- Weightman, Gavin. The Frozen-Water Trade. New York:
Hyperion, 2003. ISBN 0-7868-8640-4.
- Those who scoff at the prospect of mining lunar Helium-3 as
fuel for Earth-based fusion power plants might ponder the fact that,
starting in 1833, British colonists in India beat the sweltering
heat of the subcontinent with a steady, year-round supply of ice
cut in the winter from ponds and rivers in Massachusetts and Maine
and shipped in the holds of wooden sailing ships—a voyage of some
25,000 kilometres and 130 days. In 1870 alone, 17,000 tons of ice
were imported by India in ships sailing from Boston. Frederic Tudor,
who first conceived the idea of shipping winter ice, previously
considered worthless, to the tropics, was essentially single-handedly
responsible for ice and refrigeration becoming a fixture of daily
life in Western communities around the world. Tudor found fortune
and fame in creating an industry based on commodity which beforehand
simply melted away every spring. No technological breakthrough
was required or responsible—this is a classic case of creating a
market by filling a need of which customers were previously unaware.
In the process, Tudor suffered just about every adversity one can
imagine and never gave up, an excellent illustration that the one
essential ingredient of entrepreneurial success is the ability to
“take a whacking and keep on hacking”.
April 2004 