99% Invisible - 198- The Ice King

Episode Date: February 3, 2016

In the mid-19th century, decades before home refrigeration became the norm, you could find ice clinking in glasses from India to the Caribbean, thanks to a global commodities industry that has since melted into obscurity: the frozen water trade. In … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Picture with me, if you will, India during British colonial rule. Let's say around the year 1865. Picture a government office in Bombay, as the city was then known. Two British officers are discussing an uprising that has been challenging Britain's sovereignty over the subcontinent. It's May, the hottest month in India. Temperatures have soared to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The officers are sweating. There's no air conditioning, of course, but they have a servant who brings them two ice cold drinks. The officers take sips of their drinks and swirl the ice in their glasses. And at this moment, these cold drinks dripping with condensation. Feel like a small miracle to these colonialist wankers.

But actually, the ice was a kind of miracle. That's our own little miracle, Sam Greensman. Because in 1865, no one had refrigerators. It wouldn't be for another half century until they started appearing in the US, little lone India. Think about the ice in those officers' glasses. If you were to zoom out from those glasses, and out, and out, and then zoom in on the United States, on Boston, on a frozen lake in the dead of winter.

There, you'd find men working. You see a lot of men and horses and a lot of activity going on, and then you'll see horse-drawn plows, pikes and pusher bars or poles. That's Rick Smith, amateur historian of the American ice trade. So all of these people together were on the lake harvesting ice. Workers would cut ice out of a frozen pond, haul it to port, put it on a ship, and send it on a four-month journey to India. Any ice that British officers in colonial India would have had in their drinks would have started out on the top of a pond in Massachusetts. The tools of the ice trade varied by location, but generally it went like this.

So the first step is to measure the ice. There's a small drill hole that's drilled in and a measurement taken of how thick the ice is because it had to be at least 14 inches thick. 14 inches of ice was thick enough to hold the team of workers and horses that would be assembled, starting usually the day after a Christmas. The workers would come out onto the ice, clear off snow and debris, and then- The horse-drawn ice plows would start to score the ice,

and they would do this all over the ice until they had made a grid. A grid on the ice. They could have make a checkerboard, let's say. Workers would use giant hand saws and ice pikes, basically big sticks with sharp ends, to break up the squares of ice so that they were floating in the water. A steam-powered conveyor belt would haul these cakes of ice out of the water, and they would go through a planer, so each cake would become smooth and uniform.

Then, they'd be stacked in a nearby ice house, a large wooden structure that would hold tons of ice. Ice houses often had a railroad siding, so the ice could be loaded up onto a train and freight it off to the city. If you've seen the Disney movie Frozen, the ice harvesting scene is actually pretty accurate. At its peak, ice harvesting happened on lakes all over New England, New York, Michigan, in the Poconos region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It was, at one time, the major industry. My father actually worked on the ice harvesting back in the 1930s and 40s, and even into the 50s. This entire area of the Poconos,s and even into the 50s. This entire area of the Poconos, that was pretty much the only thing that you could do

in the winter time for work. But now it's gone. It just disappeared entirely. It's a bit sad in a way that an industry, a multi-deway, as it were. Here to also remember the natural ice industry, is Gavin Waitman. I'm Gavin Waitman. I live in London, and I write social history books mainly. And one of my most successful books was called the Frozen Water Trade. One edition of the book is actually titled

The Frozen Water Trade, a true story. Maybe because even Gavin's publishers thought the prospect of cutting frozen water out of American lakes and shipping it overseas Sounded made up. But that is exactly what happened. Ice was being harvested from all over the American Northeast packed onto railroad cars and ships and sent out to the southern US, the Caribbean, and British colonists in India. The development of the international ice trade can be traced back to one person, a man who, by the end of his life, would come to be known as the Ice King, a guy named Frederick Tudor. He was the son of a modestly well-off Boston family.

I think it'd be a very old bloke, sorry I shouldn't use the word bloke, it's an English stuff. So, basically I think he'd be a very old bloke, sorry I shouldn't use the word bloke, it's an English stuff. So, I think he'd be pretty eccentric bloke. Now, Tudor did not invent the idea of moving frozen water from one place to another. The practice actually began in Europe and South America, well before Tudor's time. People would go up to the mountains and bring down ice and snow. Although Tudor might not have known about this, but he did know that New Englanders had a local tradition of cutting ice out of local lakes and using it to keep food cool. When Fridet Tudor was a young man, farmers certainly did keep ice, which they

collected at the winter, and then when they were taking a bus at the market in the summer, they would take a bit of this ice in order to prevent it from melting. So it was used on a small scale in that way, but it wasn't put into drinks and that sort of thing, and it was very localised. When Tudor was in his early 20s, he and his brother William took a trip to the Caribbean. And he thought, these people need ice. Tudor's idea was that he was going to make his fortune because ice was a frozen asset of New England, it wasn't being used, and he felt he could sell it, particularly to countries which were very hot and could have no ice unless he delivered it to them from Boston lakes

and pods. And Bostonians thought he was absolutely crazy. But Tudor was convinced that this could work. Kaki even. He wrote that selling ice would make him quote, inevitably and unavoidably rich. Tudor set up shop on the banks of a pond called Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just about two miles northwest of Harvard Square. And after he learned how to get ice out of the lake,

