In 1626, the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon was one of the first westerners to discover a new use for ice, after packing a dead chicken in snow in the hope of preserving its flesh. He succeeded (in his own words, "excellently well"), but in so doing unfortunately caught a chill that would, several days later, be the death of him.

It was not until 1785 that Bacon's insight found widespread acceptance – and even then, it was only thanks to a chance encounter between one Alexander Dalrymple, an official of the East India Company, and George Dempster, its former director. Dalrymple mentioned in passing that the Chinese fishermen who operated in the waters around the company's trading post in Canton were in the habit of taking ice on their fishing trips in order to preserve their catch at sea, and then to transport it over long distances once on shore. Dempster was sufficiently intrigued to write to his salmon supplier in Scotland, who sent a consignment of fish on ice, by sea, to London – it arrived, six days later, perfectly fresh.

This chance conversation set in motion a booming trade in what had been a hitherto overlooked commodity. When Joseph Marr, The Ice Co's founding father, decided to expand his fish-curing business in Hull into a fish-catching one, ice was an absolute necessity. When the company moved to Fleetwood on the other side of the country in 1896, in pursuit of hake (then abundant off the UK's west coast), ice was what his son, James Herbert, imported from Norway, and subsequently stored in a giant cork-lined ice-house. And ice, again, was what the company started to manufacture for itself in 1908, as a third generation of Marrs settled into the daily rhythm of fishing boats coming and going – leaving stocked with ice, returning stocked with slightly less ice, and fish.

To Joseph Marr, the idea that people might one day manufacture ice from water would doubtless have seemed fanciful, if not outright sacrilegious. As recently as 1844, when the American inventor John Gorrie took to the pages of the Commercial Advertiser to argue "we know of no want of mankind more urgent than a cheap means of producing an abundance of artificial cold", he did so under a pseudonym, for fear of reprisals.

Gorrie, a doctor who specialised in treating malaria, had already produced a prototype of the modern air conditioner that blew air across a block of ice hanging above a feverish patient. In 1851 he received a US patent for one of the world's first ice-making machines, which harnessed the cooling properties of pressurised gases as they expanded. He was right to have worried about being deemed heretical: after a successful demonstration of his machine in 1850 at a dinner party at The Mansion hotel in Florida (an event Smithsonian magazine subsequently dubbed "the chilly reception"), the New York Globe derisively reported that "There is a Dr Gorrie, a crank down in Apalachicola, Florida, that thinks he can make ice by his machine as good as God Almighty". But Gorrie did not live to enjoy his vindication: he failed to find financial backers for his product, and died, impoverished, five years later.