Читать книгу The Ice Crop: How to Harvest, Store, Ship and Use Ice онлайн

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Prior to 1805, there was no regularly conducted traffic in ice, in this country. In the winter of 1805–6, a supply was secured at Boston, Mass., and the following summer a cargo was despatched to the West Indies, where yellow fever was then raging.

Domestic and Export Trade were both of very slow growth, and, in 1825, the ice consumed in the United States and exported to foreign ports was probably less than fifty thousand tons. During the thirty years following, the consumption of ice increased more rapidly, and the enterprise of the shippers carried the fame of Boston ice all around the world. Cargoes were consigned to London, to the East Indies, and the West Indies, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, China, Japan, and Australia.

The Export Trade reached its height about this time. Frederick Tudor, of Boston, Mass., who shipped the first cargo to the West Indies in 1806, and whose enterprise had carried his ships to all the ports mentioned, was titled the “Ice King.” Not many years after this, ice and refrigerator machines began to supply the demand for ice in tropical climes, and the importations of the natural product soon ceased. Two million tons is a liberal estimate of the amount of ice stored at this date, 1855, in the United States, with six or seven million dollars of invested capital.