Tudor started looking for learned how to get ice out of the lake, Tutor started looking for new ways to keep ice frozen. Frederick Tutor experimented with all sorts of insulating materials, because remember, this was more than 100 years before refrigerators began appearing in people's houses. He discovered that sawdust was a remarkably good insulator, and he could get it for next to nothing

from lumber mills and Maine. Kept inside of a dry ice house and packed with sawdust, Tudor would eventually discover that he could keep ice stable for years. So all Tudor had to do was get the ice on to a ship and send it to hotter climates. His first attempt to sell ice outside Boston was made with a little shipment to Masanique. Shippers didn't want to ship ice. It seemed the most ridiculous cargo, so he fitted out a ship himself. The ice made it to the Caribbean no problem, but Martinique was not equipped to deal with a temperature-sensitive product that literally melts into something worthless without the

right infrastructure. It was a bit of a failure really, because when it got to Mars, no one knew how to keep ice. He wrote a rather amusing entry in his diary about the fact that people wrapped their piece of ice in blankets and wanted off and wanted why to disappear when they got home. The newspapers ridiculed Tudor. But Tudor would not be discouraged. He went back to the Caribbean and to the Southern United States

and showed people there how to build more effective ice houses. And it worked. Frozen water carved out of lakes and ponds was being transported hundreds to thousands of miles. He had a rough time getting it going. He went bankrupt a couple of times, but he did manage it in the end. But for all of Tudor's innovation and installation and supply chain logistics, his true genius

was as a marketer. Before Tudor, ice had mostly just been used to preserve foodstuffs. Fredric Tudor pioneered the radical idea of putting ice into beverages. When you first drink a cold drink like that, when you were not used to it, it's quite a shock actually. So you had to persuade people that what he was selling was a luxury and worth paying for. Tudor would tout his eyes around to bars and so on, offer it from free. Say, look, try this, try that. He had to persuade people that what he was setting was a game to improve their

lives, if you like. It wasn't self-evident to them. The first one, as they say, is always free. Tudor wrote, once people had tried chill drinks, they were hooked, and with no longer tolerate tepid water. He was a bit like a sort of drug pusher. And like any drug pusher, Tutor soon found himself with a lot of competition.

Rival ice company set up shop on Tutor's fresh pond and staked a claim to it. In fact, they had to go get a Harvard professor to devise a map carving up boundaries for the ice rights of different parties all on the same lake. And of course, it wasn't just fresh pond, because now anybody of water that was frozen thick enough to support the weight of an ice harvesting crew was a hot commodity. Ice began to get harvested all over New England and New York, Pennsylvania and Canada.

One of Tutors competitors, the Wyndham Lake ice company based out of Wyndham Lake about 30 miles north of Boston, somehow they managed to persuade their buyers that their ice was premium product. Somehow, they managed to persuade their buyers that their ice was premium product. Ice from whenum lake would be sold as especially pure. It was nonsense, really, but it was a way of marketing, you know, our ice is better than yours. Legend has it that clean Victoria would only use whenum lake ice. And maybe you're thinking, why would England need to import ice all the way from North America when there are plenty of really cold places that are closer? Norway wondered the same thing. Norwegian businessmen tried breaking into the ice bizz, even going so far as to rename one of their lakes,

Wenham Lake, in an attempt to profit from the Wenham Lake ice companies' prestige and name recognition. Fregic Tutors Company never made a play for the UK ice market, which turned out to be a pretty good business move, because ice never really took off in England. Even in the 20th century, American GIs in England were shocked to find nothing but warm beer. And there were several in the Air Force who said they would put their drinks in the back of a plane and fly it to about 25,000 feet where it would chill a little bit at least. But there was one place where Brits could not get enough ice, India. So this is three months in the hold of a ship, twice across the equator. So it was quite a remarkable survival rate for the ice, which was eventually unloaded in Bombay as it was called then Madras and Calcasa. Despite all this, Frederick Tutor never really became inevitably an unavoidably rich, like he'd predicted. His whole life he was in and out of debt

and debtors' presence. And he eventually became not particularly wealthy, but well enough of, and he bought an estate outside Boston and lived a kind of rural life. But still, it wouldn't be until 40 years after Tutor's death, squarely in the 20th century, that the natural ice industry began to shift. The earliest refrigerators started appearing in the 19 teens, but the early models broke all the time. The physics of cooling proved much harder to master than heating, and of course you had to have electricity, which most homes in the US didn't have until the 1920s.

Slowly but surely, the technology kept kept improving and consumers began to have a choice of getting natural ice scraped off the top of a frozen pond or ice made in a factory where the water could be better controlled and filtered. Which started to get more important because as the towns grew, as buildings grew up around fresh pond and the other lakes that we used for supply, sewage would get into them. It became a health hazard. This became a great problem for the natural ice industry. And to make matters worse for the natural ice trade, the Northeast experienced a spate of unusually warm winters. The ponds that have been supplying the world's ice weren't freezing as well. The newspapers were calling it an ice famine.

The supply region shifted northward towards Maine, where the climate was colder and the water less polluted. But by then, the writing was on the wall. The natural ice trade was on its way out in the 1920s, but hung on in some places, especially rural places, until as late as the 1950s. And ice harvests still happen in some places. There's a renewed interest in the tradition. In Pennsylvania and all over New England,

there are some ice harvest revivals. One. But, you know, with some updated tools, and it's all more for heritage value. Two. All right. It's not like people are still putting frozen pond water in their drinks.

But as for the actual site where all of this started, fresh pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ice trade might as well have never existed. When I was researching this story, I stayed up in Cambridge and I went out to fresh pond. People were jogging around the lake and they were confronted by me, this completely mad Englishman saying, excuse me, do you know that this ice used to be transported to India from this pond? And they looked at me as if I was completely mad. So at fresh pond there's no plaque or anything?

No. No. Cambridge, Massachusetts has finally found something to not commemorate with a plaque. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Sam Greenspan with Katie Mangle, Avery Truffman, Kirk Cole Stead, Delaney Hall, Sharifusef, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Rosie Weinberg, Stein, Yvara Loteida, and Dylan Garrett Smith, who reached out to us about this story. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arksign, an architecture and interiors firm. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook.

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