Before refrigerators became commercially viable in the late-1800s and common household appliances have done so in the 1900s, the elites of societies past subscribed to “ice services.” In winter, workers gathered ice from lakes and rivers, crushed it into smaller pieces, before storing it in cool underground chambers until it was needed in summer – for cooling, for countering fevers, for keeping fish and dairy fresh, and for making ice-creams. This became a business that, at its peak, employed almost a hundred thousand people in the late 19th century in the U.S. alone.

Frozen water in a hot, humid summer was long a privilege of the ultra-rich only. Before the ice-delivery industry become well established (i.e., when city-dwelling customers could subscribe to daily or weekly ice deliveries), expensive mansions from England to Russia came with their own ice houses – often underground chambers close to lakes, supplied by winter ice from local rivers and ponds. And human civilizations around major mountain ranges, like the Andes or Himalaya, have long harvested ice from the never-ending glaciers above the tree line, sending sheets of ice downstream – as the Romans did in the millennia past.

That was the only way before refrigeration to freeze food or keep drinks chilled. The practice was arduous and difficult, the geographic coverage was limited, and much of the ice melted on its journey. In England in the 1700s and 1800s, large quantity of superior-quality ice was imported from Norway and put in underground ice houses – one of which was recently uncovered under Regent’s Park in London. The custom, wrote historian Daniel Boorstin half-a-century ago in his three-volume history of Americans,  was “part of the luxurious equipment of the palace of the royal governors of Virginia.” In far-off New England, ice was about to revolutionize the experience of hot summers across the world.

The earliest venture to bring ice to the masses is associated with a stubborn man called Frederick Tudor. Brought up in a wealthy family in the late 1700s, the “King of Ice” may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Alas, he almost squandered his family’s fortune before he finally saw his ice business pay off. Twice imprisoned and three times arrested for unpaid debts, his persistence in the face of constant failures is both admirable and an illustration of how innovation happens gradually – by tinkering entrepreneurs, trying and trying again.

Tudor’s idea should have been the perfect business plan: shipping abundant ice from New England, where it was mostly a nuisance, to thriving metropolises where it was incredibly useful. He believed, writes Gavin Weightman in The Frozen Water Trade, that he “could make money out of a commodity other New Englanders regarded as worthless.”

Tudor’s first journey in 1806 ended with nothing but losses. He had bought a ship of his own since no shipper would take his odd cargo (would the melting ice not damage the ship or its cargo?). Before having learned to properly insulate the ice during transit, Tudor arrived at his first destination, the French colony of Martinique, with nowhere to store the mostly melted cargo. Not exactly an instant s