Frederic Tudor: Boston's Ice King

Frederic Tudor was born on September 4, 1783 in Boston to William Tudor and his wife, Delia. Coming from a well educated family of lawyers and Harvard graduates, Frederic himself pursued a somewhat more informal education than many of his family members. Although he attended Boston Latin School between the ages of ten and thirteen, by his later teenage years he began an apprenticeship at a firm on State Street. Enjoying the support of his family’s not-unsubstantial resources, by his early twenties he had become a trader in commodities like nutmeg, flour, sugar, tea, and candles.

Frederic Tudor circa 1830
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts

It was from this experience in international trade that Tudor first developed the idea to export around the world one of Boston’s most readily available commodities: ice. The idea, needless to say, was met skeptically by the public, who wondered how Tudor would be available to preserve the cargo through its long journey to market in the Caribbean. As the first shipment prepared to leave Boston in 1806, one local newspaper published the headline: “No Joke, Ship Full of Ice Sets Sail for Martinique: Let’s Hope This Doesn’t Prove to be a Slippery Speculation!”

The first shipment, unfortunately for Tudor, seemed to prove the skeptics right. Although the future-Ice King’s technique of preserving the ice in sawdust aboard his ships ensured that they arrived in a relatively solid condition in Martinique, the tropical climate rapidly took its toll on their arrival. Tudor’s now-liquid inventory lost him a small fortune.

From this failure, however, Tudor would refine his business model into a more profitable venture. He began working on designs for an icehouse, which would be able to preserve his cargo once it reached port in the Caribbean, the first of which would be built in Cuba in 1810. He would begin turning a modest profit that same year – although bad business deals and the War of 1812 would grind his business to a halt and find him briefly confined to debtors’ prison.

Nathaniel Wyeth's Horse-Drawn Ice Cutter
Courtesy of the Atlantic

By the later part of the 1810s, however, Tudor was able to resume business, and began to turn reasonable profits. The real coup for Tudor’s operation, however, wouldn’t come until the mid-1820s, when a young manager at Tudor’s Fresh Pond harvesting site in Cambridge developed an ingenious innovation. Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth was born in 1820 to the owner of the Fresh Pond Hotel, located near the pond of the same name that currently serves a major reservoir and recreation area for the city of Cambridge. While working for Tudor in 1825, he invented a horse-drawn ice cutter, which allowed for the rapid extraction of large, uniformly shaped and sized blocks of ice from the pond. According to the Cambridge Historical Society: “It was not only his ice cutter, but his experiments with insulating materials and new ice houses which decreased melting losses from 66 percent to 8 percent that made Wyeth such an important innovator.”

Although Tudor began by selling inventory to doctors and scientists, who used the ice to experiment with food preservation and medical treatment, he began to expand his market by catering more towards tropical residents hoping to enjoy chilled drinks – a distinct novelty at the time. As the business’s popularity expanded, Tudor’s empire would grow to cater to the entire world over – and from his base in Boston, he would launch expeditions to cities as far away as Singapore and Calcutta.

"Ice-Cutting at Fresh Pond, Cambridge, Mass." 1853
Photo Courtesy of Friends of Fresh Pond

Having thus demonstrated the technological feasibility of preserving ice and the vast demand of the global markets, Tudor’s model would soon come to inspire competitors. Citing one particularly fascinating example, the Boston Globe reports that Cambridge’s Fresh Pond became a case study in the “tragedy of the commons.” As locals increasingly pulled ice out of the lake earlier and earlier in hopes of grabbing new inventory before their competitors could, they soon realized that their efforts were self-defeating: the ice had insufficient time to freeze, and the increasingly thin blocks the amateur ice-traders were extracting were too thin to last.  

Nevertheless, Tudor’s own fortunes would continue to increase. As Henry G. Pearson of the Massachusetts Historical Society explained: “Whereas in 1846 the number of tons of ice shipped had been 65,000, in 1856 the total rose to 146,000, the amount being sent in 363 cargoes to 53 different places in the United States, the West Indies, the East Indies, China, the Philippines, and Australia.” Tudor would grow fabulously wealthy on the profits from his ever-expanding empire, and would die a rich and well-liked local icon on February 6, 1864.

Fresh Pond Recreation Area in Fall 2014
Photo by Brian Pollock

Although we live in a world where ice is now readily available thanks to modern technology, we cannot forget the revolutionary impact of Frederic Tudor’s business on the nineteenth century world. As Dartmouth professor of geography Susanne Freidberg explained in an article by the Boston Globe, Tudor “set the state for the refrigeration revolution.” Whereas in earlier times, produce was essentially only edible within a short window immediately after harvest (unless it was salted, pickled, or preserved by other means), Tudor’s expansion of the availability of ice and experimentation with chilled food “took some of the first steps toward exploding these limitations.” Tudor’s innovations had a similar impact on the meat-distribution industry, and some scholars even argue that Americans developed their distinct taste for chilled beverages thanks to their early exposure to commercial-ice. 

Sources

MacDonald, Katie. "Comercial Use of Ice - Fresh Pond." Cambridge Historical Society. N.p., 2012. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

Mitenbuler, Reid. "The Stubborn American Who Brought Ice to the World." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 05 Feb. 2013. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

Neyfakh, Neon. "How a Massachusetts Man Invented the Global Ice Market - The Boston Globe." Boston Globe. Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC, 19 Dec. 2014. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

Pearson, Henry G. "Frederic Tudor - Ice King." Ice Harvesting USA. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Dec. 2015.