This video was made possible by Squarespace. Build your beautiful website with Squarespace
for 10% off at squarespace.com/HAI. Chances are that somewhere on the internet
you’ve heard the “fact” that Iceland was named Iceland by its viking settlers to
stop their enemies from coming to the island. Well, that fact is about as wrong as pineapple
on pizza. The truth is that the first norse settler
of the island was feeling a little bummed out upon arrival since his daughter and livestock
died en route so he just stayed for the winter before returning to Norway and, since the
particular area he stayed in happened to be icy he figured all of the island was icy and
therefore called it Iceland. Of course that’d be as absurd as, you know,
seeing that the sidewalk was flat and deciding the whole earth must be flat, or something. Iceland is cold and has plenty of snow and
ice during the winter but as a whole, the country is fairly green. Still, for such a northern and wintery country
the idea that it imports ice is pretty absurd. Nonetheless that is reality but Iceland’s
ice importation has a surprisingly rational explanation. Now, taking ice from one place and selling
it in another is nothing new. El Chapo was great at it but as it turns out,
centuries ago people’s refrigerators didn’t have ice dispensers. For the majority of history people just dealt
with having warm drinks like cave-people but when the 19th century rolled around that all
changed. An entrepreneur named Frederic Tudor started
taking ice from cold places like Maine and selling it in hot places like Cuba. Genius, right? Only problem, ice melts. Frederic understood this and insulated his
cargo with sawdust and, with enough ice, at least some of it would make it through the
1,600 mile journey from Maine to Cuba. At first Frederick received a frosty reception
from the hot place people as they were doubtful that they needed ice so Frederic channeled
his inner drug dealer and gave them their first bit of ice for free to get them addicted. Soon, business was booming. Now, places like New York and DC get too cold
in the winter for people to want ice but in the summer, they too get swelteringly hot
so Frederic wanted to make a way to be able to sell ice in the mid-Atlantic summers. Really the only solution was to take a whole
lot of ice, put it in an insulated building, and hope some of it lasts until summer and,
crazily enough, that worked. Most of North America started to rely on ice
so it was time for Frederick to take the ice trade intercontinental. The rest of the world also had hot places
like India so Frederic Tudor set up a regular shipment of ice to Calcutta, India which became
hugely popular with the rich English colonialists who were used to cooler temperatures. Amazingly, he had the process refined so well
at that point that the ice from New England was selling in India for, adjusted for inflation,
only $1 per pound. Soon after, ice from New England was shipped
and sold in London, in Rio de Janeiro, in Cape Town, in Hong Kong, the New England ice
even reached as far as Sydney, Australia where it sold for only $2 per pound. So, was it a coincidence that the climate
starting rapidly warming only a century after the world’s elite started using ice shipped
from the other side of the world by steamship all so they could have a chilled beverage? I’m not saying the ice trade singlehandedly
caused climate change, but it certainly didn’t help. Of course, with time artificial refrigeration
became cheap and widespread but not before making Frederic Tudor a very rich man. Iceland today, despite what some may think,
is not some backwards heathen society that shuns the use of refrigerators. Its importation of ice has to do with something
else—economics. You see, Iceland is a very expensive place. Like many isolated, northern counties, Iceland
relies on imports for many things like oil, wood, wheat, and other food. It just doesn’t have the ability to produce
these items domestically due to its geography but shipping to Iceland is also relatively
cheap since its economy is export-driven. While fish is Iceland’s biggest export this
is mostly shipped by plane but the country also has an enormous aluminum industry thanks
to its low electricity cost. Aluminum, along with most everything else
Iceland makes, is exported by ship which means that there’s demand for shipping from Iceland. That means that ships are already coming to
Iceland to bring items elsewhere so its relatively inexpensive to fill those ships with other
goods to bring to Iceland. At the same time, the average Icelander makes
about $57,000 per year, it’s one of the highest income countries in the world, so
that means making things in Iceland, in most cases, is expensive. If you go and check your handy dandy Icelandic
schedule of tariffs, though, you see that water, ice, and snow have no import duty if
imported from the European Economic Area. Therefore, Iceland imports ice from other
less expensive countries in the EEZ such as Scotland and the only additional cost is the
cheap shipping. While there are plenty of other countries
that don’t charge import duties on ice, there are few that have the mix of high domestic
labor costs and cheap inbound shipping that make it worth it for Iceland to import ice. That’s why Iceland’s grocery stores are
stocked with this imported ice from hundreds or thousands of miles away as it ends up being
about 40% less than Icelandic ice. If you want to sell a different kind of ice
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This blows my mind. Ice is so easy to make
Iceland is actually green and Greenland is ice. Fun fact.
I read "rice" at first, and thought "This must be the stupidest TIL ever".