PLANNING AND CONTROL IN THE 19th CENTURY ICE TRADE

This paper describes selected accounting records of the Tudor Ice Company which were devised to manage and control the far-flung business activities of Frederic Tudor, a 19th century entrepreneur who has been called America's first monopolist. Tudor's business genius lay in developing methods of harvesting, transporting, storing, and marketing commercial quantities of ice taken from New England ponds and shipped to tropical ports around the world. Frederic Tudor employed relatively sophisticated accounting techniques to analyze and control transportation costs and the costs of product shrinkage. He also routinely analyzed and translated foreign currency transactions for his geographically dispersed operations and evaluated the impact of competition on his operations.