When was ice cubes invented

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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Mary Bellis. Inventions Expert. Mary Bellis covered inventions and inventors for ThoughtCo for 18 years. She is known for her independent films and documentaries, including one about Alexander Graham Bell.

Updated February 24, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Bellis, Mary. His name was Frederic Tudor, and 30 years later, he would ship nearly 12, tons of ice halfway around the globe to become the "Ice King. Nothing in Tudor's early years indicated that he would invent an industry. He had the pedigree to attend Harvard but dropped out of school at the age of After loafing for a few years, he retired to his family's country estate to hunt, fish, and play at farming.

When his brother, William, quipped that they should harvest ice from the estate's pond and sell it in the West Indies, Frederic took the notion seriously. After all, he had little else to do. Frederic convinced William to join him in a scheme to ship ice from New England to the Caribbean. Tudor reasoned that once people tried it, they'd never want to live without it.

During the next six months, the brothers pooled their money and laid out plans to ship their product to the French island of Martinique, where they hoped to create a monopoly on ice. No one believed the idea would work. On February 10, , the Boston Gazette. 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. It did. Although the ice arrived in Martinique in perfect condition, no one wanted to buy it.

Tudor desperately explained how the cold blocks of ice could be used in the stifling Caribbean heat, but islanders weren't convinced. After an inauspicious start, William pulled out of the partnership.

The following winter, Frederic was on his own. Remarkably, he drummed up enough money to send another shipment of ice to the Indies. But when a trade embargo left much of the Caribbean off-limits for two years, Frederic was left twiddling his thumbs. Meanwhile, the Tudor family fortune had dwindled in a shady real estate deal in South Boston. Despite financial woes, Frederic persisted, and his ice business finally turned a profit in But a series of circumstances—including war, weather, and relatives needing bailouts—kept him from staying in the black for too long.

For decades, Americans have gone a little, shall we say, overboard on ice. In the 19th century, iced beverages were a luxury reserved only for the rich, but in the Land of Opportunity, we had so much ice we could sell it to the rest of the world. And we're still ballers when it comes to ice: Europeans are regularly gobsmacked by how much ice Americans shovel into their drinks, while American tourists marvel at the paltry one or two cubes they receive in their sodas across the pond.

So how did America's love affair with ice first solidify? On the banks of Walden Pond, Thoreau was witnessing the rise of an industry. Many ancient civilizations had harvested ice in winter for use in summer, but no one did it as ambitiously as the Americans. He launched operations in , after his brother commented that they could probably earn a fortune shipping ice from New England to the warmer Caribbean, where it could be used to preserve food and medicine.

But better storage and harvesting techniques—like sawdust instead of straw for insulation, and horse-drawn ice ploughs instead of hand tools for harvesting—eventually minimized his losses and created profits.

In an effort to expand his business in the tropics, Tudor began suggesting people use ice not only to preserve food or medicine, but also to gasp! Like any gifted dealer, he would first give it away for free and then charge once his customers were hooked. Giant blocks of ice were shaved for juleps, "lumped" for cocktails, and crushed for icy, booze-heavy "cobblers".