederic Tudor had invested about $10,000 of mostly borrowed money into that first shipment of the Caribbean.
So it’s quite unfortunate that there was no established icehouse restoring its wares.
Thanks to his brother and cousin. There was a healthy demand for ice and Martinique in the spring of 18 06 Even those who weren’t initially convinced were won over when they saw the profits that could be made with New England ice.
In a letter home, Tudor described how one merchant was persuaded to place a nice order.

[23:11] The man who keeps the Tivoli garden insisted ice creams could not be made in this country and that the ice itself would all thought before he could get it home.
I told him I had made them here and putting my fist pretty hard upon the table.
I called for an order of £60 of ice and, in a pretty warm tone, directed the man to have his cream ready, that I would come to freeze it for him in the morning, which I did accordingly,
being determined to spare no pains to convince these people that they cannot only have ice, but all the luxuries arising as well here is elsewhere.
The Tivoli man received for these creams the first night $300 after this he was humble, is a mushroom.

[23:50] The Icehouse diary reveals that along with product demonstrations like it’s a Tivoli Gardens, Tudor also understood the value of product placement.
It becomes necessary to establish with one of the most conspicuous bar keepers ajar and give him his ice for a year.
The object is to make the whole population use cold drinks instead of warm or tepid.
There will be affected in the course of three years, a single conspicuous barkeeper, having one of the jars and selling steadily. His liquors, all cold without an increase in the price, render it absolutely necessary that the others come to it or lose their customers.
They’re compelled to do what they couldn’t no other way be induced to undertake.

[24:32] By shipping the ice from New England in February for a destination just a couple of weeks away, Tudor could get away with loading his ice into the ship’s hold without much in the way of insulation.
When it arrived in the tropical climate of Martinique, with no waiting icehouse, the 130 tons of ice and thus tutors profits began melting away.
Sales were brisk, but not brisk enough to keep up with shrinkage. So Tudor lost about $4000 on that first shipment.

[25:01] As 18 06 came to an end, his Icehouse diary concluded.
The plan of transporting the ice is perfectly good now. The one thing needful is an ice house, which will keep the ice after it has arrived in the West Indies.

[25:16] The following year, William Tudor negotiated a license to send shipments of ice to Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua, as well as arranging to build a nice house in Havana, Cuba.
This first icehouse, however, didn’t work very well on the shipments to the other. Island suffered the same problems as the first shipment to Martinique.
Frederic Tudor firmly believed that he was onto a winning proposition and kept sending good money after bad.
At the end of 18 07 President Jefferson imposed an embargo that prohibited US ships from trading with foreign ports.
As the embargo went into effect, Tudor found himself upwards of $25,000 in debt, with no market for his product.
At one point, the Icehouse diary laments, I found myself without money and without friends and with only a cargo of ice in a torrid zone to depend on for the supply of both.

[26:09] Before his fortunes turned around, Tudor would spend time in debtor’s present in both Boston and Cambridge, and at one point described himself in his diary as pursued by sheriffs to the very Worf as he dodged his creditors to get a ship out of Boston Harbor.
Meanwhile, Frederick’s father, William Tudor, the elder former law student of John Adams, judge advocate general of the Continental Army and wealthy scion of the family, fell onto hard times of his own.
As Henry Greenleaf Pearson described in an article for the Proceedings of the Mass Historical Society in the 19 thirties, the fortunes of the family were threatened with disaster, along with several men of means.
Colonel Tudor had embarked on a land development scheme in South Boston.
So profitable did the venture promised to be that he set out with his wife and his daughter, Delia, for a second European tour and the two years or more of their stay abroad. The ladies tasted to the full the delights of Napoleon’s new imperial court.
But when the family returned to Boston, they found their fortune gone.
The South Boston land speculation is an incident well known in the history of the city’s development to a number of her leading citizens. It brought misfortune to William Tudor ruin from the time of this disaster to his death.
10 years later, his income was the meager salary provided by his position is clerk of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
His debts were numerous, and the respect in which he was held by his friends and contemporaries did not protect him from threats of arrest.

