Episode 96 is all about ice – in preparation for our soon-to-follow episode about Ice Cream.
Boston’s Frederic Tudor became the “Ice King” by taking ice to places in the world where it had never been before. But it wasn’t easy
Dr. John Gorrie was looking for ways to care for the sick and became one of the first humans to make ice himself. It sparked a cool revolution.
Transcriptions:
Ice King Frederic Tudor by Mick Sullivan
Ice. It’s cold. It’s crucial. And until relatively recently, it has been impossible to create. Things have certainly changed. There’s a lot of ice around today. Maybe you have an icemaker in your refrigerator. If not, you can fill up some ice cube trays and wait a few hours while the exciting magic of thermodynamics happens in your very own kitchen – the water will freeze in the cold temperature of the freezer. When you go to a restaurant or convenience store, there’s probably an ice dispenser ready to fill your big gulp cup with crystal clear, chilly cubes. Or the ice might be chipped, or crushed, or even crescent shaped.
But before modern machinery, electricity, and chemistry gave us the nearly unlimited supply of ice we enjoy today, ice was not so easy to come by. For nearly all of human history, the ice you had was limited to the ice you could find. In northern areas, finding ice was not so tough. During winter months there’s usually plenty of frozen water in lakes and other bodies of water. In this season people would harvest ice, and hope to keep it cool and solid for as long as possible – usually in ice cellars dug underground to keep ice once the lakes had melted. But by the time the summer months came around, it would have melted – leaving you iceless once again – and at the hottest, most food-spoiling time of year. Getting more ice would have been impossible until winter came back around. But remember we’re just talking about the north where winters are cold. Imagine, if you will, what it was like in places closer to the equator like New Orleans, Cuba, or India. In places such as these, it never got cold enough for ice to form. Which means most people living in those parts pretty much never saw ice. They never touched ice. If they were sick, they sweated. If they drank anything, it was warm. If they needed to preserve food, they pickled or smoked it. In the truest, most literal sense of the phrase, these people had no chill.
At least until a man known as the Ice King came along. When the Ice King was born in 1783 in Boston, MA he wasn’t known as the Ice King. He wasn’t even known as the Ice Prince. He was known as Frederic Tudor. Because that was his name. Frederic’s father was a lawyer who hoped his son would grow up to be the “Law King.” But Frederic wanted nothing to do with being a lawyer, even with the offer of full tuition to Harvard. He wanted to be in business for himself but never really had much luck.
He had an older brother, John Henry, who was sick though, and in the 1800s it was common for people with certain illnesses to travel to a place with a different climate for their well-being. It was like a sick vacation. So on doctor’s orders, Father Tudor sent the Tudor Brothers to Cuba – a place with a very different climate from Boston. Frederic would look after his brother, and perhaps come back with an attitude adjustment and willingness to give college a try. So they packed their heavy wool suits and headed to paradise. Or so they thought. Cuba was, in one word, hot. In two words: Super Hot. In Three Words super-duper hot. To make the super-duper heat worse: there was no such thing as ice. Like, it didn’t exist. Never got cold enough. Which made John Henry’s sickness even more unpleasant. Being hot and sick is the worst. Surely it couldn’t get any worse, he thought. Was he right? He was worse than right – he was wrong. It got a lot worse: as summer set in, so did mosquitos. And a big problem here was something called Yellow Fever. Thanks to the mosquitos, thousands of people every year fell ill with the disease. The Tudor Brothers were among the many who suffered from Yellow Fever. Confined to sticky hot sick beds, both of them longed for some of that ice that was back home in Boston, chilling in the family ice cellar. They dreamt of the frigid coolness, in between waking up in miserable sweaty fevers. The brothers left Cuba as soon as they could.
But John Henry would never recover and his death months later weighed heavy in Frederic’s mind. The surviving brother believed that if they would have had ice in Cuba, his brother could have recovered. This lead Frederic to his big idea. “I’ll take ice to Cuba. They’ll love it there and I’ll sell it for a fortune and then I’ll be the rich businessman I always wanted to be and my father will stop bugging me about law school.”
But it wasn’t an easy road to becoming the Ice King. No one took him seriously, which meant it was very hard to raise cash. Slowly he was able to get enough money together to buy a ship to transport his icy cargo and hire crews to harvest the ice from frozen Massachusetts lakes. Gigantic blocks of lake ice were loaded into the hold of his ship, which was called Favorite. The frozen lake would not go to Cuba though – he couldn’t get the legal permission to sell there, so instead the cargo was bound for Martinique, an island in the Carribbean that had been colonized by France. It was just as hot there, so surely they’d love ice, right?
No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of Ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.
This was from the tongue in cheek article in the Boston Gazette that ran at the time. Clearly no one believed his scheme would work. Surprisingly, when Favorite arrived at the island, most of the ice was still, well…ice, and not water (which is something an island already has plenty of). He left with 80 tons and still had well over 50 tons to sell. But there was a problem that he had not considered. Where do you put ice on a hot sunny island? There was nowhere to keep it from melting. No one ever needed such a place in Martinique. This meant if he was gonna sell it, he had to sell it fast. For a few days, he was able to sell a few blocks, but business was slow – no one really knew what to do with it.
