In 1922 a home refrigerator cost more than a brand-new Model T Ford
One 1922 refrigerator, with a wooden cold box, a water-cooled compressor and a single ice tray, sold for 714 dollars. A Model T Ford that year went for about 476. Its motor sat in the basement. Cheap, safe, self-contained fridges took decades of chemistry and engineering to arrive.
Keeping food cold is ancient. Iranians built yakhchals, domed and heavily insulated structures over underground chambers, fed by aqueducts and ventilated by wind-catchers, to hold ice using evaporation and radiation to the night sky. Much later, icehouses packed with winter lake ice and household iceboxes did the job for about a century and a half.
Artificial cold began in 1755, when Scottish professor William Cullen pumped a partial vacuum over diethyl ether. The ether boiled, drew heat from the air and even made a little ice, though nobody had a use for it. Oliver Evans sketched a closed vapour-compression cycle in 1805, and in 1834 Jacob Perkins, an American living in Britain, built one that ran continuously. James Harrison made it practical, building an ice machine beside the Barwon River in Geelong, Australia, in 1851 and supplying breweries and meatpackers. Carl von Linde's 1876 method for liquefying gases produced the first reliable compressed-ammonia refrigerator.
Those early refrigerants were a problem at home. Ammonia and sulfur dioxide sometimes leaked, so commercial machines ran for nearly 40 years before household versions caught on. General Electric's Monitor-Top of 1927, named for its resemblance to the turret of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, sold over a million units yet still used sulfur dioxide or flammable methyl formate. Freon arrived in the 1920s and opened the mass market in the 1930s. Then chemists learned it damaged the ozone layer, and in 1994 governments banned R-12 in new equipment.
The fridge reshaped eating. Separate deep freezers spread after the Second World War, and Clarence Birdseye's quick-freezing methods turned frozen vegetables from luxury into routine. In supermarkets today, refrigeration can swallow up to half of all the energy used, and open display cases need 1.3 times as much as glass-door ones.
Source: Refrigerator
