Rating: 
Summary: Interesting footnote of history
Review: "The Frozen Water Trade" is an interesting chronicle of a long dead and forgotten industry. In this book, a story is told about how a particular idea first considered to be absurd, but then grows to a tremendously large business all around, and then impacts other later industries (such as beer brewing in Milwaukee) and then ultimately capitulated from the march of technological progress.In many ways, I found the actual specifics about the business of selling ice as interesting as the general story about 19th century business life, such as dealing with relics from the mercantilist age in the caribbean to the business like of 19th century Boston shipping magnates. If the concepts that I am describing sound interesting to the slightest, then this book will not disappoint.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting footnote of history
Review: "The Frozen Water Trade" is an interesting chronicle of a long dead and forgotten industry. In this book, a story is told about how a particular idea first considered to be absurd, but then grows to a tremendously large business all around, and then impacts other later industries (such as beer brewing in Milwaukee) and then ultimately capitulated from the march of technological progress. In many ways, I found the actual specifics about the business of selling ice as interesting as the general story about 19th century business life, such as dealing with relics from the mercantilist age in the caribbean to the business like of 19th century Boston shipping magnates. If the concepts that I am describing sound interesting to the slightest, then this book will not disappoint.
Rating: 
Summary: A true story: YOU could turn ice into money
Review: As a business professor, I found this book part entertaining history, part cautionary tale about the risks and rewards of hubris. One might at first read it as the story of a mad genius, Fredrick Tudor, a 19th-century Boston scion fallen on hard times with the nutty notion to ship ice to the Caribbean. Tudor truly didn't seem to have a good head for business, but the fundamental economics of the trade were so strong that he eventually flourished. Take something that you can get for practically free (ice). Hire farm workers laid off for the winter (they'll work for practically nothing). Pack it with something that people want to get rid of (sawdust). Transport it in ships that would otherwise be carrying only ballast (they'll carry it cheap). Tudor appears to have been more-or-less an irascible nut, whose initial forays into shipping ice were disastrous (he forgot, for example, that no one in the Carribean had a place to store it, so that the first purchasers could do nothing more with their blocks of ice than carry them home gingerly in their aprons and watch them melt). As a sideline, he tried to corner the US coffee market and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and alienated everyone who could help him gain a technological edge over his competitors. In sum, Tudor is a fascinating character, but the trade itself is even more interesting then he was. Weightman's narrative is well-researched, charming, and swift. It would make an excellent choice for anyone interested in history but also a great change-of-pace for anyone interested in business in general.
Rating:
Summary: Tale of Commercial Endeavour and Perseverance
Review: I picked this book up upon when I listened to an extract read on the BBC World Service several months ago. It spoke of a wild venture by a New England businessman to ship ice from Boston to the tropics. It seemed to me a fantastic and improbably story. The very fact that it was improbably caught my attention - even with the technological advances of today, when little seems impossible, the idea of an industry based on shipping frozen water thousands of miles by ship seemed a little ludicrous. It is to Weightman's credit that he transformed this almost-forgotten industry from the footnotes of history into a gripping tale of commercial endeavour and perseverance. It is an inspiring read and a fine example of how history holds more than dusty dull stories.
Rating:
Summary: Provides a lively discourse on his accomplishments
Review: In 1806 the brig Favorite left Boston bound for Martinique packed with large chunks of ice cut from a frozen lake: the first venture of a Boston entrepreneur who believed he could make a fortune selling ice to people in the tropics. Despite ridicule and hardship, Tudor made his fortune and founded a huge industry in the process: The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story provides a lively discourse on his accomplishments. The Frozen-Water Trade is the impressive and informative story of that early 19th century adventerous entrepreneur.