And then came the angry customers. Angry about what, you may wonder…well, they were, um, angry that the marvelous blocks of cold solid water they had purchased had…melted. Of course it melted, he told them. It’s ice. That’s what ice does. Most of his ice had melted too! But no one here had ever seen ice before. Many had never even heard of it. No one knew much about ice at all. So his ice venture was a failure. At least at first. He was, after all, destined to be the Ice King. But before success there were a few more attempts and a few more failures. Things got so bad that when he got back to Boston, he rarely walked around in the daylight – partially because he was embarrassed, and partially because he owed so many people money.
Then it dawned on him. If he wanted people to know how to use ice, he needed to show them. So, despite being a wanted man for his many debts, he snuck out of Boston on a ship loaded with ice and headed for Cuba. Once he arrived, the would-be ice mogul visited as many cafes as he could find in Havana and at each one he made the baristas an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Free ice.
Free ice?
You heard me. H-2-O below 32 degrees. Zero dollars.
The catch: they had to agree to let him show them how to use it. All the delicious drinks made of coffee or fruits that were served in Havana were served hot or lukewarm. You lose the crisp refreshment of fruit juice when it hits your tongue at the same temperature as the human body. So he showed them the beauty of iced drinks, and even how to combine fruit, salt, cream, and sugar to make everyone’s favorite – ice cream. Any knucklehead with a tongue would get it after that. But even if their tongues didn’t tell them ice was a big win, their skyrocketing sales certainly did.
Of course, Frederic wasn’t going to keep shipping ice to Cuba and giving it away for free. Once they decided they liked ice and wanted ice, he was prepared to ship more – but this time it would cost money. It worked. Before long, he could, with a straight face and sense of pride, call himself the Ice King. He improved his business – learning how to pack ice so it wouldn’t melt as much in transport. He insulated with sawdust, and designed ice houses to keep his product icy for the time between arriving at its final destination and being sold to consumers.
He pulled the same want some free ice? move in cities like New Orleans, which increased his business. People just needed to see what they could do with it. And he was happy to show them the glory of ice. Before long, he was shipping boatloads of ice across the globe – even as far as India, which became one of his biggest markets.
Of course, if one person has a good idea and starts making money, other people are gonna try to get in on the action. Ice is no different. Before long people all over the south, the Caribbean and even South America were cooling their drinks, nursing their headaches, and preserving their food with the frozen lake water shipped in from the north – not just from Frederic, but from many new Ice barons.
Perhaps most importantly, all of this ice changed the way people ate. As new invention, the ice box, meant that you could keep perishable food around and safe for much, much longer. The icebox was an early refrigerator – which didn’t run on electricity and chemicals, but rather good old fashioned thermodynamics. A block of ice in a compartment above would allow the cool air to flow into a compartment below where you kept the food your family would eat. It was a huge development that you could find in most homes for most of the 1800s and early 1900s and even beyond. Fewer people got sick. Fewer people went hungry because of spoiled food, and once railcars were outfitted with cooling systems, that meant people could eat new foods from other places – which could be shipped without spoiling.
Frederic Tudor paid off his debts and could walk around Boston as a successful and proud man. There are no records of this Ice King walking around the town with a crown made of ice, but I still like to imagine it. He died in 1864 and is buried in Kings Chapel Burial Ground – the oldest, and perhaps coldest, graveyard in Boston.
Dr. John Gorrie by Mick Sullivan
Ice isn’t just about keeping your cool. Sure, it’s nice in a beverage. Sure, it was the way you kept your food from spoiling in the, ahem, icebox, – heck, a lot of the food in your fridge would have never even made it to your house without ice. So that’s good. And we’ll talk about all the delicious cold treats ice can give us in the next episode. But there’s more important things than ice cream sundaes and milkshakes in this world. Having ice around can be good for your health too.
Think about it – when you get sick, sometimes your body temperature rises. You start sweating, you are uncomfortable, nothing feels right, if it gets bad you might even begin to get delirious. Hopefully it’s never that bad for you. But what do we do when our fever starts getting higher and higher? We park ourselves in front of the Air Conditioner, we hop into a cold bath or shower and let the chilled water wash over us, or we get an ice pack, wrap it in a washcloth and sigh with a bit of relief when the chill meets the heat. But how would you bring down a fever in a time or place with no electricity, no cool water, no ice for miles and miles and miles? Oh, and no modern medicine. Let’s just say, you didn’t want to get sick in a time or place like this.
But people did get sick. They got sick left and right, backwards and forwards. Disease was everywhere: in water, on germy unwashed hands, and in the air – buzzing around on the pokey parts of mosquitos. Oh mosquitos. No insect in all of history has brought more disease to people than the pesky mosquito. Denge Fever, Malaria, and Yellow fever are a few of the things you don’t want but a mosquito will give you before heading off to give it to someone else. Thankfully, science has addressed many of the problems today – every year millions of vaccines are given to people in areas where Yellow Fever runs rampant, and it has saved uncounted lives. And of course, if you do get sick, there is medicine to keep your fever in check and help your body recover. But that’s relatively new – thanks to science!
