The Ice King Case Review
Frederic Tudor was born in Boston in 1783 during the ending period of the American
Revolution. He rode the earliest upsurge of American entrepreneurial movement,
becoming one of the country’s first tycoons. Tudor first became interested in shipping ice
from New England to the Caribbean when he was 22 years old. His brother William had
made a simple remark at a party about the “business opportunity” of providing ice from a
frozen Boston lake to the sweltering Caribbean where they had probably never
experienced such an object. He invested $10,000, some half of which was to purchase a
brig, a two-masted sailing vessel. He lost almost half his money on this first attempt. A
later attempt in Havana faired better. However fortune did not smile on him and at 28 he
wound up in a Boston jail as a debtor because of his inability to pay back his liabilities. For
years Tudor lived on the edge of bankruptcy, spending time in and out of jail for failure to
pay his bills
But that didn’t stop Tudor. He decided people in warm regions really did want ice, they
just didn’t know it. So he gave it away for cheap prices when he did get there, assuming
people would develop a taste for it. As a result of his efforts, ice gained a following, but
not immediately. After decades of effort, Tudor built a highly profitable business and made
himself a fortune, shipping ice to countries as far away as India.