[27:38] The end of the embargo found Frederic Tudor deep in debt, dodging his Boston creditors.
He skipped town in 18 10, made his way to Havana and managed to negotiate exclusive rights to sell ice in Cuba for six years.
He personally oversaw the construction of a new ice house that was built snugly enoughto allow ice to survive all the way through the tropical summer from April to September, which Henry Greenleaf Pearson described in detail.
This building, which represents probably the first attempt made by man to preserve a large quantity of ice above ground, merits, um, description.
On the outside, it was 25 ft square. The dimensions of the inner shell were 19 ft its height, 16 on top was a floor trapdoors in which provided access to the area Below.
In the space between the floor and the roof were the sales room reached by an outside staircase and living quarters for the keeper.
The structure was supported by 156 red cedar posts, as the building was only 100 ft from the place where the vessel lay.
A staging running from the boat side to the door in the second story was used for unloading the cargo with this ice house, which held about 150 tons was filled.
The top layer was covered with nine inches of shavings.

[28:57] And his icehouse diary, Tudor celebrated the somewhat limited success of his Cuban venture.
Thus is the winter of my discontent made glorious summer and all the clouds that lowered upon our house and the deep bosom of the ocean buried,
drink Spaniards and be cool that I, who have suffered so much in the cause, may be able to go home and keep myself warm.

[29:20] The Simpson article describes how all the way to remain in debt for a bit longer. This was the moment when the young Fredericks luck began to turn.
Tudor reestablished faith in his business and at last built what proved to be a genuinely efficient icehouse for the Cuban climate.
Although he had to hide from his creditors each time he came back to the United States, his business slowly improved.
It was to improve more rapidly when Tudor began to carry ice to Charleston in New Orleans, cities that he learned offered more lucrative markets for ice than ports in the West nds.
In November 18 16, Frederic Tudor described his ignoble departure from Boston for the Port of Charleston, South Carolina.

[30:01] Hateful and debasing feelings to be in such a situation is to be obliged to leave one’s home in anything like a clandestine manner.
I could not conceal my intention, and I did not. But I am satisfied my departure was without the knowledge of those who could and who would have stopped me.
Had the vessel been delayed a day, the present plan for this city would not have been undertaken in American ports like Charleston. Tudor was quickly forced to give up his hopes of exclusivity.
Unlike colonial governments in Cuba. Martin Eker, Jamaica The South Carolina Legislature saw little reason to grant um, a monopoly on the ice trade, especially when representatives from the interior counties believed that his product was a luxury item.
They would only benefit the elites around Charleston itself.
Instead, he would use his advantage, is the first to market to establish a foothold, create demand and set a price that competitors would have a hard time matching.
An advertisement he placed in the Charleston paper stresses how affordably his ice was priced.

[31:02] The Ice establishment Fitzsimmons Worf is now opened. Ice will be for sale at all hours of the day from sunrise to sundown, except when the ice housekeeper is necessarily absent of this meals,
it will be sold in any quantity, from £1 to £500.
The price at which Isis now offered in Charleston is as low as it was in the northern cities when the article was first introduced to them in the summer season, as earlier advertisements in Cuba and elsewhere had done.
The Charleston ad goes on to explain that the best way to carry ice home is wrapped in a blanket which could helpfully be purchased. The icehouse for just $1.
And the best way to store the ice at home is in a warm, dry closet because it is a well attested principle that whatever will keep a man warm with the exception of the sun and fire will keep ice cold.

[31:54] Within a few years, tutors trade with Southern ports put him on firm financial footing.
By 18 18, he no longer had to sneak in and out of Massachusetts, landing at Boston in the Open instead of coming a short, small ports like sandwich under the cover of darkness.
In the year 18 19, the ice trade made him a profit of about $24,000.
When a creditor that year sent a letter demanding payment of a $15 note tutors, haughty response shows how quickly he had wrapped himself in the mental trappings of wealth.
You did not appear to be aware that I have this season sold nearly $30,000 worth of ice and that I expect to sell 6 to 8000 MAWR before the close of the year,
that my ice houses cost each $10,000 that of these, I have four.
They’re fine fireproof buildings, occupying as much ground as two of the central Worf stores,
that there principally insured about $6000 against fire that the sales air regular progressive, uncertain, being like the demand for bread at the baker’s,
that I am inevitably and unavoidably rich that I desire no favors and will accept of none meaning to pay the face of your demand.
Had you known these things, it is probable that you would not have asked me for the $15 so very uncivilized.
But you would have given it to your son Samuel, and sent him to me to request payment.

