Frederic Tudor, a Horribly Old & Ugly Man
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FREDERIC TUDOR, A HORRIBLY OLD & UGLY MAN NOT WORTH THE HAVING WITH ALL HIS MONEY1 “A man without money is like a body without a soul — a walking dead man.” “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY 1.Comment of January 24, 1834 by Charlotte Everett to Edward Everett when the 19-year-old Euphemia “Effie” Fenno married wealthy Frederic Tudor, who was nearly 50. “What a foolish girl to marry such an old man.” The honeymoon was quickly over, when it came out that Mr. Tudor had been obtaining “marriage privileges” from another woman during the decade of his 40s. When Mrs. Euphemia Fenno Tudor tried to learn French, he threw her books into Boston harbor. Although she had expected a home of her own, it would turn out that he would insist on their residing permanently in his suite at the Tremont House downtown. It has been suggested that Frederick “Ice King” Tudor was the inspiration for Amy’s suitor in Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN. I’m not making this up, he actually did utter the words “A man without money is like a body without a soul — a walking dead man.” HDT WHAT? INDEX COOLNESS FREDERIC TUDOR 1783 September 4, Thursday: Frederic Tudor was born. He was not yet horribly old & ugly & not worth the having with all his money. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT coolness “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS 1806 March: A young man named Frederic Tudor, the son of the Judge Advocate General of George Washington, began in the business of producing and wholesaling natural ice in Boston.2 He had borrowed $10,000.00 and had purchased the ice brig Favorite, for $4,750.00, that had been being used to transport ice from a pond in New York near the Hudson River to the hotels and plantations in the vicinity of Charlestown NC, and loaded 130 tons of ice from Massachusetts ponds onto this brig and sent it off to the port of Saint Pierre on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean to cool down the planters, who could well afford to pay for it. It was an obvious idea, not a new idea, to send coolness from some place where there was too much of it to some place where there was not enough of it. The Romans had done this, for instance, with teams of slaves toting snows down from the mountains to ice the Emperor Nero. Tudor would spend the next fifteen years of his life experimenting with the laws of world supply and demand in relation to this obvious idea. Ironically, however, in this initial venture he would lose $3,000.00 to $4,000.00 of his capital, in part because of inadequate insulation. If you are in the ice business but your ice has turned to water, it seems nobody wants to know you. This man would visit debtors’ prison several times over the next few years, before his dedication and concentration began to pay off for him, and pay off big, and cause his customers to begin to refer to him proudly/enviously as the American Ice King. 2. Did he get this idea from President Washington’s humongous icehouse at Mount Vernon? HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS 1812 Mr. Frederic Tudor senior deeded to his son Frederic Tudor the some 75 acres of the “Rockwood” estate at Nahant. HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS 1816 February 13, Tuesday: The Teatro San Carlo of Naples was destroyed by fire (the cost of rebuilding would be paid entirely by the wealthy Domenico Barbaja). As an experiment Frederic Tudor began construction, in Havana, Cuba, of the 1st above-ground-level structure for the storage of large quantities of nice, clean ice to be placed on the tongues of white slavemasters in exchange for coins they had in their pockets on account of the blood, sweat, and tears of their forced labor (not to put too fine a point on it). He would spend $2,400 in the construction of this building. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. March 15, Friday: Frederic Tudor’s Havana, Cuba ice-house was fully charged and its doors were sealed. He began to carefully monitor the hogsheads of water that ran off from this enclosed stack of ice, to determine the “product decay” per hour. Eventually, by experimenting with various insulation materials, such as blankets and boards and dry and wet sawdust, he would get his losses down to about 18 pounds of saleable product per hour. “We cannot know how long it took the Walden block to melt, but a millennium or two is quite realistic based on modern analogs and heat flux calculations.” coolness “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS June 16, Sunday: Celebrations took place in Vienna honoring the 50th anniversary of Antonio Salieri’s arrival in the city. He received a gold medal from the Lord Chamberlain in the name of the Emperor. During a celebration of the High Mass Salieri conducted his own music. In the evening, a concert by his pupils took place in his Vienna home, wherein Beitrag zur fünfzigjährigen Jubelfeier des Herrn Salieri D.441 for solo voices and piano by Franz Schubert was performed for the initial time. That night Percy Bysshe Shelley and his 18-year-old bride Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft were holed up at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, with Dr. John Polidori and George Gordon, Lord Byron, because during this particularly violent storm of that strangely rainy summer, they simply would not have been able to make their way back comfortably to where they had been staying at Chapuis. Evidently due to the bad weather the group was unable to get a good cable connection for their TV (or something), and so they decided to amuse themselves by reading aloud a collection of German ghost stories, THE FANTASMAGORIANA, in one of which a group of travelers were trying to amuse one another with their respective supernatural experiences. Byron proposed the agenda that they were each to invent a story such as found in this volume, for one another’s entertainment. Shelley wrote a piece which was entirely forgettable, Byron dashed off a fragment, and Polidori began what would become the “The Vampyre,” the first modern vampire tale, the main character of which, Lord Ruthven, could well have been based upon Byron (for some time it would be presumed that Byron himself had invented the story). Mary herself did not at this point put anything on paper. HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS In every month during this year there was a severe frost. January and February were comparatively mild, though there were a few cold days. The greater part of March was as might be expected, cold and boisterous. April opened warm, again, as might be expected, but then grew colder, ending in snow and ice and wintry cold. In May ice formed half an inch thick. Opening buds and flowers were killed and the corn froze. Frost, ice, and snow occurred throughout June. On Inauguration Day, in June, there was four inches of snow on the level ground in Warner, New Hampshire, while across the border in Maine there was ten inches. Almost every green thing was killed. There would be no fruit this year. Then there was frost and ice even in July. On July 5th, ice covered the ponds of New England and New York state like window glass. In August this ice thickened to half an inch. The wind was from the north, and cold, nearly all summer. About all that could be done with the corn this year was cut it and dry it for fodder. Farmers would be obliged to pay $4 and even $5 a bushel for corn from the 1815 harvest, in order to get seed for the next spring’s planting. Then the first two weeks of September were mild but the remainder of the month was cold, with frost, and ice again formed, a quarter of an inch thick. October was more than usually cold, with frost and ice. November was cold and blustering, with snow enough HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS for good sleighing, but then December proved to be quite mild and comfortable. Cold weather was persisting through the summer in much of the world’s temperate zones. Crops were being killed by frost and snow would be occurring in June and July in the United States. The weather this summer was so dreadful for farming, that during the following traveling season, the summer of 1817, a number of families would pack up and leave for points west. (This population migration phenomenon caused by the cold summer of 1816 would come to be known as “Ohio fever.”) Why was this summer of 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere exhibiting such strange weather? Well, it wasn’t just the sunspots, which were extraordinarily prominent and which people were observing through smoked glass during that May and June, and also, it wasn’t just the “ice king” Frederic Tudor of Boston who was cooling off the hot spots of this planet! For in fact dust, circling the earth from the explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, in this season was reaching the northern latitudes.3 Crop-damaging summer frosts caused SUNSPOTS some of the hard-won farmlands of New England to be abandoned — fields upon which cultivation has not since been attempted. Indiana experienced an unprecedented surge of some 42,000 settlers in this year, many of them fleeing the cold weather back in New England.