Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from Howstupworks.com

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frinning.

Most of the profiles of Frederick Tutor that are floating around the web.

Some of his story like this in the early 19th century he noticed that one thing Massachusetts

had a lot of in the winter time was ice and so he hatched a clever plan that in cold weather

he would harvest that ice for really cheap and then he would sell it all around the world when it was hot.

Single handedly turning ice into a commodity and becoming vastly wealthy in the process.

So often happens with our show it is way more complicated than that beginning with the fact that it was not even his idea in the first place.

Like I saw articles in a lot of I mean generalist publications mainstream stuff but all repeating the idea that this was his idea but it wasn't.

He also didn't do it alone he had a lot of help from things like tax incentives and economic systems that ultimately skewed things.

And his financial favor so we are going to look at that more complicated story than is often in the one page right up today.

Yeah he really does I mean I haven't had not read a lot about him but he really does usually get lauded as like this really insightful idea man who.

This one concept and ran with it was a he and entrepreneur and it's like uh oh yeah apart from that we're going to talk about some other issues yeah.

So Frederick to door was from a prominent Boston family his father William had gone to Harvard studied law under John Adams and had been in George Washington's continental army during the Revolutionary War including serving as its judge advocate.

And after marrying Frederick's mother Delia Jarvis in 1778 he left the army to set up a law office and he would also go on to serve in the Massachusetts legislature and as secretary of the Commonwealth.

William and Delia had six surviving children between 70 and 79 and 1791 and Frederick was born on September 4th 1783.

Their family was comfortable but it wasn't really until 1796 when Williams father died that they became truly wealthy William inherited an estate that was worth about $40,000 which was a lot of money at the time.

I didn't try to translate them into did it today's dollars because that is always it's tricky and it's there's never really a one to one way to do it.

There's really not it's really like throwing just a dartboard at some dollar signs and landing on something it's it was a lot of money though.

And at that point he retired from law and became a gentleman of leisure.

Oh that's the dream.

I mean, gentlemen of leisure while also being in the state legislature and stuff but he didn't work as a full time job anymore.

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