Ice is quite an interesting commodity, isn’t it? It was once something that people found almost a luxury to add to their drinks and it slowly evolved into a necessity which every home must have. In my home, ice has had a conflicted position. While me and my father absolutely love it, my mother has never seen it as quite that necessary to block up space in her freezer when she could use it to store many other eatables. It’s a conundrum we’re still trying to figure out the solution to, as a family.
However, this got me thinking about ice. Was ice always as easily available to us as it is today? Was ice always a necessity? Was it always as easy to find ice of different shapes as we find it today? Well, of course not. Like all other commodities, ice too, has evolved over centuries.
Through a little bit of reading, I found that ice as we use it today was the brainchild of a very intuitive businessman named Frederic Tudor. To give you a brief history about him, he belonged to a wealthy family and dropped out of Harvard. He had a passion for business, and it was this drive to do something unique which encouraged him to pursue a business in ice. He decided that he could make money by selling ice to those living in hot countries such as the Caribbean and later India. Ice was quite easily available, and free of cost, near where he lived, in Boston, Massachusetts. This naturally available ice was pure and therefore ready-to-use.
He did not simply plunge into the business without seeing if there was a demand for it. He supplied ice to bartenders in the Caribbean free of cost for a year, to be used in the drinks they made. According to Tudor, “A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again”. He was not wrong. However, he did incur quite a few hiccups along the way before he built his empire of ice. He sold his first shipment to Martinique in 1806. Of course, a lot of the ice had melted in the journey, and he sold whatever had not melted at a loss of 4,500 dollars. He incurred even bigger losses in his next three shipments to Cuba and as a result of this, he found himself in a debtor’s prison between 1812 to 1813. Nonetheless, this did not dampen his spirits and he began earning profits from this trade, ten years later. He reached the peak of his career in the 1830s when he took the risk of transporting ice to Calcutta, India. He transported 180 tonnes of ice from Massachusetts to Calcutta. The 16,000-mile journey required months of travel and not surprisingly, 80 tonnes melted on the way. Nonetheless, Tudor had managed to make a profit with the ice he could sell. His success eventually earned him the name of ‘Ice King’.
Now, you’re probably thinking, was ice not available at all before the 1830’s in India? Well, it was available, but it did not prove to be a very feasible source. In the winter months ice was sourced from Chinsurah, which is now a town in the Hooghly district of West Bengal and the ice sourced from there was known as ‘Hooghly Ice’. This was quite an unsanitary form of slushy ice and hence was unfit for consumption. Mohona Kanjilal, in her book, ‘A Taste of Time – A Food History of Calcutta’, states that ice factories were established in Calcutta in 1878 when the Bengal Ice Company was formed.
Today, a chilled coke, topped up with ice and a refreshing slice of lime or whisky on the rocks is something we can demand. If we get hurt, we apply ice sometimes to soothe the pain. Ice is used for several purposes today but were it not for the sake of an intuitive businessman, I wonder how we would’ve figured our way to this beautifully versatile commodity.
Nikita Chung 