The Dynamics of Innovation

America’s Ice Industry: A Case Study The American ice industry thrived in 19th century New England. The “Ice King,” Frederic Tudor of Boston, sent his first shipment of ice from the port of Charlestown, Massachusetts, to Martinique in the West Indies in 1806. Fifty years later, his company was shipping nearly 150 tons of ice per year to several U.S. ports, the Caribbean islands, Rio de Janeiro, Bombay, Hong Kong, and sites in between. Tudor benefited from collaboration with Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, who invented an ice plow and more than 50 other tools for harvesting natural ice from local ponds and storing it. These innovations are said to have cut the price of delivered ice by one-third. Tudor’s growing success attracted others to the business, so that by the late 1870s there were no fewer than 14 firms in the Boston area alone cutting almost 700,000 tons of ice each year. Maine and New Hampshire also had thriving ice companies. Innovations continued to make the product more uniform and lower the cost of production. The ice business became an important part of the U.S. economy and continued to expand as households became regular consumers of harvested ice. City dwellers had begun purchasing ice boxes in growing numbers after 1850, and these soon became a modern necessity. Yet—though no one recognized it at the time— the 1880s were to be the zenith of the harvested ice James Utterback | Massachusetts Institute of Technology