As you know, ice wasn’t always easy to get, and it may just be what saved a person’s life in these pre-vaccine and pre-effective medicine days. So in the mid-1800s a Florida doctor named John Gorrie dedicated his life making ice. Something so simple now actually this scared a lot of people at the time. Many believed creating ice was reserved for a greater power – human mortals shouldn’t make ice – it’s blasphemy. But John didn’t pay attention to the naysayers – he had lives to save.
Where he lived in Apalachicola, Florida there was ocean and swamp around him. Lots of swamp. And to be clear – he, nor anyone else at the time knew what was making people sick – it was just obvious that people were getting sick. Maybe it was bad swamp air, maybe it was the germs large groups of people breathe out, maybe it was bad luck. Though he didn’t know it was mosquitos carrying disease, he was committed to helping the sick. So committed in fact that he opened up entire sections of his home for patients to stay while they were treated. Because Yellow Fever was most common in the summer, the patients had a hard time staying cool, as their fevers caused their body temps to rise as high as the hot swampy Florida air around them.
Wanting to bring some comfort so they might recover, Gorrie created one of the earliest versions of air conditioning. It started with a bedpan. Not sure what a bedpan is? Well, it’s that nifty little bowl they keep around hospital beds so you don’t have to get up in order to use the restroom. You can do your business right there in bed and someone else can dump it for you. John, of course, started with a clean bedpan. Germ theory might have been a few years off, but he was smart enough not to build an air conditioner out of a used dirty portable toilet!
The design was simple. He drilled a hole in the pan, hung it from the ceiling, put a precious block of ice in there and opened the window. You may know that cool air sinks and warm air rises. If you didn’t know that, well, cool are sinks and warm air rises – a fact that John also knew. As the air from the window moved through the bedpan hanging from above, it cooled and then quickly made its way down and around the person in bed underneath. After promising the patients under the bedpans that any drips they felt were just meltwater, he stood back and observed. It got cooler. A lot cooler. And people got a lot more comfortable – which increased the chances of recovery.
But ice was hard to get in a tiny swampy town in Florida. So when he ran out, he started thinking about other things – mainly how to make ice in a hot place that has rarely, if ever, seen even the tiniest chunk of natural ice – even in the winter months.
Man-Made ice?!? Whoever heard of such a thing!
It was hard to find investors but he needed money to do it. And it was hard to find supporters and believers, on top of that. Money or not. He knew he would save lives, but first he had to convince the rich and powerful. In 1850 he did just that – at a fancy party filled with people in dresses and suits and tuxedos. Everyone came to have a good time, but that was difficult to do because of the oppressive heat. Too bad no one had any ice.
Then came the dramatic reveal, waiters appeared with trays of ice cubes, drinks nestled in between big chunks of ice, and probably a few bowls of ice cream to boot.
Alright, now we’re talking. Ice party time! … but wait wait wait wait wait…where on earth did you get this ice?
Oh this ice? You know…I just…made it.
MAde it? Impossible. Who do you think you are? Zeus?
Nah baby, I’m not Zeus, I’m a scientist. And a guy trying to sell ice now, I suppose. Do you want some ice?
Oh you know I do.
Things looked good for a while, but when the Ice King Frederic Tudor and the other Ice barons up north found out about Gorrie making ice, they used the press to convince the public that it was bad. Science ice could never be as good as nature ice they said. Which is a tough sell to a thoughtful mind today – nature’s ice was pulled from lakes and ponds – you know where there is lots of dirt and leaves and sticks and fish and fish poop. Not to mention whatever run off from surrounding farms made it’s way into the water.
Gorrie’s way of icemaking was far cleaner and free from animal poop – of any kind. He created a machine that compressed air and forced it through metal tubes surrounded by water – perfectly clean water that came into contact with no chemicals or anything else gross. So when the process turned it to ice, it was also very clean indeed. Gorrie was awarded the patent for the ice making machine in 1851, but thanks to the bad press and some bad luck, he never saw much profit from it.
When the Civil War began a decade later, Gorrie was no longer alive, but his ice maker sure came back to life. The navy from the north ran blockades on the south, meaning shipments were prevented from arriving at ports. Ice was still a common thing to ship in many of these boats. So with no ice coming in, southerners looked to Gorrie’s ice machine to help the sick and wounded, and also preserve foods. Finally, ice was made by people in the quantity Gorrie had believed to be possible, he just wasn’t around to see it happen. After the war, we never looked back – we have all the ice we could ever want and Gorrie is remembered as a father of refrigeration and air conditioning.
By the way it wasn’t until the next century in 1901 that people would come to believe that it wasn’t bad air causing Yellow Fever and malaria (which literally translates to “bad air” in Italian). A Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay made the claim in 1886 that it was caused by mosquitos, and by 1901 and international group of doctors agreed, determining Yellow fever was a virus carried by certain mosquitos.
It didn’t take people anywhere near this long to believe in the power and benefits of man-made science ice!
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