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Homo sapiens have displayed behavioural modernity (often defined as four sets of behaviours: (i) abstract thinking; (ii) depth of planning; (iii) behavioural, economical, and technological innovativeness; and (iv) symbolic behaviour) for approximately 50,000 years [37]. In the 50 millennia of modern behaviour, humans have dispersed across much of the Earth, including areas where the climate allows for the accumulation of surface ice throughout a portion of the year [38]. Yet, there is little evidence of ancient technologies to mitigate the effects of surface ice on daily human life; it appears that ice accumulation did not hinder the activities of the average early human. In fact, mitigating the effects of surface ice accumulation and especially preventing surface ice accumulation are decidedly modern human endeavours, as shown in the timeline of Figure 1.2.

Perhaps human’s first attempt at simply overcoming the effects of surface icing occurred in Scandinavia, where the last glacier retreated 12,000 years ago. In Southern Europe, human culture had adopted iron and bronze tools to farm and build houses, villages, and cities. The Stone Age in circumpolar Europe, on the other hand, would continue until the year 400 in the current era. Whereas everywhere else in Europe at this time, from Ireland to Transylvania and the Pyrenees, was covered in deciduous forests of oak and broadleaf trees, Scandinavia had only a pre-Boreal forest of birch and spruce. Nonetheless, people survived in the harsh Scandinavian climate by fashioning skis. A ten-foot Finnish ski which was preserved in peat has been dated to 7000 BCE. Skis such as these, made of carefully selected compression pine (obtained from curved tree trunks), turned the vast frozen waterways into an efficient method of hunting and transportation. Skis have been used militarily since at least 1200 CE, when King Sverre ordered local civilians to spy on enemy positions on ski. Formal ski troops later formed, with the earliest illustration of such being dated to 1619 which shows Swedish soldiers guarding against the Russians. Ski troops would play a considerable role in the fighting between Finland and Russia in the Second World War. The race training developed for these military ski troops would cross over into the civilian world and lead to cross-country skiing as a sport and further lead to the emergence of alpine skiing [39].

Figure 1.2 A timeline of human activities which have aided in our understanding of how to mitigate the effects of surface ice accumulation. The first industrial revolution accelerated our understanding of mechanical and electrical cooling. The second industrial revolution accelerated our need for anti-surface icing strategies due to advancements in transportation. BCE denotes before the current era.

Horse-powered transportation also necessitated a solution to the problem of surface ice accumulation. In the time between the introduction of iron horseshoes around 1000 CE and the beginning of the automobile-era, numerous solutions were described in farriery literature to assist the working horse in gaining traction on ice [40]. This includes the addition of protruding metal calks to the underside of the horseshoe, much like studded tires would assist in automobile traction in the twentieth century [41].

Human’s understanding of ice accumulation began to take shape during the First Industrial Revolution. This period of rapid mechanization also ushered in new chemical manufacturing processes, in turn fuelling accelerated research into the nascent field of modern chemistry. In 1756, Abbé Nollet described a method of artificially cooling wine by dissolving sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) in water [42]. Coined “frigorific mixtures”, the apothecary Richard Walker’s “An Account of Some Remarkable Discoveries in the Production of Artificial Cold” concluded that the cold temperatures produced upon mixing were a result of sensible heat being transformed into the latent heat necessary to form the new phase upon dissolution of the salt [43]. The concept of artificial cooling via an ice-salt solution was employed in the experimental setup of Sir Charles Blagden with which he concluded that: (1) turbidity raises the freezing point of a liquid; and (2) the freezing point of a liquid solvent can be depressed by the addition of a solute [44]. The mathematical formulation of the inverse linear relationship between the solute concentration and freezing point temperature depression of the solvent would later be called Blagden’s Law [45].

Mechanization in the First Industrial Revolution was realized using: steam engines powered by coal, water wheels placed in a flowing river, or pneumatically by air compressed using a waterfall. Wolfe and Baker described an example of the latter for the Royal Society in 1761. The giant Hiero’s fountain built at the Chemnicensian mines in Hungary used a 260-foot tall column of water to compress air. Wolfe and Baker noted that upon opening the stopcock, the air rapidly expanded producing enough cold to precipitate snow out of the air’s humidity and form ice on the nozzle [46]. The first practical machine to use this working principle explicitly for making ice was described by the “Father of Refrigeration”, James Harrison, in his 1856 patent. Harrison’s machine used a compressor to liquify ammonia before it passed through refrigeration coils whereupon it re-vapourized, pulling heat from the surrounding system and returning to the compressor. The machine was capable of producing up to 3,000 kg of ice per day, and quickly replaced the practice of seasonal natural ice harvesting, which dated back to as early as 1000 BCE [47, 48]. By the turn of the 20^th century, vapour-compression refrigeration technology had advanced so much that centralized machines built for the production of ice were replaced with on-site refrigeration units in the breweries and meat packing plants which were once the main customers of artificial and natural ice [48]. Home ice boxes became obsolete by the 1930’s when General Electric introduced the first electric home refrigerator; concerns over pollution tainting naturally-harvested ice would pressure lawmakers in the United States to outlaw the practice [49]. The same working principles that allowed for the refrigeration of our food supply starting in the 1850’s have more recently allowed for the creation of well-controlled freezing conditions within the lab. Circulating chillers and the like, which operate on vapour-compression technology, are now routinely employed by researchers to test their engineered surfaces in environments which present the conditions for surface ice accumulation.

