To this day, Europeans rarely put ice in their drinks, but Americans do. Thanks to the low price of ice in the United States, Rees said, people here “developed a taste for cold drinks faster and stronger than anyone else.” This required active involvement from Tudor, who sent operatives to go from bar to bar trying to convince owners to incorporate his product into drinks. To make the sale, Tudor committed to giving some bartenders free ice for a year, figuring that customers would so enjoy the clink in their glasses that other local bars would feel pressure to put in orders. “The object is to make the whole population use cold drinks instead of warm or tepid,” Tudor wrote in his diary. “A single conspicuous bar keeper…selling steadily his liquors all cold without an increase in price, render it absolutely necessary that the others come to it or lose their customers.” According to Gavin Weightman, who wrote a 2003 book about the New England ice trade, Tudor was celebrated for half a century after his death by scholars at the Harvard Business School, who “admired him for creating a demand where it didn’t exist before.”

via How a Massachusetts man invented the global ice market – Ideas – The Boston Globe.