The Ice Trade

In 1806, a young Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor loaded a ship with ice cut from frozen ponds in New England and sent it to the Caribbean island of Martinique. Many people laughed at the idea of shipping ice to a tropical island, and the first trip lost money: much of the ice melted, and few local people knew what to do with the rest.

Tudor did not give up. He experimented with ways to keep ice from melting and discovered that sawdust, which lumber mills produced in large amounts and treated as waste, was an excellent insulator. He also built insulated storage houses in the ports where he sold ice, and he created demand by showing bartenders how to serve cold drinks. In 1833, one of his ships carried ice on a four-month voyage to Calcutta, in India, and more than half of it arrived.

By the middle of the century, ice harvesting had become a major industry. Workers used horse-drawn tools to cut frozen ponds into uniform blocks that could be stacked efficiently in ships and storage houses. The trade declined in the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, as machines that could make ice artificially became cheaper and more reliable.