The Frozen Trade by Gavin Weightman
HarperCollins (2003)

I happened to be reading William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange: How Trade
Shaped the World and was mildly startled to see a reference to the
magnitude of America's 19th century ice trade. Startled, because I'd never
heard of this trade. Yet ice was America's second largest
export tonnage (second only to King Cotton) at the time of the Civil War. I
immediately resolved to learn more and a few moments of augmented
intelligence (ie, Google) threw up the name of Frederic Tudor, the “Ice
King” who invented the industry.  From there it was a quick jump to The
Frozen Trade.

Gavin Weightman's book on the ice trade is at its heart the story of
Frederic Tudor, and this is why it is so good. His story — perhaps “yarn”
might be a better description — ranges over most of the seven seas, taking
in privateers, shipwrecks, invention, speculation, enterprise and vision on
the way.  Tudor had an idea and spent years, in a truly American fashion,
pursuing it until he had created an entirely new market and had satisfied it
through an entirely new industry.

Weightman's narrative is well-paced and he balances the biographical detail,
the economic and social background and the history of the ice trade
beautifully. Tudor's story is a story of heroic entrepreneurialism and a
story of imagination. When he shipped his first cargo of New England ice
down to Martinique in 1806, he thought he would have a sure-fire success.
But the inhabitants had no idea what to do with it: if you'd never seen
ice, would you buy some? Eventually he found selling it to make ice cream a
moderate economic success and was encouraged to continue. A decade later,
his breakthrough came when he began shipping not to the Caribbean but to
Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans and the business began taking off.

At the same time, the “ecosystem” began to develop. Downstream, the waste
water coming off of the melting ice was sold as a cold draught rather than
poured down the drain.  Upstream, the demand for sawdust (used to insulate
the ice cargos) from the Maine timber industry — hitherto a nuisance by-product and a
pollutant —  generated more wealth.  New technology was applied to cutting,
storing and hauling the ice.  And all the time, the market was growing.

His marketing strategy was dynamite. He created an insatiable demand for two
main products: ice cream and cold drinks. When opening up a new town, he
would provide free ice to bartenders knowing that customers would never go
back to warm drinks once they'd tried a icy mint julep or an iced tea. It seemed
to me slightly reminiscent of the bottled water industry today: create a
demand, satisfy it and then use brand to drive up the price. Indeed,
Weightman notes that the only difference between “Wenham Lake Ice” (one of
the main brands of the time) and other ice was purely marketing.  The
Norwegians, who ended up controlling the English ice market, even renamed
one of their lakes “Lake Wenham”!

Tudor was a ruthless businessman, seeing off competitors by lowering the
price of his ice to ruin them, but not a perfect one. Some of his
enterprises outside ice went well (graphite mining and property) and some
not so well (he lost a fortune speculating on coffee futures). In any case,
by 1849 the ice trade he had created was going so well that he ran out of
ice to ship from Boston and had to send a ship and a crew north to cut chunks off of
icebergs for the supplies.  By the time Thoreau was moaning about
the ice trade disturbing his peace on “Walden Pond”, Tudor was shipping ice
to Calcutta (where the grateful British Raj coined him a medal), round the
Cape to San Francisco and even to Australia. In America, ice was no longer a
luxury item but an essential comfort, a state that Tudor and competitors
attempted to extend to England. The first attempts in the 1840s didn't go
well, despite the opening (in 1845) of an ice shop in The Strand. Well into
the 1930s, Weightman says, Londoners didn't take to the odd American
affectation of cold drinks. Far be it from me to feed American prejudices
about English dental health, but I wonder if a reason may be found in the
passage Weightman quotes including an interview with an English ice cream
seller in 1851. He says, amongst other things, “I don't think [ice cream]
will ever take greatly in the streets… they get among the teeth and make
you feel tooth-ached all over.”  Just a theory.

Naturally, as I was drawn through the book, I couldn't help but try and
extract key messages around the intersection between economics and
technology. In this field, there is a definite and fascinating paradox around Frederic.
Frederic was not a Luddite by any means and appears to have been
excited by the new inventions of the time. In 1830, he predicted that “steam
will soon take the place of horses,” and went on to say that “the times are
surcharged with novel inventions and improvements of all kinds… steam
seems now the ordinary power: in all probability some other and more
convenient one will be discovered.” And, of course, it was. Yet as Weightman
notes in passing, it never seems to have occurred to Frederic that someone
might “undermine his ice trade by manufacturing ice or making an artificial
refrigerator.” Perhaps it is some kind of innovator's curse, to imagine
change in all businesses except the one they have created: it's why Bill
Gates didn't invent Google and why Akio Moirta didn't invent the iPod.

As it turned out, when artificial refrigerators did arrive, they at first
bolstered the trade by providing an inexhaustible, year-round supply of
clean ice for shipping through the existing supply chain before, in time,
they destroyed the trade by decentralising ice making to the point of
consumption. Destroyed the trade so thoroughly, in fact, that few people
remember that it ever existed. The market that Frederic's genius created is
still with us, but the industry he created to service it has melted away.
By the First World War, the ice trade was waning.  By the Second,
refrigerators were in millions of US households and the ice trade was no
more.  Not just gone, but forgotten.

So, a book that educates and entertains but also leaves you wanting to discover
more. What more can you ask for?

Dave Birch
Director, Consult Hyperion