In 1748, Scottish physician William Cullen at the University of Glasgow demonstrated the first artificial refrigeration by boiling ethyl ether in a vacuum, which absorbed heat and produced cooling. Though a laboratory experiment, it laid the scientific groundwork for mechanical cooling.

Cullen's experiment caught the imagination of Enlightenment thinkers and writers, who saw it as evidence of human mastery over nature. Poets and philosophers of the era referenced such scientific marvels in odes to progress and reason.