Moving Cold Around the World

[A] The nineteenth-century ice trade began as a joke at its founder's expense. In 1806 Frederic Tudor shipped pond ice from New England to the Caribbean and lost most of it, and most of his money, before he understood where the loss occurred. [B] The ice had travelled well enough in a packed hold. It melted in the hands of merchants who had no ice house to put it in and no customers who had ever asked for any. [C] His later success came from making the demand before supplying it. He gave ice to bar keepers on condition that a chilled drink was sold at the price of a warm one, and waited for the habit to set. [D]

The engineering that followed was dull and decisive. Sawdust, the waste of the same forests, insulated better than hay and cost nothing at all. Horse-drawn cutters scored the ponds into a grid so that the blocks came out square and stacked without air between them, and a square block in a good ice house loses only a small part of itself in a year. By the 1850s ice cut in Massachusetts was being sold in Calcutta. The trade ended not because anyone found a better way to carry ice, but because mechanical refrigeration removed the need to move cold from one place to another at all.