The end of the First Industrial Revolution also saw the introduction of another artificial refrigeration concept: thermoelectrics. French watch dealer-turned physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier described in his 1834 paper “Nouvelles Expérences sur la Caloricité des Courans Électriques” [New Experiments on the Heat Effects of Electric Currents] that passing a current through bimetallic circuits caused the absorption of heat at one of the metal junctions and rejection of heat at the other. When Peltier welded bismuth with antimony, the semiconductor yielded a temperature of -45°C [50]. In 1838 physicist Emil Lenz used the same bismuth-antimony junction in his experimental apparatus to freeze water when current was applied in one direction, and melt the ice when current was reversed [51]. Almost simultaneously to the work of Peltier and Lenz, German medical doctor and physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck described how bimetallic circuits would deflect the needle of a compass when the circuit’s junctions were held at different temperatures [52]. Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted connected Seebeck’s work with his own on the relationship between current and magnetism and realized that the temperature difference between the junctions produces a voltage, driving an electric current [53]. We now call these two thermoelectric effects the “Peltier-Seebeck effect”, connoting that they are converse manifestations of the same physical process. The Seebeck portion of the effect forms the basis of the working principle for thermocouples, the temperature measurement devices which have become indispensable in rigorous surface icing research, and indeed in scientific research as a whole [54]. The Peltier effect gained considerable attention in the 1950’s after Abram Ioffe demonstrated the increased thermoelectric effect possessed by doped semiconductors [55]. It was theorized that thermoelectric cooling could surpass vapour-compression technology for domestic refrigeration. This time of frenzied semiconductor research culminated in H. Julian Goldsmid’s discovery of Bi₂Te₃-Sb₂Te₃ as the material with the highest thermoelectric effect [56]. Even so, bismuth-telluride alloys only produce moderate amounts of cooling compared to vapour-compression refrigerators. Nonetheless, the Peltier plate has become widely used in surface icing experimentation as it offers researchers high reliability and control over temperatures [57].

The turn of the 20^th century ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution, a period of transition from the steam power which was typical of the earlier industrial revolution, to the more modern energy sources of electricity and petroleum [58]. Although attempts at designing an internal combustion engine date back to the early 1800’s, the German locomotive engineer Karl Benz is credited with developing the first gasoline engine for which he was granted a patent in 1879. Benz’s subsequent patents all centred around the practical use of his engine for mobility, culminating in the Benz Patent Motorwagen, the world’s first automobile introduced in 1886 [59]. By 1901 Benz & Cie was producing nearly 600 automobiles per year and Ransom E. Olds had implemented a stationary assembly line at his car factory in Lansing, Michigan increasing production to 2500 cars that year [60]. When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line at his Highland Park, Michigan factory in 1913, productivity was increased 8-fold with a completed car exiting the factory every 15 minutes [61]. The sheer number of automobiles on the road, their increased reliability (and therefore range), and their increased speed necessitated a solution be devised for slippery surface ice conditions - in much the same vein that horse-powered transportation had required increased traction in past centuries. Beginning in 1940, Detroit, Michigan fittingly became the first city in the world to spread salt on its streets to combat surface icing. The city relied on its vast underground reserves of rock salt to melt surface ice using the principles of frigorific mixtures discovered in the 1790’s [62]. The use of road salt has dramatically increased in the past 80 years. In 2010, between 10 and 20 million tons of salt was used in the United States alone [63].

The increased power-to-weight ratio of the internal combustion engine had a second dramatic impact on human transportation in the 20^th century. For the first time, heavier-than-air powered flight was made possible by the new propulsion technology. American bicycle sales and repairmen - turned aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled and sustained airplane flights in 1903. Their plane was powered by a 8.9 kW engine weighing 82 kg and made a flight of 37 m at a velocity of 10.9 km/h [64]. Airplane technology advanced quickly after the Wright brothers’ flight. Airplanes would play a significant role in World War I both in terms of reconnaissance and combat. And the first trans-Atlantic airplane flight would take place between Newfoundland and Ireland by John Alcock and Arthur Brown in 1919 [65]. By the start of World War II, it was apparent that the accretion of ice on the surface of airplanes greatly affected the airflow over their wings and tails, with typical tests showing that less than 0.5 mm of ice along the leading edge can decrease lift by up to 25% [66]. Manual removal of surface ice which formed on the wings while the plane was grounded proved to be an impossible task, leading to the development of the first glycol-based deicing fluid which, much like road salt, forms a frigorific mixture with the surface ice allowing it to flow from the airplane [67]. A typical modern commercial jet requires between 550 and 3800 litres of deicing fluid to completely remove surface ice during wet-weather conditions [66].

As can be seen from the previous discussion of man’s attempts at researching and combatting surface ice formation, the implemented solutions have been rather active solutions, necessitating reapplication for continued effect. Contrarily, research since the turn of the 21^st century has aspired toward anti-icing/icephobic materials which offer a passive method of keeping a surface free of ice. In the next section we outline an important 20^th century concept which was omitted from the previous historical discussion, the Classical Nucleation Theory (CNT). CNT has re-emerged with the introduction of new nano-scale manufacturing techniques as a way to rationally design surfaces which thermodynamically inhibit the formation of ice.