Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What were the challenges Frederick Tudor faced in the ice trade?
Imagine it's January, 1835 in Boston, Massachusetts. You hurry along a downtown street, sweat trickling down your back despite the cold winter air. You skid around a final corner and finally reach your cousin Frederick Tudor's townhouse. Pound on the door with your fist and take a step back. After a moment, 51-year-old Frederick opens the door. His eyes widen when he sees your face.
William, you look like you've seen a ghost. Come in, it's terribly cold. Without a word, you brush past him into the parlor, where a newspaper lies folded on the table beside a steaming cup of coffee. Frederick follows you in, a note of concern in his voice. Please, sit down, William. Would you like something to drink?
Frederick takes a seat across from you and adds a spoonful of sugar to his coffee and stirs it slowly. You watch the swirling brown liquid in your stomach churning. Oh no, thank you.
Chapter 3: How did Tudor expand his ice business to the American South?
Well, is everything okay? What brings you here? Well, it's the coffee. I told you, have a cup. No, not that coffee.
The market. The coffee market. For the past few years, you've made a living in the coffee trade, buying and selling large quantities of beans for a profit, but you've never actually set eyes on the coffee that you purchase. You're a futures trader. You agree to buy coffee at a fixed price in the future, and then you profit when the price goes up more than you promised to buy it for.
It's been such a lucrative source of income that recently you convinced your cousin Frederick to invest his own savings in Coffee Futures, too. Frederick sets his cup down slowly. Coffee market? What's happened? The price of beans has crashed. Well, how's that? It's been climbing 30% a year. It was a bubble, apparently, and now it's just burst.
My payments are due and I'm going to have to sell at a loss. Oh, how short are you?
Chapter 4: What risks did Tudor take in his pursuit of success?
200,000. Good Lord, William. I'm going to have to declare bankruptcy. I'm ruined. Frederick closes his eyes and exhales slowly, but you interrupt his thoughts. Frederick, you'll be taking a substantial loss as well. Well, I have the ice business as collateral. Will that be enough to see you through? I guess it has to be, because if it isn't, I'll lose everything too.
Frederick only invested his money in coffee because you urged him to, so you feel dreadful delivering such bad news. You know the difficulties he had building his ice empire. And now, just as he's finally made a fortune, he might lose it all and it's all your fault.
From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story.
By the time Frederick Tudor was in his early 40s, he'd weathered 20 years in the ice trade. After a first decade of struggling to establish a foothold in the Caribbean, he'd experienced a turning point when he expanded his business to the southern United States. There, he found that the markets of sweltering port cities like New Orleans offered a more reliable and profitable income.
And from that moment, Tudor's business began to thrive. But his journey to prosperity had not been an easy one, thanks to Tudor's enormous appetite for risk. Time and again, Tudor had wagered everything in order to expand the ice trade and constantly encountered setbacks that nearly wiped him out.
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Chapter 5: What innovative strategies did Tudor use to increase ice production?
But through all, he persevered, relying on his supreme self-confidence and sheer determination to succeed. So by his early 50s, Tudor had begun to stake his hard-earned fortune on other high-reward but high-risk ventures, like coffee futures. And like all gamblers, Tudor discovered that he'd lose more often than he'd win.
It would only be when Tudor settled down and stopped taking risks that he'd finally manage to secure the riches he'd spent a lifetime chasing. This is Episode 4 in our four-part series on The Ice King, Indian Summer. By 1824, Frederick Tudor had ice houses in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Cuba.
Every year, the amount of ice sold from his facilities increased, but Tudor soon hit a limit on how much he could sell. The demand was there, but he didn't have the supply to meet it. Five years earlier in 1819, Tudor's mother had sold the family estate at Rockwood, Massachusetts to settle her late husband's debts.
Ever since, Tudor had been forced to harvest most of his ice from another source called Fresh Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts. At 155 acres, Fresh Pond was larger than its name suggested. But while there was sufficient ice in Fresh Pond to meet Tudor's needs, harvesting it was painfully slow. Collecting giant blocks of ice by hand was back-breaking work.
Hired laborers used pickaxes and chisels to hack the heavy blocks from the surface of the pond, then dragged or floated them to the shore. Once on land, more laborers set about shaping the ice into stackable units with two-man saws. It was arduous and time-consuming work.
But while Tudor had come up with a technique to increase the amount of ice that formed in fresh pond by drilling holes in the partially frozen surface to increase its thickness, he hadn't found a way to harvest the ice any faster. And now the glacial pace of securing his product was holding his company back. Imagine it's January 1824 at Fresh Pond.
Despite the bitter cold, you strip off your coat and toss it aside. For the past hour, you've been hacking away at the frozen surface, cutting the ice into large chunks. For most of the year, you run a hotel on the banks of the pond. But in winter, when the tourists have gone for the season, you and your men turn your hand to harvesting ice for Frederick Tudor.
The pay is good, but the work is punishing. But just as you're about to take another swing of your pickaxe, you hear a shout. Hey, you there! You turn to see Frederick Tudor picking his way gingerly onto the ice, taking small and careful steps to keep from slipping. You set down your pickaxe, steam rising from your shoulders. Mr. Tudor, what brings you out here?
I'm coming to see what's taking you so long.
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Chapter 6: How did Tudor's coffee futures investment impact his finances?
My ships are idle in Boston Harbor. My ice houses are empty. We're waiting on you. Well, I'm sorry, Mr. Tudor. The men are working as quickly as they can. Tudor looks over at one laborer who's put his pickaxe down and is wiping his sweaty brow with a cloth. Oh, yeah? You sure about that? Tudor then shouts over to the man.
You there, get on with it!
