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The Ice King's gamble

How to prove people will pay for something they have never seen · 13 min

In 1806 a young Boston man shipped ice to the Caribbean. People carried it home in blankets, and it vanished. Fifteen years later he was almost bankrupt; twelve years after that, his ice reached Calcutta. In 1964 AT&T let fair visitors try a video phone, and very few ever paid. How do you test demand for something nobody has seen?

Takeaways

  • Frederic Tudor's first cargo of ice, sent from Boston to Martinique in eighteen hundred and six, melted and lost money; in eighteen twenty-one he wrote that he was almost bankrupt. His method was an icehouse to store it, free ice for bars, and cold drinks sold at the same price as warm ones. By eighteen thirty-three his ice was reaching Calcutta.
  • AT&T let visitors try its Picturephone at the nineteen sixty-four World's Fair, but very few paid for it afterwards: by the account of an engineer who was at Bell Labs at the time, sales expected in the tens of thousands came to a few hundred. A taste away from the moment of real use did not create demand. Two cases, a century and a half apart: a pattern, not a law.
  • Something to try: before Friday, give five people a real taste of what you offer, free, at the moment they would use it. Then offer the second one at your real price, and count who pays.

Chapters

  1. Ice in a blanket0:17
  2. They queued at the fair1:51
  3. The second glass3:32
  4. The book on trial5:51
  5. Same taste, different moment8:23
  6. The second sale9:42
  7. The answer11:28

References

  1. Bulletin of the Business Historical Society (Baker Library deposit; letters of F. Tudor) — Frederic Tudor, Ice King(1932)
  2. Simpson, L. P. (American Studies 9(1)) — Boston Ice and Letters in The Age of Jefferson(1968)
  3. Bean, S. S. (American Heritage) — Cold Mine(1991)
  4. Herold, M. W. (Revista Espaço Acadêmico 11(126)) — Ice in the Tropics: the Export of 'Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness' to India and Brazil(2011)
  5. Herold, M. W. (University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, full text) — Ice in the Tropics: the Export of 'Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness' to India and Brazil(2012)
  6. Weightman, G. (excerpt on BookBrowse) — The Frozen Water Trade Excerpt: Read free excerpt of The Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Weightman(2003)
  7. Greenspan, S. with Weightman, G. (99% Invisible, Episode 198) — The Ice King(2016)
  8. Neyfakh, L. (The Boston Globe) — How a Massachusetts man invented the global ice market(2014)
  9. Cascio, C. (Hagley Museum and Library) — Museum Collection: Chilling with the Ice King of New England(2026)
  10. Landrigan, L. (New England Historical Society) — Frederic Tudor in 1806 Brings Cocktails and Ice Cream to the Rest of the World(2018)
  11. Kerpelman, L. C. (HistoryNet) — How Pioneering Entrepreneurs Helped 19th-Century America Keep Cool(2021)
  12. Srinivas, T. (The Conversation, republished by Snopes) — Why Do We Use Ice in Drinks?(2020)
  13. Engineering and Technology History Wiki (IEEE History Center) — Picturephone
  14. Dietrich, M. (Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture, vol. 1) — Cultural Networks: Infrastructural Implications of AT&T's Picturephone(2020)
  15. NYU Poly Archives (A. Michael Noll collection) — The PicturePhone
  16. Noll, A. M. (The New York Times; NYU Poly Archives record) — Videophone: A Flop That Won't Die(1992)
  17. Noll, A. M. (Telecommunications Policy; NYU Poly Archives record) — Anatomy of a failure: Picturephone revisited(1992)
  18. NYU Tandon School of Engineering — Before there was Zoom(2023)
  19. Gershon, L. (JSTOR Daily) — A Prehistory of Zoom(2024)
  20. Miller, J. (TeleGeography) — Before FaceTime: When The Picturephone Was The Future(2017)
  21. Young, V. A. (Carnegie Mellon University News) — Fifty Years Into 'Picturephones,' CMU Revamps Original Machine With Modern Twist(2020)
  22. Simon & Schuster (publisher record; Rogers, E. M., Free Press) — Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition(2003)
  23. Dearing, J. W. & Singhal, A. (Human Behavior & Emerging Technologies) — New directions for diffusion of innovations research: Dissemination, implementation, and positive deviance(2020)
  24. Health Affairs (thematic issue briefing) — Diffusion Of Innovation(2018)
  25. Draper, S. (University of Glasgow, Department of Psychology) — S-shaped curve for uptake of innovations(2005)
  26. Health Behavior and Health Education, 4th ed. (companion website, University of Pennsylvania) — Critiques
  27. Bawa, K. & Shoemaker, R. (Marketing Science 23(3), IDEAS/RePEc record with abstract) — The Effects of Free Sample Promotions on Incremental Brand Sales(2004)