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Let's face it.
We take ice for granted. Why wouldn't we?
It's just frozen water. It comes right from the freezer,
the door of your fridge, the convenience store.
It's in your Starbucks, your soda, it's in your water. It's just ice.
So easy to get, we don't even have to think about it.
But what if we go back to a time before the store, before Starbucks,
before your freezer.
Where did our ice come from then?
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In the 19th century, millions of people around the world got their ice from here,
Fresh Pond, a kettle hole lake about five miles outside downtown Boston.
Today Fresh Pond is a reservoir that helps supply
Cambridge, Massachusetts, with its drinking water.
But 200 years ago, it was the center of a burgeoning ice industry.
Before refrigeration technology allowed us to freeze
water on demand, ice was harvested just like any
agricultural product >> This operation was pretty
extraordinary, I mean they could cut up a pond in a matter of hours, certainly in
a matter of days >> This is Andy Robichaud,
a Boston University history professor who's writing a book about
the ice industry.
>> So if you were to go to Fresh Pond to watch the harvest, as many
people did, you would have seen massive teams of workers.
You would see them gridding the pond with this special tools, you would see them
breaking off large rafts and then sort of floating them toward an ice house.
You would see the ice block lifted on a ramp or in a pulley system run by horses.
And then in the ice house you would see workers feverishly shuffling and pushing
ice blocks into different corners of the ice house to get it nice and packed.
>> Like other cash crops, ice was big business.
By the 1830s as much as 75,000 tons of ice was
being harvested from ponds across New England every year.
If that bag you get the convenience store is five pounds, that means they
were harvesting 30 million bags of ice in a year, that's a lot of ice.
>> By the 1830s, ice from Fresh Pond is being shipped all over the world.
Charleston, South Carolina. New Orleans, Louisiana. Havana.
Martinique. As far as Rio de Janeiro, parts of China, Bombay, and Calcutta.
>> Of course people were harvesting ice from lakes and ponds before the 19th
century, but it hadn't been done on an industrial scale before.
And no one had ever tried shipping it across the world.
I mean, who would think to do that?
It all started with this guy: Frederic Tudor. Tudor was born
in 1783, just seven years after the declaration of independence was signed.
His father had studied law with John Adams and
advised George Washington during the revolutionary war.
Those were big shoes to fill, so Tudor decided to fill them with ice.
>> He's looking at this global economy, that's really flowing through Boston,
where ships are going out all across the world.
And a lot of those ships that are going out of Boston at
this time are going out lightweight.
>> A ship leaving Boston lightweight meant they didn't have a lot
of exports to sell at their destination.
But because they expected to be bringing a heavy load back,
they'd have to weigh the ship down on the outbound voyage with some kind of ballast.
>> He sees an opportunity here to ship ice. These ships can go out with ice instead
of rocks, and they can sell the ice on the other end.
And so in 1806, he sends the first shipment to Martinique. It's covered in
the Boston papers. It's called "the Slippery Speculation" by one newspaper.
I think a lot of people thought that wouldn't survive the trip,
that it would melt.
>> The ice did survive the trip, or
enough of it anyway, to lay the foundations for a global ice market.
>>This was very much understood in its own time period as something extraordinary.
Tudor becomes known as the Ice King, as the person who sort of made ice into
a commodity.
>> Obviously the ice harvesting industry couldn't last forever.
Ice produced through refrigeration technology gradually replaced ice carved
from lakes and ponds.
But old school ice harvesting did continue well into the 20th century.
The clips you've been watching in this video actually come from the 1920s,
not the 1820s.
But the methods they show are very close to what you would have seen at Fresh Pond
almost 200 years ago.
Today it's impossible not to take something as simple as ice for granted.
But some part of that is thanks to Frederic Tudor, Boston's Ice King,
who helped to give the world a taste for frosty cold beverages in the summertime.
So maybe raise a glass to him, the next time you're enjoying an iced coffee on
a hot summer day.
Or the middle of winter.
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