Rating:
Summary: A Huge, Strange, Influential, and Forgotten Industry
Review: It was necessary to add the subtitle to the book _The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story_ (Hyperion), as in it, Gavin Weightman has told a tale that stretches credulity. How can we have almost completely forgotten an industry that employed thousands, created millionaires and monopolies, and sent an American product around the world, changing forever the way people dined and drank? Oh, the answer is artificial refrigeration, but before that there was the commercial ice trade, and before that, people simply did not have ice cream, mint juleps, and fresh fish that could keep in the markets. Beyond being an exposure of a surprisingly secret history, this book is the story of an entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who may never have heard the phrase "Find a need and fill it," but who did just that, showing commercial ingenuity and perseverance that ought to make this a textbook case of American business acumen. Tudor, born in 1783 to a wealthy Massachusetts family, was more interested in making his fortune than in getting an education, and dropped out of college. On a trip to Havana in 1801, he discovered that it was hot, and that no one would sell you a cool drink, for there were none to sell. But at home in New England, they had ice on ponds and rivers every year, ice that uselessly froze and then melted as the seasons changed. The ice was mostly a nuisance, restricting river traffic, and there were tons and tons of it. Tudor merely had to get it from cold lands to hot. This, of course, was the problem, a problem solved with Yankee ingenuity in design of ice houses and ice cutters and of insulation for cargo ships. He went through bankruptcy, incarceration for debt, and a mental breakdown in making his dream become a reality. Originally, people sneered at him; a trade in ice seemed as ridiculous to those who had never heard of it then as now. But Tudor, having developed thriving business to New York, Charleston, Havana, and New Orleans, hit his supreme mark when his brig reached Calcutta in 1833 with two-thirds of its ice cargo intact. Tudor's commercial triumph offset his sometimes disastrous speculations in sea salt, graphite, and coffee, so that he ended his life a very wealthy man. He was the first trader in ice, and others saw the profits he was making and went into the business for themselves, forming an enormous industry throughout New England. One of the reasons so little is remembered about it is that it seldom figured in any official trade statistics. It was neither mining nor farming, so it was not taxed or regulated. It was only by the years of the First World War, over fifty years after Tudor died, that mechanical refrigeration to manufacture what used to be harvested from ponds and rivers, began to make a real dent in the ice trade, although some river and pond ice continued to be traded until the middle of the twentieth century. As Weightman says, "All of this huge industry simply melted away," but the enterprise was so enormous, so complicated, so revolutionary, and so very strange that it is a real pleasure to read his preservation of Tudor's life and works.
Rating:
Summary: Story of a Forgotten Industry
Review: Mr. Gavin tells a very good tale of how Fredric Tudor took the seemingly absurd idea of selling ice and turned the idea into what was one of America's largest industries of the 19th Century. What I found most captivating - more so than the biographical aspect of the book - was how Gavin put ice in perspective in America. It was a huge industry producing millions of dollars a year and employing thousands (many on a seasonal basis), yet because it was not taxed there is very little hard data. Moreover, ice appears to have been a primarily American love in the last century. Only after WWII did the rest of the world pick up our affinity for cold drinks and food. These perspectives make the book more than a biography or "how they done it" book and makes it worth reading. Although I thought the book weakened towards the end (as if he was looking to fill a few more pages) it was a joy to read. Gavin made the history of a unique industry into a good story.
Rating:
Summary: Fredrick Tutor
Review: One of the 'Books Of The Day' happened to be this one (cant remember which though) and I was not only hooked in just a few pages, but surprised at how little I knew about such an revolutionary part of our early "ice age".
While the first few chapters of the book are excellent, it starts to get a bit dry in the middle - though the reference inside Waldon about Fredric will always stick in my mind from now on.
It would have been best if it had finished up at the end of the 'Mr. Tutor' epic. Instead I felt the 'After Tutor' chapter was almost added as something to bulk up the book - interesting but just seemed out of place. Maybe it was just unpolished?
If this book didnt fill such a huge hole in what I knew - I think it would've been a 3ish. Truth be told anytime such a little gem of a book is found - I am absolutely "kept" - and with this book it was 80% of the way.
ss
Rating:
Summary: A Full Business Cycle
Review: Part biography, part business history, author Gavin Weightman's "The Frozen Water Trade," is an interesting and readable account of a uniquely American business that is all but forgotten today. In this modern era of refigeration, it seems impossible to imagine the world of a century ago in which everything was cooled by harvested freshwater ice, or indeed a world of two centuries ago when NOTHING was refrigerated. Were it not for the entreprenurial genius of a man named Fredric Tudor, Weightman's man protagonist, we all might be drinking warm drinks to this very day becuase the very idea of cold beverages might never have caught on. Tudor's classic story is that of a vsionary who had difficulty convincing his contemporaries of the wisdom of his ideas, and who risked everything he had to make that vision a reality. He eventually succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and in the process changed the habits of first America and then of the world. Starting in 1806, Tudor hatched upon a scheme to deliver New England ice to the tropics for sale. He was beset by all kinds of difficulties: bureaucratic red tape, unreliable underlings, shipwrecks, disease, debtors prison, embargoes and even a war or two. By midcentury, however, his trade in ice had become New England's leading export and had become a commodity no American could do without. All of this Weightman dutifully recounts in the narrative history style that has become so popular these days. It was appeal most to those who enjoy business success stoires. The one drawback of the book is that Tudor as a character is relatively colorless. He was a driven businessman who had few other interests. Because he is forgotten today, the accounts of his personal life don't carry much interest. Nevertheless, the story of the forgotten industry he pioneered has been well preserved by this enjoyable book.
Rating:
Summary: An entertaining tale
Review: very pleasant to read about life without AC, in today's
moderated July. All the tools, all the industry, all the fortunes
won and lost -- Tudor runs up a huge "coffee debt"
investing in coffee futures, which takes him years
to pay off -- a wonderful carpe diem for any
frustrated (or not so frustrated) entrepreneur.
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