[33:18] It’s basically the 19th century equivalent of Don’t You know who I am again? Just insufferable.
In 18 20 Tudor believed it was time to expand into the New Orleans market.
The funding for this venture came from an unexpected source, Frederic literary minded brother William Tudor. It helped lay the groundwork for the ice trade in the Caribbean and knew the business in detail.
He’d written a couple of books in a number of essays, and he now wanted to start a literary magazine called The North American Review.
He came to Frederic with the novel idea.
He would approach some of his Harvard friends who were interested in the new journal for funding, which he would then invest in opening an ice house in New Orleans.
As Frederic paid back the loan, the principal will be returned to his investors, but then the interest would support the magazine with the right benefactors. It worked, providing both the New Orleans Icehouse and the North American Review with start up money.
As Frederic Tudor began earning what would become an immense fortune, he was also earning a reputation as one of America’s first monopolists.
He was so possessive of the concept of shipping ice toe warm climates that he hated not only competition but the very idea of competition.
His Icehouse diary records the secret glee that he felt upon learning that a competitors ship had wrecked and that the cargo was lost.

[34:43] It was mentioned today that a cargo of ice has been lost, bound to the Delaware. This makes three cargoes this spring, which had been lost.
It is an ill wind, which blows nobody good.
I am sorry to profit by the misfortunes of my neighbors, but as I first taught the world that ice may be transported by sea, I may consider the business as mine to a certain extent.
How dare anyone else enter the business that he had invented.

[35:12] I got one of my worst ever college grades in economics, so I’ll let the article in the Accounting historians Journal explain how tutors company engaged in predatory pricing to drive upstart competitors out of his best markets.
Competition in the ice trade was a pervasive problem for Frederic Tudor, particularly in mainland cities of the United States.
Tudor frequently resorted to cutthroat price reductions to control the ice trade in such southern cities a Savannah and Charleston, while the monopoly Tudor enjoyed in Havana allowed him to sell ice for as much as 25 cents a pound.
In South Carolina and Georgia, prices as low as 6 to 8 cents a pound were hard to maintain because of competition from New York entrepreneurs.
Tudor apparently took an active role in pricing decisions. Has typical strategy was to cut prices drastically to force his competitors out of business.
For example, Tudor would prices ice for a penny a pound until a competitors supply and melted at the docks.
Then he would raise prices to profitable levels.
His diaries record the following case This interfere er will get about $5 in all for what must have cost him at least $100.
This business is mine. I commenced this business and have a right to rejoice, an ill success attending the others who would profit by my discovery without allowing me the credit of teaching them.

[36:33] Establishing a market for Boston Ice in India would be the culmination of three decades of work, and Tudor was driven to succeed by the failure of another venture.
An investment in coffee completely collapsed, losing a vast sum of money.
Though Frederic was now wiser, wealthier and more able to sustain such a loss without ending up in debtor’s prison In 18 34 he summarized his position writing in the first place. The speculation and coffee is totally failed.
I bought and sold about £7 million. There’s only about a half million still to be sold, and the loss will reach about $175,000.
This apparently disastrous coffee speculation, which has ruined its author, William Savage, has been attended with some good effects in by case.
It has invigorated me toe efforts and renewal of the expedition to Calcutta, which had been nearly abandoned by me from laziness.

[37:30] Just the notes for his coffee speculation came do he got news that his entire first cargo of ice to Kolkata it sold for a premium.
Tudor was back in the black, and he doubled down on the India trade with Henry Greenleaf Pearson, raving,
the feet of carrying a cargo of ice on a four months voyage, crossing the equator twice stirred men’s imaginations and greatly increased his prestige.
Moreover, by providing an article of commerce, which could be shipped from Boston to Calcutta, he facilitated the means for return cargo and thus kept up a trade between the two ports that otherwise would have languished.
The article in the Accounting Historians Journal details how he took advantage of this expanded direct trade between Boston and Kolkata to diversify the goods he shipped to India beyond simple ice.

[38:21] Because the ice function is ballast. Tudor ships also carried other cargo, for example, in 18 75 cargo to Bombay contained in addition toe ice.
The following items rosin drills, oil, glass boards and lobsters.
A cargo from Boston to Calcutta contained rock oil drills, salmon, lobsters and boards.
Other ships carried apples, butter, tar, pitch turpentine, ice pitchers, Painkillers, Inc manufactured cloth and manufactured tobacco.

