Frederic Tudor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Until Frederic Tudor came along, ice was not used in American homes. Without refrigeration, diet was based on the season and meat and fish were dried, smoked or salted. It was not a great diet and prone to spoilage.
While attending a Boston party in 1805, the 21 year old Taylor heard his older brother joke that ice on New England ponds ought to be packed up and sold in the steamy ports of the Caribbean. That was Tudor's A-Hah moment. In 1806, Tudor surprised his friends and family by shipping 130 tons of ice to Martinique, where he personally promoted the sales by demonstrating how to use and preserve the novel product. But the ice melted quickly in the tropical heat and Tudor lost more than half of the $10,000 he had invested in the scheme.
Undaunted, Tudor spent the next twenty years perfecting the cutting, storage and shipment of ice. He travelled through the American South and Caribbean extolling the virtues of chilled beverages, ice cream, ice-preserved foods and medical ice packs. At one point, he was shipping New England ice all the way to India, selling the preserved cargo at a substantial profit and re-investing the money in a large Calcutta ice house. By 1856, Tudor was shipping 130,000tons of New England ice around the world each year. Ice became an important world commodity and Tudor became the "Ice-King".