Nevertheless, his discovery set in motion the birth of the second ice trade – and the death of the first. In 19th-century America (and, to a lesser extent, Britain), ice had been a nation-shaping industry, as the widespread extraction of abundant naturally occurring ice had allowed fresh produce to travel further and stay fresh longer, significantly improving diets in the global north. For years, natural ice was the US's second-biggest crop by weight to be transported by trains and ships (the first, speaking of nation-shaping commodities, was cotton). But within a couple of generations, a string of innovations pushed the original ice trade into obsolescence.

First, following Gorrie's prototype, there was the emergence of "machine", or artificially made ice, which gradually supplanted the natural ice trade. Next came a number of inventions that transformed how ice was used within the home, such as the fridge-freezer and the first packaged ice. In the early 20th century in North America, the iceman had been as much a neighbourhood fixture as the postman or paperboy; by the 1970s, all that remained of a once-mighty trade was a patchwork of scattered regional packaged ice suppliers attempting to find scant space in the nation's freezer compartments.

When Alan Marr, Joseph Marr's great-grandson, visited Canada in 1978, his family business was approaching meltdown. Back at home, freezer trawlers – fishing boats capable of making their own ice on board – were becoming more widespread, meaning that The Ice Co's onshore ice-manufacturing facilities risked becoming totally obsolete. But in the new world, Alan saw a new opportunity. He was astonished to see that – in the words of his granddaughter, Polly Metcalfe, The Ice Co's current managing director – "in every single bar and restaurant he went into, they ram-packed the glass full of ice".

It wasn't a huge leap to assume that if people wanted ice in their drinks in Canada (hardly the warmest country in the world), they might want ice in their drinks in the UK, too. Back on home soil, he imported a Vogt ice machine from the US – which cools water in a tubular system, resulting in the cylindrical cubes so familiar to packaged ice users today – and got to work making ice for an entirely new market.

Except, at first, there didn't seem to be much of a market. It was not until a transformative deal with the US air force base in East Anglia (three truckloads, a huge amount at the time) that it looked like this new venture would make any kind of commercial sense. By 1987, there was enough demand for this strange new product for Charles Marr (Alan's son) to launch one of the first packaged ice products to hit the British market, choosing the shrewdly egalitarian name Party Ice for a product that would dutifully do its job regardless of whether it was chilling a bottle of champagne or a glass of Coke.