[38:56] Of course, a voyage of over four months from Boston to Kolkata took more preparation in precaution than a quick jaunt to New Orleans or Havana.
Our article in the 18 34 journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal explains in shipping it to the West Indies, a voyage of 10 or 15 days, little precaution is used.
The whole hold of the vessel is filled with it, having a lining of tan about four inches thick upon the bottom and sides of the hold and the top lifts, covered with a layer of Hey,
the hatches air, then closed and are not allowed to be open till the Isis ready to be discharged for the voyage to India, a much longer one that had been hitherto attempted.
Some additional precautions were deemed necessary for the preservation of the ice.
The ice hold was an insulated house extending from the after part of the forward hatch. About 50 ft in length.
It was constructed as follows. Floor of one inch deal planks was first laid down upon the dunwich at the bottom of the vessel.
Over this was strewed a layer 1 ft thick of tan that is, the refuse spark from the tanners pits thoroughly dried, which is found to be a very good and cheap non conductor.

[40:10] Over this was laid. Another deal. Planking and the four sides of the hold were built up in exactly the same manner.
The pump well and main mast were boxed round in the same manner.
The cubes of ice were then packed or built together. So close is to leave no space between them and to make the whole one solid mass.
About 180 tons were thus stowed on. The top was pressed down closely. A foot of hay and the whole was shut up from access of air with a deal planking one inch thick, nailed upon the lower surface of the lower deck timbers.
The space between the planks and the deck being stuffed with tan.
The ice was shipped on the 6th and 7th of May 18 33 and discharged in Calcutta on the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th of September, making the voyage in four months and seven days.
The amount of wasted could not be exactly ascertained from the sinking of the ice gauge because on opening the chamber it was found that the ice had melted between each block and not from the exterior, only in the manner of one solid mass, as was anticipated.

[41:16] Calculating from the rods and from the diminishing draft with ship, Mr Dicks well estimated the loss on arrival at Diamond Harbor to be 55 tons, six or eight tons more being lost during the passage up the river and probably about 20 and landing.
About 100 tons were finally deposited in the icehouse onshore, a lower room in a house that bright mons got rapidly floored and lined with planks for the occasion.

[41:42] A British newspaper editor, wrote of the arrival. How maney Calcutta tables glittered with ice that day.
The butter dishes were filled. The goblets of water were converted, the miniature Arctic seas with icebergs floating on the surface.
All business was suspended until noon, and people rushed to pay each other congratulatory visits.
Everybody invited everybody to dinner to taste Claritin beer cooled by the American importation.

[42:09] The establishment of an ice house at Kolkata was both a capstone of three decades of effort and symbolic of the creation of a global empire of ice.
Tudor would also establish ice houses Bombay and Madras, eventually expanding toe Hong Kong, Singapore and more ports in South and East Asia.

[42:28] Ice was always Frederic tutors bread and butter. But much like his early partner Nathaniel Wyeth, tutors, mind was always racing, thinking up schemes both practical and otherwise.
The Pearson article notes a few of the earliest ideas he came up with.
His interest in contrivances showed itself in early age, when he was only 17. He devised a siphon pump for pumping water from the holds of vessels and drafted a letter to the royal society describing it.
It would seem that he hardly took it seriously, however, for the sheet on which the letter was written is principally filled with the description of the device inverse.
Evidently composed for the entertainment of his sisters, The double dori consisted of 2 20 ft Dorries, fastened side by side with a space of 5 ft between them.
It excited the wonder of the Lin fishermen and, when under sail, gave its occupants a good drenching.

[43:21] Finally mentioned should be made of the fact that it was Tudor who introduced the first steam locomotive into New England in January 18 30 when four bills for railroads were before the Legislature.
He brought from Charleston a small locomotive of one half horsepower and a car large enough to carry one passenger running on the sidewalk at four miles an hour. The train attracted great attention.
Steam, he writes, will soon take the place of horses in ordinary stage coaches.
I should not be surprised if it should be employed for heavy draft in ordinary purposes,
the Times Air sir charged with novel inventions and improvements of all kinds, steam seems now the ordinary power in all probability, some other and more convenient one will be discovered.

