Скачать или смотреть Why Americans Are Obsessed With Ice? 🧊

Americans use more ice than every other country combined!
Order a Coke in Paris? Room temperature. Ask for ice water in London? One sad cube. Mark Twain once wrote that the only truly American characteristic he could identify was "the national devotion to ice-water."

So where did this obsession come from?
In 1806, a 23-year-old from Boston named Frederic Tudor loaded a ship with frozen pond water and sailed it to the Caribbean. Everyone thought he was insane. The Boston Gazette literally made puns about how stupid his plan was. He lost everything. Went to debtor's prison. Twice.
But Tudor had a plan: give bartenders free ice for a year. Get people hooked on cold drinks. Then charge them.

It worked. By 1833, he was shipping ice 16,000 miles to India — a four-month journey — and it arrived still frozen. By the Civil War, American ships carried more ice than any commodity except cotton. Two-thirds of Boston and New York households received daily ice deliveries.

Frederic Tudor got an entire country addicted to ice. 200 years later, we're still hooked.

🔔 Subscribe to Hidden in Plain Time for more forgotten history ‪@HiddenInPlainTime‬

#history #ice #americanhistory #foodhistory #frederictudor #usa #usahistory