A Boston Merchant Sold Ice to People Who Had No Use for It

Frederic Tudor, a merchant living near Boston who became known as the Ice King, learned that people in South America never had snow and never had ice. He decided to sell them ice.

This was before refrigeration, before the freezer had been invented. Tudor's plan was to take blocks of ice where it was plentiful, load them onto boats, and sell them where winter never arrived. He was selling winter itself.

The problem he had to solve first was that the ice melted during the long voyage south. Tudor experimented with insulation, first wrapping the blocks in wool and then covering them with sawdust, which preserved the ice a little longer. On one shipment he started with 200 pounds and arrived with about 70 pounds left, and he sold what remained.

When he arrived, buyers did not know what to do with it. Some came back complaining that it had melted. As Tudor understood it, that is simply what ice does when it is hot outside.

So he decided he had to make people want it. He settled on one product that could carry the whole business, a cold drink on a hot day. He went to bartenders, chipped off small pieces for free, and asked them to start serving rum chilled.

Drinkers who tried cold rum did not want to go back to it warm. Demand started to build. Tudor kept improving how ice was packed, stored, and shipped, pioneering better ways to move cold over long distances, and he built an impressive trade.

In the end, that success taught the lesson too well. Once people understood that water could be frozen to make ice themselves, the need to ship natural ice thousands of miles collapsed. Tudor had put himself out of business.