Exporting American cool

It takes a world of nerds to fill the minds of nerds with stuff that they didn't know that they wanted to know.
OK, so our lives would probably have been fulfilled even if we didn't get a chance to read about the guy who pioneered the ice trade.
Nevertheless, this article, The Forgotten American Ice Trade, from a blog in India by way of Hacker News | American Ice Trade, in its substance, shows how an entrepreneur built an industry of ice shipments from Boston to the India that Columbus thought he'd found and, eventually, to the India that really was.
By the methods of the 'net, we get to feel that same burst of connectedness and opportunity. It's doubtful that I would have sought out an article about the ice trade, much less tried to research the topic. Further, I read Hacker News because, as the name implies, it provides a stream of mostly technical topics. Somewhere on the line, some nerd found this article and posted it; other nerds found it interesting.