As the man lifts his pickaxe and gets back to work, you guide Tudor back to the shore where ice is stacked in piles. Now, please, Mr. Tudor, this is hard work. The men do need to rest from time to time, but I promise you, we are working as fast as possible. Well, then what's causing the delay? You've never asked for this much ice. Every year you need more, but we can't go any quicker.
"'Maybe you should bring in more men. I already have every able-bodied man in the district. Well, there's $50,000 worth of ice floating in this pond, and I need it in Boston. It's a time-critical industry.' "'Well, I don't know what you expect me to do, Mr. Tudor. Ice is ice. We can't harvest it any quicker.' Tudor stops to think, and his gaze drifts back to your hotel on the shore.
You have empty rooms, don't you? I do. Not many travelers passing through in winter. Well, good. I'll advertise for laborers in Boston and send them up here. Put them up in your hotel, I'll pay for the rooms, but as soon as they arrive, set them to work.
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Chapter 7: What led to Tudor's decision to ship ice to India?
I need that ice. Well, all right, sir, but if you're going to need that much ice every year, we're going to need a different solution in the long term. As you head back onto the frozen pond, you turn the problem over in your head. Tudor is right. The bottleneck in his supply chain is real, but you're not sure more men is going to fix it.
So while you could use more muscle in the short term, in the long term, you're determined to solve this problem with brains, not brawn. By increasing the number of workers harvesting ice at Fresh Pond, Frederick Tudor eventually obtained enough stock to supply his customers. But employing more workers from further afield cost more money, which reduced his profit margin.
And the following winter, as the ice harvest season began again, Tudor prepared to recruit extra workers once more. But before he could, ice from Fresh Pond began arriving at Tudor's ice houses in Boston Harbor in greater quantities and frequency than usual. The holdup in his supply chain had unexpectedly disappeared. Tudor was, of course, pleased, but he was also puzzled.
His meticulous diary suggested that nothing had changed. The weather was no different. He wasn't paying for more labor. So Tudor decided to travel to Fresh Pond to see what had caused the sudden increase in supply. When Tudor arrived, he found an odd-looking plow being dragged across Fresh Pond by two horses.
One of Tudor's ice harvesters, hotelier Nathaniel Wyeth, explained that this peculiar contraption was his new invention, an ice-cutting machine. Wyeth had fashioned an adjustable metal blade and fitted it to a plow that normally worked the fields in summer. Horses wearing spiked shoes pulled the machine across the ice, scoring a line into the surface.
By cutting parallel lines at fixed intervals and another set of parallel lines at right angles, Wyeth marked a grid into the surface of the ice. Then the blade was lowered and the machine was dragged over the lines again. After repeating this process to gradually cut lower and lower, laborers used chisels to gouge large blocks from the frozen pond.
The horse-drawn blade was quicker than cutting the ice by hand, and since all the blocks were a uniform size and shape, they no longer needed to be refined with a saw. They were also in the perfect shape to stack and store. Tudor was impressed with Wyeth's ingenuity. With one stroke of his ice-cutting machine, Wyeth has slashed the limitations on Tudor's ice supply.
And that winter, Tudor's ship set sail without having to wait in port, and his ice houses in the tropics never ran short. So in return, Tudor rewarded Wyeth with a new title of Chief Ice Harvester and a salary of $500 a year, a handsome sum at the time. But Tudor wasn't motivated simply by gratitude and generosity.
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Chapter 8: How did Tudor respond to betrayal by his business partner?
He also hoped the lucrative wage would ensure that Wyeth and his revolutionary machine weren't lured away by a competitor. Now, with plenty of ice on hand, Tudor once again set about expanding his business. In 1827, he built a new, larger ice house in Charleston, South Carolina.
He intended to build a bigger ice house in Savannah, Georgia, too, but ran out of time, though he did manage to find an existing warehouse and fit it with insulation to act as an overflow storage unit that season. Then, the following year, in 1828, Tudor predicted an even greater yield of ice.
That's because Nathaniel Wyeth had been busy during the summer again, this time building a lifting platform that would speed up the process of getting the ice from the pond to the shore. Wyeth's ice lift looked like a giant balance scale with platforms at either end of a beam. When one side lowered into the water, the other rose into the air.
Wyeth intended for an ice block to be floated onto the platform in the water. then it would be lifted by a horse-drawn pulley. While laborers dragged the ice block off the raised platform, another team would float the next ice block onto the lowered platform. It was another ingenious device, and Wyeth and Tudor wanted to put it into action straight away.
But in mid-December 1827, a low-pressure system settled over New England, wreaking havoc with the weather. One day, temperatures would plunge below freezing, but the next, they rose so high that Bostonians walked the streets in short-sleeves.
As a result of this unpredictable weather, the ice on Fresh Pond never thickened enough to use Wyeth's heavy ice-cutting machine, and the few blocks that were managed to be cut by hand weren't big enough for Tudor's needs. So by the end of January 1828, Tudor was back in the situation he'd been in three years earlier.
His ships were moored in Boston Harbor with empty holds, and there was no prospect of beginning the larger harvest on Fresh Pond. Desperate to find an alternative source of ice, Tudor and Wyeth scoured other bodies of water in Massachusetts. They found a few shaded ponds where temperatures had fallen low enough for thick ice to form, but they were few and far between.
None were as large as Fresh Pond, and none were set up for large-scale ice harvesting. In the end, the only viable option they found was Swains Pond, north of Boston. Getting there was a nightmare. There was only one narrow path that led to it, which was blocked by a large boulder.
Even after they blew up this rock with gunpowder to remove it, the surface of the path was rutted and slow, and as a result, an impatient wagon driver pulled down a fence and drove a shortcut through a farmer's orchard. Meanwhile, Tudor's laborers chopped down the farmer's trees near the pond's shoreline to give them room to work.
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