[44:09] During the War of 18 12, Tudor proposed a new whole shape for ships of war, publishing a pamphlet laying out his thinking, in which he said it would combine the shape of a dolphin in the shape of a duck in a perfect balance of speed and stability, concluding,
she is intended to sail faster than other vessels before the wind close, hauled to it or with wind free,
to be an excellent sea boat because on account of her fullness, she will live light on the water,
to rise easily on a C because she does not present any straight line in her main body from stem to stern,
to be under perfect command of a rudder because it has so strong a hold on the water,
to go about with great facility and quickness because she has so strong a hold on the water aft and so small the hold forward.

[44:55] He sent a copy of the pamphlet to former President Jefferson, saying,
If you should take the trouble of looking over the few sheets which I have the honor to enclose and you should think me correct, your favorable opinion will aid me much in an application, which I proposed to make to the executive department of the government,
to have my model carried into effect and one or more of the line of battleships or frigates which Congress may determine to build.
Jefferson declined gracefully writing back. I thank you for the pamphlet, but of all the subjects on which I could have been asked for an opinion, that of naval construction is the one on which I am the most ignorant.
Born and bred among the mountains and having never lived in a seaport, I do not understand even the language and phrases of this subject, and I’m still less familiar with the different forms of construction at college.
Indeed, I became acquainted with the principles of the solids of least resistance, but your appeal to the forms of duck and dolphin are more likely to furnish you useful hints undeterred, Tudor build a prototype called the Black Swan, which is fitted out as a privateer.
It was launched with some success, but the hull shape was not the revolution in shipbuilding that its inventor had hoped.
Certainly it couldn’t even hold a candle to the nearly supernatural performance of the U. S s constitution, which had been built in a nearby shipyard a decade and a half before.

[46:15] Even in 18 59 when Frederic Tudor was mostly retired, his mind raced with schemes.
That year, he wrote to Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy with an idea about how the city streets could be widened without costing the city anything.
Even then, nearly 40 years before the city’s subway and elevated train systems were begun, Boston streets were so congested that he could open the letter with commiseration.
Dear Sir, as you have been run over and I have been knocked down by carriages in the streets of Boston, we have in our own persons practical evidence that our streets are too narrow.
Indeed, it seems to me the daily locking in jams of carriages, carts and wagons to be observed in great numbers of our streets call loudly for a remedy.
He proposed a land trading scheme that would benefit the landowners on one side of the street if they all agreed to give up some of their property for the street and sidewalk.
Saying that it avoided what he called odious betterment laws,
Mayor Quincy wrote back and essentially said that it sounded like a very interesting plan, and I’d be curious to hear about the results if it were put into place in some other city.

[47:26] Frederic Tudor had the time to pester Mayor Quincy with his schemes because he had begun to transition into retirement a few years before.
In August of 18 52 he wrote to a pair of businessmen who he hoped would buy out his ice business The present month.
That is, 47 years since I formed the plan and next February, the same number of years since I went to see with the first cargo in a brig belonging to myself, bound for Martinique, have thought I might yet work upon it up to the half century.
But as I am now, just upon the point of being 69 years of age, I prefer now to make the attempt to infuse new youth, skill and energy into a business which I cannot think but is of great promise for the future, as well as a present good realization,
that it is one whose risks air known one where, in good practice, an economy tell with great force.
Finally, one which cannot readily be gone into by others.
I have thought it might be of sufficient interest to your house to supply to the business. What I inform you are it’s once and gradually to relieve me from much care and soon of all care and the conduct of the business.
When he wasn’t busy thinking up schemes, Tudor split his time between a grand estate in the hunt and his Beacon Hill house of the corner of Beacon Enjoy streets.
It was in his Beacon Hill home, where he passed away in early 18 64 at the age of 80.

Wrap-Up

[48:51] To learn more about the ice king, check out this week’s show. Notes.
Hub history dot com slash 211 Ah, Huff Links toe all the journal articles I quoted from period sources about Frederic Tudor in the ice industry,
the article from the JP Historical Society describing how ice was harvested and the full text of Walden, including Thoreau’s description of the ice harvest.
I’ll also includes some pictures of ice harvesting in 19th century New England so you can see what ice plows, ice houses and conveyors look like an action.
And for good measure, I have an image of a tropical ice house as designed by Nathaniel Wyeth and Frederic Tudor.

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