On April 19th I gave my third speech at Toastmasters, titled "The Ice King", for which I won Best Speaker of the evening. This time one of the objectives for giving the speech was to memorize the material, so I only wrote notes to practice before hand. I did my best to recreate the speech here to post, although this is probably longer than the 7 minutes and 30 seconds for the actual speech. In any case, I hope you find it to be as interesting to read as it was to research and write.
The Ice King
Ice cream is a popular treat in Japan. A day out in the city and one is likely to pass by a Baskin Robins, Hagen Daaz or, recently, a Cold Stone Creamery store. Japan consumes 780,000 kiloliters of frozen desserts a year, or in other words, 200 million gallons. This, however, pales in comparison with the U.S. penchant for ice cream, ranking in at 1.2 billion gallons consumed in 2005. U.S. ice cream exports are also quite impressive, coming to 400 million gallons, and much of that is commonly sent the 6,000-some miles to Japan. So, one must ask, when imagining all this “frozen dessert” being shipped so far away, what life was like before refrigeration?
Before the introduction of refrigeration into industrial mass production, only the extremely wealthy could afford the delights of ice cream. As recent as the 19th Century, people used natural ice to preserve their food. At that time, ice was a product used to cool foods more than to be consumed itself, and was an important product for restaurants, dairies, breweries, meat packing establishments and hospitals, which needed ice year-round to ensure even temperatures.
The winter harvest of the north east U.S. in the 19th Century was largely centered on harvesting ice from the natural ponds located there. In fact, the well-known Walden Pond – vis-à-vis Henry David Thoreau – was a major source of natural ice for export, not only domestically to the southern states, but even overseas. Thoreau wrote in the winter of 1846-7:
“The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well... The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
In those days, this industry was famously led by a man named Frederic Tudor, otherwise known as the Ice King. During his life, Tudor accumulated a fortune shipping ice thousands of miles around the world.
Tudor’s first international conquest was in 1806, when he had the idea to ship 80 tons of natural ice from Massachusetts ponds 1,500 miles to the Caribbean island of Martinique. The journey took 3 weeks to complete, and upon arrival, as one might expect, any potential for profit literally melted away. Tudor lost $4500 on that idea, which in 1806 was worth millions. Still, Tudor made three more attempts in the following years, this time to Havana, Cuba, where he tried to establish an exclusive agreement with the island. But it seemed as if there would be no profit from shipping ice internationally and Tudor’s debts far outweighed his income.
But Tudor’s luck would change and in 1815, straight out of debtor’s prison, he managed to borrow $2100 and build an ice house in Havana. The ice house was a double-shelled structure that would hold and protect 150 tons of ice even in the summer heat, insulated with straw and sawdust. It seemed this was the key to the Ice King’s success and over the next two decades, Tudor would work hard to improve his methods to get ice to arrive intact over long distances.
However, in 1833, people started to wonder if the Ice King had lost his mind. The Tudor Ice Company announced that they would make an ocean journey from Boston to Calcutta, India – a distance 10 times that to Havana – which would take 4 months. Tudor packed 180 tons of natural ice onto his ship and set sail in May, 1833. When he arrived in September people thought it must be a joke, however, he was able to maintain 55% of his product – something unthinkable today – but selling over 100 tons of ice, Tudor make a large profit. Over the next 20 years, in fact, building an ice house in Calcutta as well, it would be one of his most profitable ports, making him millions - $72 million in fact (2005USD value).
So how did Tudor pull it off? Well, aside from increasing efficiency by attaining less melt by using straw, sawdust and rice chaff, he fit the blocks of ice tightly together and encouraged the introduction of new ice cutting techniques (it used to all be done painstakingly by hand). He watched the temperature closely to maximize ice depth when he harvested, drummed up demand for ice in the market, and most importantly, built ice houses in New Orleans, Charleston, Havana, Jamaica, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Galle (on the southern tip of Sri Lanka), and Singapore.
The irony in all of this? Ice houses were the answer to the Ice King’s success, however, they were not a new invention. The technique of preserving ice in this manner goes back to ancient Persia where they built yakhchals that would hold ice from the mountains well into the summer. The Romans and the Chinese are also reported to have used ice houses centuries ago. Marco Polo reportedly told stories of “milk dried into a kind of paste” that he saw in China in the late 13th Century – this was, of course, ice cream. And funny enough, ice cream may have been one of the factors that caused the downfall of the natural ice business altogether.
In 1870, an artificial ice plant opened in Louisiana. While the artificial and natural ice markets continued to exist side-by-side for quite some time, it wasn’t long before manufactured ice would take the lead. A vaporization process utilizing ammonia had been used to make artificial ice for industrial purposes – such as at breweries - since the 1840s, and the development of this new technology was a major advantage to those who before had no choice but to buy their ice from the Ice King. In 1892, the Tudor Ice Company closed its doors once and for all, and by 1913, the first DOMestic use ELectric REfrigerator, “The Domelre”, the first such system to feature “ice cubes”, was introduced in Chicago at a retail price of $900.
Many ask why Tudor hadn’t invested in refrigeration, when it must have been clear to him at some point early on that his business was not “ice” but “cold”. However, Tudor probably understood cold more than anyone, demonstrated by his keen eye for getting the largest, deepest cuts of natural ice when the temperature was at its lowest in the winters, and his uncanny ability to retain both cold and ice for such long durations over thousands of miles.
The irony of artificial ice taking the place of natural ice in the world market is this: No one knew at the time, but the introduction of CFCs to replace the toxic chemical ammonia in 1928, would eventually be linked to ozone depletion and global warming. Who would have thought that methods for artificial ice production would eventually threaten to melt the natural ice on earth and bring humanity to the brink of a climate disaster? We now face a worldwide challenge to preserve the world’s ice in order to stop sea levels from rising and inundating or flooding low-lying cities and islands. At a time when many of us may be asking how this could have happened, we needn’t look any further than the ubiquitous ice cream cone to be reminded of the paradigm shift that led us to our present situation.
Tudor lived and died before our civilization was faced with the consequences of industrial overload, however, I believe we can learn from something the Ice King surely understood. Frederic Tudor worked on the basis of what nature had to provide, and developed a dependence on nature in a way that would help to preserve it, year after year. The Ice King left the naysayer gaping at his achievements and provided the power of preservation in the form of ice to the dairy farmer, the butcher, the beer brewer, the doctor, and, for those who were lucky, the ice cream man.
Some links:
Natural Ice Harvesting in New England
Engineering achievements: refrigeration timeline
The Hindu: "Ice Houses through the years" (newspaper article)
Frederic Tudor (wiki)
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